—“Where did you learn that the roots of science are in martial epistemology? Who on your reading list?”—
Well, it’s not a novel idea. I just frame it more precisely.
I think I intuitively understood it just because of all the history I’ve read. But it was the sequence Marija Gimbutas > J. P. Mallory > Karen Armstrong that provided such consistency that I was able to make use of it.
IMHO Karen Amstrong does the best job of the worldwide analysis of the age of transformation, and the foundations of our differences as the martial structure of that time.
That said, Taleb also covers it in the Black Swan when he says that military people are the least ideological because they have the most skin in the game.