Are There Laws of History? | Hacker News Reader

Are There Laws of History?

aeon.co

118 pointsbenbreen135 comments

"In February 2010, Peter Turchin, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, predicted that 2020 would see a sharp increase in political volatility for Western democracies."

I get the impression that the author of the article believes that this has come to pass, though she does not say so explicitly. We are now in the middle of May, and from my perspective, nothing of the sort has happened - in fact, the political institutions of the Western democracies seem to be functioning about as well as they were before, despite the major disruptions caused by Covid-19.

By "as well as before", I mean that they are functioning, not particularly efficiently, but at least so far with no scocietal collapse, and while there is more volatility than necessary, the level does not seem to have changed markedly from the norms of the preceding decade (i.e. since the prdiction was made.)

So we are still waiting to see if Turchin's prediction will come to pass. Furthermore, for his model to be in any way validated by such an outcome, it would have to happen for the reasons he proposed, and not, say, as a consequence of Covid-19, which he did not predict.

> Furthermore, for his model to be in any way validated by such an outcome, it would have to happen for the reasons he proposed, and not, say, as a consequence of Covid-19, which he did not predict.

I mostly agree with you, but I don't agree with this point.

It's perfectly coherent to take the view "by [2020], society will be stretched to the point that [whatever comes up] will trigger [whatever]". There is a very wide range of possible responses to any event. A minor stressor can cause a breakdown in bad times when it would barely even have been noticed in good times. The same omen will usually signify good things in good times and bad things in bad times. As such, if you're predicting "bad times will result in typical stresses leading [pretextually?] to atypical breakdowns", which stresses happen to do so is kind of beside the point.

If e.g. people somewhere are almost ready for a revolution, and some charismatic guy comes along who thinks we need electrum-based money, and he leads a revolution with electrum-based money as a major part of his policy platform... we don't necessarily want to say that electrum was a key issue at the time. The revolution was determined by many things, but not that one. Electrum was mostly chosen arbitrarily by a guy who happened to be good at revolting, at a time when revolting was fruitful.

That's a fair point, though then we might wonder if it would have happened on Turchin's schedule in response to a more normal trigger. Regardless of what happens this year, it takes more than one successful prediction to support a theory of predictable cycles.

I disagree. I believe we've seen a sharp increase in political volatility worldwide, though it did not just happen, but has been happening since 2015. Up until about that point, the world had been dominated for a few decades by a relatively cohesive global consensus, which is now significantly more ragged.

But I don't think the terms are well-defined enough to really debate this. I don't think your perspective is any more right or wrong than mine, because what is meant by "political volatility" is poorly defined.

>> since 2015

Really? I seem to remember the bush years as being very divisive. The war(s). Gitmo. Hanging chads. Torturing people. Dick Cheney. Wiretapping ... it was bad.

Yes, really. I am not saying that volatility (again, by my personal definition, which I don't claim is universal) there was no volatility before, but rather that I see an inflection point around 2015.

For example, I don't think there were ever polls asking whether President Bush should have been impeached, but if there had been, the level of support for it would have been tiny, despite all the things you listed. On the other hand, a majority or near majority of people polled regularly supported impeaching the current president. There are other examples in other countries.

But again, I really don't think we have an objective standard to measure against, this is just what I see.

The bush admin was terrible, moreso i'd say than trump's, but the global neoliberal consensus was unshaken.

Not as many people cared or paid attention in the Bush years. A lot more people cared when Trump got elected, I think.

You do not need any special abilities to predict that.

If you look around, the democracy is slipping from our hands for much of the western world and this means people look up to democratic values less when they do their decisionmaking.

Since it seems (although has never been proven) that it is in fact the democratic values that allow democratic countries to live in relative peace I think it is only going to get worse.

When elected officials can not only skirt but just totally ignore the law, when democratic procedures can be subverted, elections distorted, this is how democratic values slowly die.

When people no longer are interested in history, spend their entire days glued to a screen, when they choose only easy entertainment and are not listening to messages explaining how democracy works and why we need it, etc., this is eroding perceived need for democracy. People use "democracy" now without understanding what the word means, more and more.

Ok, but there's no "sharp increase" in 2020 specifically. At least so far.

No, there is no "sharp increase". These things take decades.

But sharp increase is not needed. Think of it like a marriage between countries that is slowly starting to erode. It might seem ok for a long time, from the sidelines, when you squint your eyes. But then a crisis happens that tests it and everything falls apart.

Such predictions are not falsifiable, because its proponents use confirmation bias to prove them true.

Just as their opponents use their own confirmation bias to "prove" them wrong.

Politics in the UK and US and is clearly far more polarised and far more extremist in tone - especially on the right - than was the case ten years ago.

The Brexit nationalist nonsense in the UK was almost unthinkable in 2010. It was literally considered fringe lunacy. A senior politician on the right literally called the people in favour of it "swivel-eyed loons."

Now it's mainstream policy, with huge popular support - balanced against a slightly larger segment of the population who still consider it self-harming folly.

That's your instability right there. You can Google any number of people on both sides saying that they cannot remember a time when the country was this polarised, and an utter absence of anyone saying the opposite.

This is not normal. If you want to claim it is, prove it.

In the U.K. I’d point to the General Strike of 1926 as a time when people were more polarized and I might add substantially prone to more political violence. Yes, it was nearly a century ago, but we’re often subject to recent bias wheN we think the current time is special.

In the U.S. when someone points out that we've never been more polarized, it’s always easy to point out that a couple million men took up arms against each other during the civil war. But more recently between 1965 and 1968 there were riots in a dozen U.S. cities including N.Y., Chicago, L.A., Detroit, Newark , Baltimore and Washington which required use of the National Guard or army to restore order. We see nothing like that today.

And for good reason:

https://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1965...

https://learninglab.si.edu/collections/martin-luther-king-jr...

> We see nothing like that today.

True, but knowing why that is the case is hard to do. Are modern day Americans more supportive of military adventures in far away lands that kill thousands of innocent people, or is it that we hardly see anything about it on the news, especially images of dead bodies?

Similarly, are Americans now satisfied with the level of equality and justice currently enjoyed by the African American community, or are they occupied by other distractions?

Riots in the streets seem to have been largely replaced by arguments in internet forums, particularly Reddit, where you will find not only large amounts of "unrest", but also a significant amount of mental illness - people who have completely lost touch with reality.

It's frustating bringing a new idea to the Brits and have it be claimed that nothing new in the world truly exists, it has always been done before in one form or the other. The brits invented it first anyway.

And then encounter your line of thinking where an event less damaging than the battle of the somme, or the great fire of 1666 is somehow exempt from the normality of history.

I dont think HN is the appropriate place to discuss polticial demands on what is 'normal'.

not to mention that this particular prediction doesn't even need any sort of quantitative or scientific methods. The idea of cyclical politics and periodic decay is as old as ancient Greece, comes up in virtually any religion, and you don't need a TI 84 to arrive at the conclusion that roughly every few decades something awful is going to happen.

Taleb has some good comments about this, which is that just as you can make a prediction and have it come true by pure chance, we can view evidence from history and fit a pattern to it (even though that pattern occurred only by chance). Personally I think the best way to view history is as a series of poorly controlled experiments. As with scientific experiments, the evidence may be suggestive of some pattern, but we should embrace an attitude of skepticism and openness to counterexamples. The patterns we see may tend towards "laws," but we should assume some level of imperfect resolution and control and therefore associate a confidence percentage with our inferences.

You can line any reasoning up against chance. Theres a chance that the sun will rise tomorrow. Measuring a prediction against chance says nothing for the validity of the knowledge or structures you used to build that prediction.

People have to build paths through life that span years and decades, one does not need chance or randomness to know those plans might fail.

Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt noted that the very idea of history being a dynamic process of "progress," is itself an idea with an explicit logic - an idea-ology - where once you have accepted it, all political reason operates within the iterated logic of that idea.

So it's not history that has laws, but rather the implicit logic flowing from only tacitly held notions forms what someone would interpret as a "law."

What is history useful for? Locating essential human experiences, but like statistics, the drunk uses a lamp post for support not illumination.

Many postmodern philosophers and french intellectuals have said the same thing. We can choose to step outside the shadow of history, nearly with trivial effort. But for what purpose.

> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

- Hannah Arendt

> What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms.

(From the linked page https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a).

Multiple problems here. My understanding (as a pretty-well-read-for-an-amateur in the subject) is that this claim is overstated. Most historians today seem to agree that

- Rome had long since stopped being the capital city of the Empire. It wasn't even the most important city in Italy in the Late Empire. - Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall." It had been a long time since Italians ruled the empire. The empire simply passed from rule by Romanized-non-Italians to foreign conquerors. - The Roman empire didn't fall, it moved; it persisted in the East until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Emperor in Constantinople would have called himself 'Roman' for those 1000 years, and the term 'Byzantine' is a later invention. - There were lots of contributing factors to the fall of the Western Empire that worked together. Some of these were external (migrations of the German tribes, invasions), some of these were internal (cultural divergence between East and West). There is some debate about the relative importance of these different factors.

The question can't be answered not just because the answer itself is complicated, it's because the meaning to the question is ambiguous in a way that the questions answered by thermodynamics are not. For related, more specific questions, we actually do have consensus on the answer.

It's also cherry-picking one example. There are lots of cases of historians coming to a better understanding of an event over time, and concluding earlier explanations of the event are incorrect.

While I can see why it would be good to have a "science of history," we've proven largely unable to do this in much simpler areas. Analytics applied to the game of baseball, a game where we have complete information about everything that happens today, including where people are standing on the field and the ball's spin rate, has only recently gotten to the point where there's a quantitative science around it. Human history is a lot more complex than baseball.

> Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall."

The sack of Rome in 410 came as a giant shock to the Roman world, and led to debate among Romans about the cause of the crisis of the Empire. Augustine's "City of God" was written to defend Christianity from the accusation that it was the cause of Rome's decline. The Western Roman Empire did not disappear overnight after the sack of Rome, but that was clearly a sign that the Empire was badly weakened. By the late 5th Century, the Western Roman Empire had been completely taken over and divided up by rather barbarous Germans, and it would have been obvious to any Roman that the Empire was extinct in the West.

The idea of a "transformation" of the Roman Empire in the West, as opposed to a collapse, really isn't tenable, in my opinion.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God

It's a good point, the sack of Rome would have been a big moment.

My point is that marking the end of the Roman Empire with the fall of Romulus Augustlus is an artificial crutch used by historians - from what I've read, most historians agree to this point. While Rome had been overrun by Germans by the end of the 5th century, de facto it had been ruled by Germans for a long while before then (even if none were called "king" or "emperor."). And even after the Germans controlled it, up through the reign of Justinian there was an off-again-on-again relationship in which the Eastern emperor played a role in who controlled Italy. Your "typical" Roman (whether that's a Roman on the street or a Roman in the Senate) would have seen a slow decay, but wouldn't have looked at any one particular event and said "Well, I guess that means the Roman Empire is done, let's move on to the Middle Ages!"

This all speaks to how the question of "How did Rome fall?" is underspecified, because how you answer the question depends on what you mean by the question.

I completely agree that marking the end of the Roman Empire with the fall of Romulus Augustulus in 476 is not very meaningful. But there was a definite collapse of Roman civilization in the West, with a highly urbanized society with a sophisticated economy and an elaborate tax system funding public goods (infrastructure, the legal system, security) and a fair level of literacy being replaced by a largely de-urbanized, almost completely illiterate, and in many places de-monetized society. The collapse didn't happen instantly or at the same time everywhere, but it did take place roughly during the 5th Century, and would have been noticed by people who lived at the time. They might not have known right away that things would be different forever, but there were definite events along the way - the sack of Rome in 410, the failure of Majorian's attempts to reconquer critical territories of the Western Empire, and others.

I mostly feel that there's been a trend in historiography to over-emphasize continuity, with the theory of the "transformation of the Roman Empire." It looks much less like a "transformation" of the Empire from one state into another, and much more like a civilizational collapse. I agree that why this collapse occurred is difficult to answer, but I find the argument that it didn't occur unconvincing.

My dream is a book/blog explaining historic processes with Ishikawa cause-and-effect fishbone diagrams[0]. For history, the main branches of the fishbone could be: Military, Economy, Society, Politics, and Nature. So a tentative diagram explaining the fall of the Western Roman Empire would have:

* Military: weakened army (increasing dependence on mercenaries), fights with the Germanic tribes (in turn, caused by the expansion of the Huns).

* Economy: inflation (debasement of currency), decline in the influx of slaves (end of expansion), lost taxation from some provinces (Germanic invasions), decline in maritime trade (Vandalic pirates), decline of agriculture (excessive taxes), drain of money (trade deficit with the Eastern Empire).

* Society: decline of civic virtue (expansion of Christianity), loss of ties with Rome in the provinces.

* Politics: political instability, overly powerful Praetorian Guard.

* Nature: population decline (Antonine Plague, Plague of Cyprian), soil erosion (deforestation, excessive grazing, soil salinization).

Improving the diagram and making similar diagrams explaining other events and processes is left as an exercise to the reader.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram

"One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations." Sapiens, By Yuval Noah Harari

This quote stood out for me when I read Sapiens.

It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same sentence.

> It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same sentence.

Not really. Tendency denotes a general inclination, such as objects tending to move toward the centre of mass. Tectonic plates tend to shift slowly. In both cases these are very solid and reliable predictions which are almost certainly true in a vast majority of cases.

I would not agree with the statement vis-a-vis luxury items and necessity (fur coats, diamond rings, harems, are not demanded by all), but there is a tendency for certain classes of items to be considered "essential" over time.

With a sufficiently hot take, iron laws become malleable.

May be strange at a first glance but binary/boolean logic/reasoning/quantification is just a special case of probability theory. This is covered exhaustively in Probability Theory: The Logic Science, by E.T Jaynes.

And so "tend" and "iron law" are interpreted as assertions of different levels of certainty, where "tend" implies a certainty greater than 50% and "iron law" a certainty closer to 100%.

A tendency can be shown to be present in all known categories of samples (justifying 'Iron') , while not occuring in every single sample, making it a tendency.

Separately, tendency can mean a type of outcome is more likely, or that there is an underlying force acting in a direction, regardless of whether that force is cancelled by other forces.

Gravity is a tendency for things to fall back to earth. But somethings can escape it.

Huh I wonder what he would have said about access to clean air, water, and land.

What context is this in? Some people who are religious break this rule. The amish aswell are an extreme example.

My dad is a historian, and it's always pretty entertaining to run the current faddy "big idea" in popular history past him.

There's always two parts to his response:

1. $bigIdea is not a result of serious historical research; it's a reflection of laypeople projecting their preferred narratives onto history

2. literally dozens of counterexamples that he can cite on the spot from across different continents and historical eras

My takeaway: laws of history are the stuff of cranks and oversimplified history popularizations.

I’ve taken a few grad level history courses, enough where I feel “safe” reading primary sources, and assessing the relative quality of history-oriented literature. I like to read “dull history”, especially social and economic histories with focuses on labor.

I totally agree with your dad. The HN community likes to dis Malcolm Gladwell (for example) but reveres Harari and Diamond. They’re creative smart people, with interesting and sharp ideas.

They like to lean on history or sociology to support their sharp instincts. Their books are good to get a sense for their instincts, and how they’ve occasionally played out through history. But you should never read them as an authoritative account of history or sociology, and you should not seriously consider their historical references to draw conclusions about the inevitability of the future.

I‘ve recently been reading primary sources of intellectuals living in Russia in the immediate months and years before WW1. None of them saw the war coming. None of them saw the revolution. Each of them made bold, evidence-based predictions about the near future, and they were all wrong. Same with (brilliant) Soviet economists in the 80s.

I recommend reading these books for fun if they please you, but please do not think that they’ve given you a comprehensive or correct view of history, even for the specific events they describe.

I love history as a subject but it’s one of those fascinations where the more you dig in the more you learn that the picture is complex and nuanced, which shouldn’t be surprising society now is complex and nuanced why would the past be so different.

As a subject though it was badly taught in my youth (no idea if it’s improved).

We learnt about the Romans then basically nothing till the victorians and the WWII.

Might have perhaps been worth mentioning oh the empire in a UK school you would think.

Agreed on all points. For me, the value of history is how humblingly-nuanced it is. It’s kind of like Simpson’s Law: the more you see and the deeper you look, you learn more but you “know” less (because looking deeper merely exposes you to more nuance). The more widely you study history, the more you see this truth repeating itself.

It’s value is an inoculation against black and white interpretations of anything. This is good for free thinking, but arguably bad for people who want to influence you to think in black and white terms. Maybe that’s why our study of history in secondary school is so superficial! :) (just kidding)

In all seriousness, it’s really hard to cover history at the breadth of a primary and secondary school curriculum, and get to spend any time on depth. The curriculum seems more interested in arming us with superficial facts, than improving our way of thinking, but I’m sure it’s not the same everywhere.

Also bit of a sidebar, but the saxonizing of England, and the whole story of Oliver Cromwell and Scotland is so damn fascinating! It’s a shame they didn’t teach that. So many lessons to learn and interesting counterfactual thought experiments that teenagers would eat up. Although, I guess talking about nationally divisive topics isn’t super palatable. American classrooms are still trying to figure out how to teach slavery in 2020, and it’s been 150 years since emancipation.

What about non-contemporary “laws”?

For example, Polybius’ Anacyclosis. It originated with Plato and Aristotle, and Polybius codified it - and it influenced thinkers such as Machiavelli and Kant.

To a modern reader, or at any rate to this modern reader, it holds water.

Yes, there are counter-examples, but they seem to be vastly outweighed by examples which follow the form. See the French and American revolutions, the glorious revolution, the arc of the Roman Empire, for a few.

I would say (as an absolutely unqualified observer) that we (much of the world) are currently in an ochlocractic state, moving towards monarchies.

I’d be interested in his/your take on an idea that had persisted and influenced for several millennia - I wouldn’t call it a flash in the pan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis

How is the French revolution an example for this? That went from a somewhat absolutist monarchy (maybe we could call that "tyranny"? but the king never had sole power) to something that looked like it could have been a constitutional monarchy to mob rule relatively quickly, and then back to tyranny (and then back to monarchy, then to democracy, then to tyranny, then to democracy, then to occupation, then to democracy).

I mean obviously it is somewhat easier for a monarchy or a democracy to change in character (monarchy->tyranny) than in essence (monarchy->democracy), but a) that model doesn't account for changes in essence at all (especially not in the context of revolutions), b) there have been countless examples of monarchs that had to cede power instead of gaining it, c) I can't think of that many historic examples of actual mob rule that remained stable over a longer period.

More fundamentally, it's even questionable that we can come up with clear criteria to distinguish, say, monarchy from tyranny.

What would you make of “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant? To me, all models are wrong but some, like his, are useful.

If you're just interested in having some understanding of the past, books like that are great.

If you want to predict the future, your analysis should be about 98% detailed study of the present, and 2% history. Much as you would consult mostly this week's weather forecast when deciding to go for a picnic, but maybe adjust slightly based on historical error rates in weather forecasting.

The real usefulness of history research in prediction/policymaking often seems to be in debunking popular myths that shape/bias how we analyze the future and present. The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. In hindsight those are both obviously false, but at the time a lot of people believed them. Historians help identify and make us cognizant of those narratives.

Yes, history is a fruitful source of evidence to disprove modern conjectures, but a poor way to prove conjectures. The predictive value of history is in how it teaches us to stop trying to make predictions.

> The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards.

can you please elaborate on this? it sounds like you're proposing the offensively wrong notion that the Iraq War was noble and well-founded, truly aimed at restoring democracy to Iraq, but went wrong because the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy

> but went wrong because the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy

There's an assumption in what you're saying that the "Iraqi people" is a meaningful entity with a collective will that is expressed through collective action. We use that kind of thinking to reason about liberal democracies where there is a meaningful entity (a voting public with a storng shared national identity) and a mechanism (elections) for expressing preferences and a means (representative government, civil society) of taking collective action. It's not a very useful way to analyze a bunch of people who have none of those things.

My point wasn't that "Iraq is allergic to democracy." It was that thinking in terms of societies being drawn to or repulsed by democracy is an error in itself. The way to avoid those errors is to study lots of societies over a long period of time. That's where history helps you identify and understand the narratives and categories you unconsciously use to understand the world.

I don't know whether Iraq's current culture is amenable to democracy. However I don't know that the U.S.'s current culture is actually more amenable to democracy. Further, the idea that the U.S. military effort aims to install democracy has been disproven over and over again - the U.S. military generally aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests, regardless of the wishes of the local people who are actually governed. This is the opposite of democracy. So it seems inappropriate and even offensive to bring up the question of whether Iraq is ready for democracy, though I don't think you intended to be offensive.

Not the OP, but:

I think that Bush was sincere in his belief that bringing democracy to Iraq was a (if not the) primary goal of the Iraq War, and that doing so would be beneficial to the Iraqis. And I could believe that he felt a "white man's burden" and obligation that, because he could do so, he ought to do so.

[And to be clear: my belief is that the notion of "white man's burden" is incredibly racist and offensive, and I do not condone actions taken in such a manner.]

While I wouldn't call it "allergic to democracy", I can also entertain arguments that successful democratic regimes have preconditions for their success that Iraq simply did not have. I can even entertain arguments that democracy is not the best form of government, and it strikes me as mildly offensive to presume that democracy is automatically better than whatever form of government exists.

I think OP's point is that the Iraq War was undertaken in the [racist] belief that they were bettering the Iraqis by bringing democracy to them, and the failure is that, well, we were racist in the first place to believe that "bringing democracy" to another people is "bettering" them.

> I think that Bush was sincere in his belief that bringing democracy to Iraq was a (if not the) primary goal of the Iraq War, and that doing so would be beneficial to the Iraqis.

I believe that Bush probably stroked himself thinking this way, as did virtually the entire media and political class. However I don't think it was anywhere close to a primary goal, as you say. More to the point: their actual conduct in the war does not indicate in any way that this was a genuine goal as opposed to a piece of propaganda.

> While I wouldn't call it "allergic to democracy", I can also entertain arguments that successful democratic regimes have preconditions for their success that Iraq simply did not have.

Any citations for this notion? But to restate a point I made in another comment: the discussion of whether Iraq is ready for democracy is almost offensively inappropriate and nonsequitur, because the U.S. military does not aim to install democracy, it aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests, regardless of the wishes of the local people who are governed.

To put it another way, we have no way of knowing whether Iraq is "ready for democracy" based on the Iraq War because the U.S. military did not act in a way to actually try to install democracy.

> Any citations for this notion?

I don't recall if Why Nations Fail specifically covered democracy, but at the very least, you can definitely see why nations caught in the vicious cycles it outlines might suffer more because of democracy.

> because the U.S. military does not aim to install democracy, it aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests

No. The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the enemy's military. That's the big thing of what went so horribly wrong in Iraq: the US kept pushing military solution after military solution to fix very-non-military problems and was confused as to why it didn't work.

> The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the enemy's military.

If you look at U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt, CIA, military) over history, one consistent goal is to install regimes that are friendly to the U.S. and to topple regimes which are not. Defeating the military of the hostile regime can be part of that. But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

The U.S. generally sticks around and tries to install a replacement, often undemocratically. On the occasion that they do implement democratic elections, any winner that is not sufficiently friendly to U.S. interests is undermined or even couped and a (usually right-wing) government is installed undemocratically.

Occasionally the U.S. will even undermine the democratic government of a country it hasn't even officially militarily engaged with, because the leader is threatening U.S. business interests. The history of U.S. relations with Latin America is littered with this type of illegal covert warfare, most recently in Bolivia with Evo Morales who was nationalizing natural resources that U.S. business wanted access to.

> But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

That is exactly what the US military planned with Iraq, Rumsfeld had outlawed any talk of Phase IV (nation building). The generals wanted out of there as quick as possible because they knew it would be a clusterfk regardless of Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney thinking State, USAid and the UN would just manage Chalabi’s flowering democracy.

Of course, that fantasy lasted as long as it to blow up the UN HQ in Baghdad.

I think ideological is a better word than racist here.

A racial purist would adopt one of two positions - invade and extract value - or don't waste our money on those people. It's true from the left side they see rightists but this is an optical illusion. It's as how I used to believe a democrats were secret Maoists.

One could argue that Iraqi circumstances are fundamentally less suitable for democracy, not because "the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy" but because of the structure of the country divided both by religion (Sunni vs Shia) and ethnicity (the Kurdish regions) - democracy in the region would be much more feasible if the Ottoman empire was divided differently according to the boundaries of the "natural" communities (e.g. instead of the current Iraq/Syria border one would have a Shia state, a Sunni state and a Kurdish state since, say 1930s) but the currently established borders are drawn in a way as if to intentionally maximize the long-term instability within each country.

Like the US, (catholic vs protestant) and ethnicity (some Mexican regions) ... The division of the Ottoman empire was nullified by the War of Independence of the Turks. A Kurdish state would have never been possible, because of the ethnic plurality in the region. The religious divide, is an expression of a political one. The Iraq-Syria border makes as much sense as the US-Mexican border, German-French, still democracy is a possibility.

That sounds plausible though I'm not educated enough to comment on that. But I do know that the question is separate from the Iraq War because the IW never truly aimed to establish an autonomous democracy.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002202211244385...

They have 50% cousin marriage, which predicts high levels of clannishness and low support of democracy.

It looks like if you want to bring democracy to the middle east, you first have to stop cousin marriage then try again in a few generations time.

This would also reduce genetic disease and raise IQ. There are no charities or programs to pick this low hanging fruit as it's very un-PC to talk about this.

Bit of a scissor statement there. I could argue one side of that on Monday and another on Tuesday.

I dont think Iraq war was noble pursuit of democracy. That on itself is one of narratives - in which American wars are good and just regardless how self-serving and sociopathic people pushing for them are.

I've read The Story of Civilization, but I haven't read that - could you tl;dr? My impression of the Durantian Big Picture is a sense that everything recurs, no big ideas or events are ever really unprecedented, and a kind of skeptical liberalism is the best philosophy.

(Minor point: his wife Ariel was a co-author.)

No offense to your dad, but there’s literally dozens of counter examples for every take on history. The physical evidence and the obvious can fill in the blanks pretty easily from daily human emotional rollercoaster our biology takes us on

Historians fill in a whole lot of gaps based on consensus acceptance of a narrative. There’s never an objective measure of reality. I can read the writings of the dead just fine if they’re in English. Thanks for your the context though, mr historian. How foolish of me

Not just a historian thing.

What’s that? They knew metal smithing and made hand tools? Because they exist? And they did song and dance?

Well those dead humans sure were a thing! Never heard of such a thing before now!

As a thought exercise let's stipulate it's possible to model political economies over time and run experiments on them. This would be a pre-condition for identifying "laws" and demonstrating their effects. Such a model would be more complex and require more inputs than weather modeling.

We can't reliably forecast weather for more than a few days. It's implausible that you can do anything even close for human history.

It's possible to draw robust conclusions about human behavior. But you have to use other approaches and frame the problem differently from "discovering laws of history."

Isn't dialectical materialism an attempt at finding laws of history? I've always understood it as a sort of evolutionary biology for social science. This article mentions Marx, but only as a guy who had an idea of a communist society?

Right after mentioning Marx the author states: > The idea that such progress was inevitable was sharply derailed by the genocides and totalitarianism of the mid-20th century...

Dialectical materialism (while not infallible) is not derailed by genocides and totalitarianism but rather predicts such events, as well as things like imperialism, colonialism, and recessions / depressions cycles.

I, personally, think it can easily become reductive to push everything into dialectical materialism, and many people have added onto Marx's analysis. But if you're going to try and nail down some laws around history I think it might be a good idea to read about thinkers in the past who have already tried to answer the question.

If I recall Marx's thesis correctly, my recollection is that he thought that capitalism would spontaneously lead to the proletariat revolution. And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred in the most backward, feudal states among the great powers, and in the context of a multi-factional civil war in a state that was losing to foreign powers.

It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your ideology if you're promoting a scientific view of the world that makes predictions that failed to come to pass.

Marx was specifically drawing from proletariat uprisings that were happening around him. To name one particularly famous one, The Paris Commune. Marx was trying to explain the tumultuous political situation of 1800's Europe. You also have to keep in mind that he wrote from a context that still had a living memory of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist social and economic relations.

> And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred in the most backward

They don't commonly teach about the leftwing revolt in Germany in 1918 which was crushed when the ruling government instructed the Freikorps to smash it and murder its leaders. It's also hardly mentioned that FDR's policies in America were an urgent response to multiple general strikes that spontaneously erupted all over the country.

It is certainly not the history of proletarian unrest in the West that discredits Marx's historical materialism, we just have a common understanding of a very sanitized and biased version of labor history.

The internal forces of capitalism that Marx identified as the source of these class conflicts have certainly evolved over generations of spectacular technological and social change, but they're still there and still very relevant. Our capitalist present, in the broader context of history, is still very young in comparison to other socioeconomic orders.

Perhaps I should have added the qualifier "successful."

What actually happened was that laissez-faire capitalism (which was the dominant form of capitalism in the 19th century) ended up yielding to essentially social democracy, whereby the state becomes a check on capitalist control of the working classes and provides guarantees and surety to the working classes. I'd argue that the modern social democratic variant of capitalism would be foreign enough from the laissez-faire capitalism of Marx's era that he wouldn't consider it capitalism.

What are these differences between social democratic capitalism and laissez-faire capitalism that are so fundamental that Marx would not recognize the former as capitalism? We still have class relations defined by how we participate in economic relations. If anything, the extensive financialization of modern capitalism really exaggerates just how subordinate _all_ of us are, proletariat and bourgeoisie alike, to the logic of concentrated capital which seeks to increase in its concentration.

And is it really fair to call the capitalism of Marx's time "laissez-faire" when the government coordinated very closely and heavy-handedly with the bourgeoisie to develop capitalism further (for example, land reform, imperialism)? I will take the position that laissez-faire is an ideological definition of capitalism that never described actually existing capitalism and could never for long. After all, all those prole revolts of Marx's time that were squashed were squashed by the state on behalf of the bourgeoisie. If they did not have a state to rely on, they would invent one. And if a state emerged that would oppose them, they would seek to destroy and replace it. So it goes.

But it would be impossible for me to defend such a position in the confines of a thread because I would have to scour the entire history of capitalism and show how involved the state was in creating and preserving a world suited for bourgeois hegemony. It would easily be thousands of pages and I would just be recapitulating dozens of scholarly works.

I don't see your point.

Marx had many ideas, but I think you're dismissing them just because a revolution hasn't happened. In which case, I don't think you understand Marx. Much of his critiques on capitalism hold true today (eg growing inequality between classes, alienation of labor).

Anyhow for your argument above, Marx might see it confirm his theory, as what you call a movement towards social democracy capitalism, Marx might see it a step away from free market capitalism and one step closer to socialism. But the idea might not even be true, as the state is arguably controlled by the capitalist classes, so he very might well still see it as capitalism....

> What actually happened was that laissez-faire capitalism (which was the dominant form of capitalism in the 19th century) ended up yielding to essentially social democracy

and subsequently started decaying into neoliberalism.

Spontaneously? What are you referring to? The only particular moment in dialectical analysis is the synthesis, which is inherently unpredictable. Marxism is only predictive over the totality of history given the structure of the dialectic. I’m sure if you constructed an arbitrary dialectic you could find a synthesis tomorrow, it just wouldn’t be the synthesis he’s writing about.

The effective law of which I am aware is that “eventually there will be a proletarian revolution”, although obviously this is impossible to invalidate if it’s incorrect.

150 years is blink of a second in the order of history. Think about how long feudalism has lasted and how long it took bourgeoisie to eliminate the ruling class.

Also, it's debatable if Russian Revolution was a communist revolution per se. There is sufficient literature that goes both ways, i.e. arguing it was more of a bourgeoisie revolution against the monarchy than a proletarian revolution.

Of course, Marx himself predicted (which is not a prediction of his theory) that a communist revolution will happen in his lifetime. It might be him overfitting to his own era which saw successive revolutions. I personally don't find this a big deal since it doesn't have any important implication to materialism. It just makes Marx's prediction wrong.

For an updated/modern view on Marxism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory

I think it's important to distinguish Marx's theories (dialectical materialism) from Marx's application of them. Marxists apply his method of systemic analysis to contemporary events to navigate global and local economic issues, but don't deify the man himself. Marx isn't a Nostradamus-like figure, and many people have added to dialectical materialism and the labor theory of value.

To put it simply, Marx looked at this machine we're using to produce things and said "Woah, I don't think this machine will run more than another 150 years", and we've managed to duct tape and super-glue it to running much longer, the fundamental analysis of capitalism's contradictions are still true, we've just adapted better to them than he anticipated.

Some think capitalism recovered from the 1929 crash only thanks to the enormous destruction brought by WWII (in lives and capital). That's a very costly "duct-tape".

Absolutely not. Marx's conception was that due to the internal contradictions and failures of capitalism, it would eventually and progressively lead into a communist revolution through at some point a revolution.

The proletariat revolution in itself, according to Marx, would be slowly triggered by the advancement of material conditions, that is the evolution of the relations between classes, up until a point where the relations between the proletariat class and the bourgeois class would lead to revolution. The predictions made about the upcoming contradictions of capitalism by Marx have been quite accurate, altough not perfect; he didn't expect them to be.

This specific scenario that Marx was predicting never happened. Late stage capitalism has not been achieved until recently. For example, Marx expected the revolution to happen as all classes would be absorbed into either the owner class or the proletariat class, which has only happened in the past few decades. He also expected it to happen when the capitalist, automating most production, would start to run out of consumers as they would not be employed anymore: we see this contradiction being paliated through creation of demand and creation of useless jobs, which are not sustainable solutions. He also predicted that beforethen, the middle class would be absorbed into either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, with people formerly of middle class becoming reliant on rent and debt in order to provide for their essential assets. This transformation is in the process of happening.

I am also skeptical of any grand theories of history. However, be fair in your criticism of Marxism. Dialectical materialism posits that eventually, communism would overtake capitalism the same way that feudalism overtook slavery and capitalism overtook feudalism. It also posits, and I think that this is a very good observation, that political economies are based on class relations and that these systems progress, regress or succeed one another by class relations moreso than individual action. Marx's theory could be read to predict that communism will overtake capitalism in five decades or in a hundred. It's core assertion is that the next dialectical shift will be about the proletarian class and it's relationship with the owner class, and that when capitalism is supplanted it will be through the abolition of the relationship between worker and owner through the vehicle of private property. This seems like a fairly rigid theory that holds all possible observations.

Why socialist revolution advanced on backward countries instead of the most advanced capitalist ones, like Marx "prophetized" (in a simplistic reading)? This question is one of the most profound ones, and is debated in socialist circles before, during and after 1917.

Read Gramsci "The Revolution against Das Kapital" (1917), Trotsky predicting the Russian revolution in "Results and Prospects" (1908), and most of all, read about the concept of uneven and combined development. You will find a richness of thought not seen in other places, and marxism in a very different (and non-linear) light.

Apologetics and pseudoscience are also littered with hotly-debated, profound questions and a half-dozen answers for each of them.

In science, the null hypothesis that all of this theory is the result of human ingenuity rather than methodical observation gets a seat at the table too.

Doubt must have always the biggest seat at the table, but we also need to take special attention to the models showing the most predictive power against the facts. If not, we can fall in the extreme postmodernist trap (every "narrative" is equal). Of course, a model with many fulfilled predictions can be falsy too, maybe there is only just a very lucky astrologer behind the predictions highlighted by survivorship bias. But is worth to look closer to these models for (maybe) grains of truth.

Many think marxism/historical materialism is only pseudoscience with no predictive and analytic power at all because we aren't living yet in fully automated luxury communism. But dig on it and there are pearls, for example, Trotsky predicting in the thirties the URSS bureaucracy restoring capitalism and becoming a new bourgeois. That was an historical prediction of the highest caliber against forecasts of all kinds (from the capitalist and the stalinist camp). The capital concentration process predicted by Marx is another, enduring many years. There are many more.

And there is also the analytic power. Suppose you aren't making any prediction, you can really say an historical materialistic class-based analysis of the French revolution is entirely pseudoscience?

> Isn't dialectical materialism an attempt at finding laws of history?

Perhaps. Or perhaps it was an attempt at making up a basis for Marx's already-decided-upon agenda.

> Dialectical materialism (while not infallible) is not derailed by genocides and totalitarianism but rather predicts such events...

Does it predicts the genocides and totalitarianism produced by communism? Somehow I doubt it, but I am open to correction.

And, I wonder what evidence would make you decide that dialectic materialism was in fact a failed idea - not just "not infallible", but "mostly wrong". Between the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and the fall of (real) communism in China[1], the dialectic materialist view of history is looking (at least to me) like a fairy tale.

-----

[1] I can't imagine Marx regarding "to get rich is glorious" as having any place in a genuinely communist society.

Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of interpretation.

I've found that the stories different societies tell about their own history that are far more interesting than the objective facts of what happened, because those stories reflect quite a bit about what those societies think about themselves and their place in the world.

Accounts of the American Founding Fathers alternate between casting them as heroes and as goats. Currently they're goats (read an article recently that said America was founded on slavery and genocide).

The application of science to history that seems to work is to notice patterns that repeat over and over. So if you were studying cats you might notice that they tend to meow, chase mice and get in catfights. Likewise with humans they tend to form political coalitions, try to gain power, have wars with neighbouring countries and the like. If you read the history of Europe it's pretty much ruler of A gained power over B or was overthrown etc. repeated about 3000 times. As to exactly what happens when you can't tell really. Some of the patterns of behaviour long predate humans - birds build nests, defend their property and go out to work getting food for the offspring, chimps conduct war like activities against their neighbours and so on. It's mostly rooted in evolution.

Another thing you can predict is long running technical advances along the lines of Moore's law which will probably have notable effects during our lifetimes - more powerful computers, cheaper solar and the like.

Thinking about the meaning of life, I can only really say this about it: We take up space on the surface of a planet.

Perhaps all of the war and misery is really just due to having too little space to share amongst too many people. I'm sure Malthus would agree.

What an absurd conclusion. We have been having wars and misery for pretty much all of our history as a civilization (plenty more misery before that and proto-wars on a terrible scale on a population basis) Our population has for most of that long time been very small, much smaller than it is now.

In fact, in the last 70 or so years since WWII, our wars have become less absolutely violent, less deadly and less widespread than ever, while absolute misery among humans has also declined immensely, despite there being more than ever before of us during the same time.Malthus himself was also shown to be badly wrong, so yes, maybe he would agree with you.

I think that ISIS behavior was almost there compared to the Nazi. They even had genocide of their own. Rwandan genocide was in 1994, long after WWII. Mao Zedong ruled between 1958 to 1962 and his Great Leap Forward policy killed more people then Hitler or Stalin.

The difference is that non of these happened in Europe and United States.

Also Mao wasn't trying to kill people with the Great Leap Forward.

It's sort of like how everyone gives the British a free pass for the millions of Indians they starved during the second world war.

Incompetence is bad but malice is worse.

It was not random incompetence. Human life or suffering had little value, own vision had a lot of value.

For the Bengal Famine or the Great Leap Forward?

The Bengal famine was a terrible example of British incompetence and indifference, and one that gets little mention (though it's being recognized more now) but I'd say it's qualitatively different than most active genocides. The British didn't purposely try to kill those people, they just facilitated the kind of stupid mismanagement of food and food production incentives that allowed for it to happen unintentionally, then took their sweet time before finally doing something to fix it. The nearby Japanese occupation of Burma and a year of exceptionally bad natural disasters in the region also had some fault. Furthermore, if they get something of a free pass it might also be because the UK was at the time desperately fighting almost alone in a huge war and barely succeeding at providing for the needs of its own domestic population, let alone diverting shipping to feed millions of people on the other side of the world.

One consolation is that the Bengal famine contributed to the disintegration of the British Raj in India after the war. It had been a catastrophic catalyst for tolerance of malignantly, and as it turns out, falsely paternalistic English rule.

India was a net exporter of food leading up to it. So yes, they sacrificed some British subjects to save others. Mostly incompetence. Just like the Great Leap Forward.

There is no size comparison between the Nazi genocides and the sorts of mostly localized horrors that ISIS is responsible for. The Rwandan Genocide was terrible but it also barely compares to the Nazis' work or to the sheer frequency of genocides before that. As for the Great Leap, it was worse, but it too is accounted for in the actual numbers of government caused deaths during the 20th and 21st centuries and they clearly show that people dying by bad, genocidal government activity has decreased enormously since the second world war. (since before that even but just to keep things concise relative to the comment above)

The Yazidis genocide is recognized as genocide. ISIS did not gained as much territory as Germans back during WWII. But they were not less violent or deadly. Merely less successful in gaining territory and bulk of Yazidis escaped with international help. As far as violence and control over population go, ISIS rule was pretty high on scale (especially control exercised against women was every aspect of life reaching) with added bonus of sexual slavery.

The Rwandan genocide was on smaller geographical scale, but had no smaller level of violence and was effective in killing targeted population.

The Nazi were the biggest and most successful genocide. But no genocide before that was as big as Nazi one. They were smaller and localized. And looking at list of smaller genocides, there is plenty of it after WWII (also before).

>Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right?

Opening quote is an equivocation fallacy. Most scientists agree with historians that the issues historians investigate are too complex to be treated the way we treat motion or thermodynamics, with the tools we have at this time.

It's cargo-culting physics to assert that there are a set of "high level" laws in some area without having in hand the reductionist mechanics.

This cart-before-the-horse is so pervasive in social sciences, and developing sciences like neuroscience, that it's understandable one would ask why history can't get in on the action.

The glib invocation of phlogiston theory is telling. The essence of phlogiston theory is not wrong!

I strongly disagree with this view. I sympathize with you that it's probably true that scientists are inclined to cargo-cult their science after physics. But the endeavor here is not wrong, so even if it's cargo-cult, it's good.

Science's primary objective is to find models. A model should do predictions, and then scientist should collect data of interest, and make sure the data isn't falsified by the model's predictions. Any scientist who cannot do predictions, and verify that data doesn't contradict predictions, is no scientist at all.

Once you have models, it's simply too tempting to formalize them and build mathematical theories for them. If nothing, for computational advantage, so you can make computers make predictions, this way you can eliminate human errors. So, it seems like any science will eventually build models that can generate predictions from first principles.

It is one thing to claim the entire human history can be predicted from first principles of a theory X. Clearly, we have no such X. Maybe we never will. It's another, and totally reasonable thing, to build a theory X from first principles that correctly predicts some data.

No one has ever built a historical model that predicts the future with any accuracy. There are plenty of overfit models that "predict" the past, but none hold up on new events.

Interesting book on the topic from the world's leading researcher, if you're curious: https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-Predicti...

Does Moore's law count as a historical model?

Perhaps it is too recent and limited in scope,

but it is about, like, some measurable things about society, which is based on past observations, and it has been somewhat predictive? (though, perhaps it being somewhat predictive has been in part due to it becoming somewhat prescriptive?)

Moore's law is more of an economic necessity. Circuits get cheaper to run, cheaper to make, and faster the more you shrink them, so you just keep shrinking them. This was observed by Carver Mead way back in the middle of the 20th century.

Moore's law requires an average of 3% increase a month in the number of transistors packed on a chip. With a few hundred thousand people working on the problem, that's not crazy. Of course it's going to be spikey, but combined over the lifetime of a chip project...

I don't know that Moore's Law is what most people would mean by a historical law, but it has held up surprisingly well even for a non-historical law :)

Just because it has not been done before, doesn't mean trying to do so (i.e. make a science of history) is invalid or just cargo culting. Especially since GP referred to other social sciences, and named neuroscience. It has not been done for history, maybe it never will be. I don't think generalizing this to all social sciences holds up. Surely there are some falsifiable predictions of psychology, sociology etc that has been tested.

The social sciences don't work like the hard sciences though. And the primary reason for this is because humans, unlike say, atoms or molecules, are not independent objects. They are subjects with agency and can react and change their behaviour in response to what your models predict about them. Essentially predictions can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

> I sympathize with you that it's probably true that scientists are inclined to cargo-cult their science after physics. But the endeavor here is not wrong, so even if it's cargo-cult, it's good.

Having been trained as a physicist and then worked as a biologist and dabbled in history, it isn't good. Physics cannot be used as the ideal of sciences because it is an extremely strange science. Consider: physics deal with simple systems with only a few essential observables that can be repeatably measured. History deals with very complicated systems with an inordinate number of possible observables none of which can be repeatably measured. Why would you expect them to resemble each other? I actually wrote a book about this...

> Science's primary objective is to find models. A model should do predictions, and then scientist should collect data of interest, and make sure the data isn't falsified by the model's predictions. Any scientist who cannot do predictions, and verify that data doesn't contradict predictions, is no scientist at all.

A model is supposed to recapitulate observations. Prediction is only relevant in the case of repeatable observations or the discovery of new observables. Astrophysics and history don't get the former, but you will find prediction in both in the latter case...but once you've measured it, it's not prediction anymore.

> Once you have models, it's simply too tempting to formalize them and build mathematical theories for them.

People do this to a limited extent with toy models, but the relationships among observables in history that you can get from the historical record tend to be fairly simple and rough, while the number of observables is enormous, so formal modelling doesn't buy you much. When people have done this on a large scale, you get the Club of Rome...trying to peer a few decades into the future with an enormously complicated model.

> It's another, and totally reasonable thing, to build a theory X from first principles that correctly predicts some data.

First principles are overrated, and I think the training of physicists overemphasizes them. In condensed matter there's a phrase, "more is different." We can go from atomic descriptions to macroscopic ones...in very, very simple cases. History has no such simple cases. You always have a huge number of parameters, which leads you back to the old adage that with three parameters you can draw an elephant, and with four you can make him wag his tail. There's too much slop for a model from first principles predicting things in history to be interesting.

Boyle's gas law can be discovered without knowing anything about a kinetic theory of gases or quantum mechanics. You can discover "high level" laws (effective but incomplete approximations to reality) without knowing how to model the system components at the individual level. Inexact, sure, but with (limited) analytic and predictive power.

In Biology you don't know how all the cells of a population of wolves and rabbits works or his present state. But you can use predator-prey models to predict (at some level) population fluctuations.

If science awaited to have a complete description at the most fundamental level to make predictions, there will be no progress at all. By discovering "high level" laws you can get closer to "lower level" ones, as Boyle is an step to get to QM (what's the cart and what's the horse). Maybe all "laws" are emergent and our models only approximations, and there is no fundamental ones to be discovered, so gravity, etc, are much more complex and "systemic" we think.

But sure, there is lot of epistemological traps, pseudoscience, bullshit and honest dead ends in the process.

It's absolutely possible to argue persuasively for high level laws without having a full reductionist mechanics. For example, Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were strong even though the physical/chemical basis of heritability was totally unknown in his time. He didn't even know Mendel's laws. Fisher also developed his models of evolutionary dynamics without knowledge of the underlying mechanics of heritability, and his models still stand. In fact, I'd argue that a big part of what makes a good scientific theorist is the ability to formulate and test high-level laws without complete knowledge of lower-level mechanics.

... "natural selection" IS the mechanics. The reason it's convincing is you can imagine what would arise, systematically, from imperfect reproduction under forces of selection, NOT because it's an attractive theory you saw in the tea leaves of the complexity of the world.

It's also falling that a historian would discredit an idea by referring to "phlogiston" which is only the go-to cliche for "haha ridiculous premodern scientific bad idea" just because the name sounds old-timey and obsolete.

In your view, what is the not-wrong essence of phlogiston theory?

That the energy output of a flame is regulated by the oxygen flux. Phlogition theory suggests a phlogiston flux that is just the oxygen flux with a sign reversed and consequently when they measured the mass of the phlogiston, they got a negative value.

A lack of understanding is like dirty glasses, everything blurs together and it becomes impossible to distinguish between right and wrong ideas.

I don't agree that the essence is not wrong, but I can imagine a decent argument for that position predicated on considering Phlogiston as chemical energy. Some substances can easily release energy through oxidation, others not so much.

A lot of this depends on the definition of "law." It also implicitly depends on what we consider scientific. That is, history may or may not ever be a mathematical science, but it could be a science or field that just does other things than other sciences.

The problem of coming up with laws of history is that we have to decide what kind of science takes history as its object in the first place; what kind of laws would be commensurate with that framing?

Is "history repeats itself" the kind of thing that we would call a law if proven adequate to the science? What about "might makes right"? Is "genealogy" an adequate scientific field or methodology, in its own way, on its own terms? What about dialectical materialism?

I don't think polling existing history departments or historians will necessarily get you there either.

law of history: telling people who sit at the bottleneck of a trade network that it's their culture that made them rich will always get you invited to dinner.

This has a real Asimov-like feel

Psychohistory

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

Just the title had me thinking of the Foundation series.

I've been noticing similar concepts in modern sci-fi/tech thrillers lately. Devs and the most recent season of Westworld come to mind.

It got me thinking about how certain "threats" or big changes can affect our fiction and be reflected in our scary stories. In Asimov's time, psychohistory was pitched as some amazing tool that could be used to improve (or at least prevent the total destruction of) human civilization.

Now it's all about modern/fictionalized computing power being used to model humanity's actions, but not necessarily for positive ends. Even if some of the characters think they're working for the best, it's pitched as a something unnatural to revolt against.

I guess the obvious read would be that Asimov didn't have any real world examples to draw upon so it was easier to extrapolate the day's advances in math and computing into something more powerful and empowering. Today we look at the potential abuses of powerful algorithms and behavioral modeling and imagine something similar but much more powerful and dangerous.

Exactly what I was thinking. ;-)

Absolutely, yes

-Hari

What seems clear is that we're not ready to declare a set of "laws of history". We're not even close. I think this can be parsed pretty easily by reading between the lines of basically every historian's response to grand unified theories of history like this, and the author of this piece clearly recognizes "cliodynamics" as hubris, despite all our seemingly impressive advancements in data analysis.

I don't know if the scope of asserting this is fully appreciated. One of the most influential ideologies in history is based on the idea that certain laws of history were essentially cracked in the mid-1800s.

Ctrl+F "Marx", 1 throwaway mention. "Hegel" 0 mentions.

I'm not sure I buy the idea of cliodynamics as useful for making predictions about the future, but I do like the idea of at least some researchers talking about history with data and through a data-driven lens. I don't get why there's such controversy over the idea of a data-driven understanding of history

Because it is ridiculously easy to overfit your models, and the combined human behaviour producing 'history' is so complex and ever-changing that it cannot be simulated.

Also, if such a law were proposed, a widespread (dis)belief in that law could undo it.

Oh, I don't believe in a law of history or anything like that. I'm just saying the coupling the practice of history with data analysis is some cases could be fruitful - kind of like anthropological history, but with a bit wider focus

If "those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it", are 'those who do not understand what is going on right now simply doomed?'

The article mentions Kondratiev long waves, this idea was very debated in marxists circles in the twenties. Here is a very interesting criticism, by Trotsky:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.ht...

Some more:

https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratiev...

That those who believe there are laws are sure to be wrong?

Here is a "law" of history that I think is pretty well justified: you will occasionally be surprised by important, unpredictable events. Get used to uncertainty and distrust confident predictions.

First law of history... The victors get to write it.

"History is Written by the Losers"

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-writt...

Marx would like a word....

Whether you are an adherent or not, the absence of any mention of historical materialism[0] in this essay is like discussing the world's largest ravines without mentioning the grand canyon. The only mention of Marx is towards a cartoonish representation of his vision of the future, a practice he pretty much refused to do. You hate to see it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

reminds me of the communists in Hail Caesar

I would love to see a history book that would describe the past in more generalized terms (i.e. without necessarily mentioning particular dates, names, events, places or artifacts, while still with just enough detail) so as to emphasize the natural, as it were, progression of the development of the civilization. History is far from being random as it might seem to some.

David Christan, Big History:

https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History

https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-history/oclc/940282526

Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History accomplishes a similar end:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...

His later Energy and Civilization largely updates this, though shifting the historical focus somewhat.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

The only law of history is that it is told from the perspective of those in charge. That's it. History is perspective, narrative, interpretation and propaganda. What other laws can you derive from a subjective and arbitrary field? History has always changed with the times as different people in charge manufacture history to suit their needs.

There is nothing in history that is even universally agreed upon - civil war, ww1, ww2, vietnam war, etc. Heck even factual items like the date of the beginning of ww2 is in dispute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com