The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse | Hacker News Reader

The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

theatlantic.com

> Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”)

His theories are interesting, but the fact that he claims not to be part of the elite himself indicates he's got some serious intellectual blindspots. Modern academia is one the most perfect examples of "elite overproduction" there is. Hundreds of thousands of doctoral students investing huge amounts of time and money to chase a relatively tiny pool of prestigious teaching and research positions.

To his credit, intentional or not, according to his CV [1] he's only advised four PhD students and hasn't advised any since 2004. Four students per advisor lifetime might even be below replacement rate for having enough professors.

[1] http://peterturchin.com/curriculum-vitae/

Replacement rate is highly field dependent. Certain fields (e.g. applied math, some physical sciences) have excellent career prospects for PhDs in industry, in which case the number of lifetime advisees for a given professor can greatly exceed 1 while remaining under the replacement rate for academia. Other fields have much worse prospects for PhDs outside of academia, in which case the replacement rate is much closer to 1. (Granted, there’s always a fudge factor to account for people who do PhDs just for fun.) I’m not sure where Turchin’s field (ecology/evolutionary biology) falls on this spectrum.

It’s important to point out the obvious: the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 PhD student with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single PhD student who desires a faculty position. It is shocking how little this basic, obvious fact is discussed within our ivory towers.

But in a very utopian way isnt this what is desired? Its 2020. Shouldnt the year 2020 have a population composed of 30% scientist doing nothing but long term research? It wont be exponential forever. Eventually you would get professors that do pure research or teach classes with only 3 students.

That would be pretty nice actually. The small classes I had in my late studies almost didn't feel like university.

>Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single PhD student who desires a faculty position.

Isn't it implied that only the best PhD students will get a faculty position? How do you choose the best one if you only let one student enter a PhD program?

This is exactly Turchin’s point: by the inherent nature of hierarchies, few people on the bottom are qualified for a spot at the top, but many fields (especially academia) have no way of effectively absorbing those who don’t make the cut, leading to disenchantment.

This is particularly bad in academia because a lot of professors intentionally take on more PhD students than can possibly fill future roles for which a PhD is necessary, in order to use them as cheap labor. This is especially true in the biological sciences: rather than hiring career staff scientists to run experiments, professors simply use their much cheaper grad student labor pool.

Population grows exponentially. Number of scientists should, too. The question is the exponent.

Assuming sustained US population growth rates at the current 0.6% per year (big assumption), we expect the population to grow by ~23% over the course of a 35 year academic career. So to sustain the current relative size of academia the replacement rate is not too off from 1 student per advisor lifetime.

What the exponent should be is a whole other matter.

I cocked my head a bit at that line as well.

I will entertain the possibility that he has always viewed himself as an outsider of the elite or as an elite-imposter.

Perhaps the very recognition that there is an elite means you are not one of them.

I suppose it depends on how stringent your criteria, but I would consider an Ivy League professor more of a member of the ruling elite than University of Connecticut, which is a perfectly respectable university but not one from which Presidents typically pick their scientific or economic advisors.

He’s a tenured professor at that! How many of those spots are available to go around again? Sounds pretty elite to me.

> Hundreds of thousands of doctoral students investing huge amounts of time and money to chase a relatively tiny pool of prestigious teaching and research positions.

That's a pretty cynical take on academia. There are plenty of good reasons to go for a PhD that don't amount to prestige chasing and it isn't accurate to view PhD programs as a jobs training program to push you into academia similar to a coding bootcamp, but longer and more expensive.

The experience of learning research by generating new knowledge with the top experts in your field is intrinsically valuable even if you don't use it every day. The one high school teacher I had who had done her PhD was by far the best teacher at the whole school. Everyone benefits from having a more educated society. Plus, most PhDs are funded. That money doesn't get thrown on a fire. It is paid for by the student teaching undergrads (which is a huge profit driver for universities if you need a selfish reason to support PhDs) and then is turned around into research which benefits society. Most PhDs don't end up going back into academia either. In fact the profit from cheap teaching assistants in the form of PhD students is probably the biggest driver of getting more of them at the university level, not some sort of academic circle jerk. Universities just want money.

Peter Turchin has a blog post (http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-mad-prophet-of-conn... ) expressing his own views about the Atlantic article, explaining: "I cringed in a number of places as I read his article. Yes, I propose a fairly ambitious program of testing theories about historical processes by translating them into explicit models and then testing model predictions with large datasets. But no, I don’t think of myself as a Hari Seldon. In fact, the fictional Hari Seldon had no appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and mathematical chaos (because Asimov wrote the stories before the discovery of chaos). And cliodynamics is not psychohistory."

Also from Peter, lest this become a predictable round of journalist bashing:

"Graeme is a very intelligent journalist and his explanations of cliodynamics and structural-demographic mechanisms that bring about state breakdown are quite good. The Atlantic went through a thorough fact-checking process (unusual in these times of online media with limited resources to check facts) and I have no argument with the factual foundations of the Graeme’s article."

Seldon missed The Mule, pretty big failure of psychohistory right there.

I don’t think he did? Psychohistory relies on gargantuan groups of people acting predictably, so you can’t predict a one-off random mutation of a single individual. That’s not a failure, it’s a limitation- and why whenever Seldon appeared, he prefaced his statements with a % chance that the plan was still succeeding- the remaining failure case included a catastrophic mule-like event.

Mule-like occurrences were always a possibility, which is why Seldon also created the Second Foundation to fix the bug and set the plan back on track- which of course they did. Things were a bit touch-and-go for a while there, but the possibility of failure is always a consequence of probabilistic modeling

Not a faliure, but a predictable weakness of the model that was well known and was brought up several times. Psychohistory cannot model individual eccentricities, the mule was a huge divide-by-zero trap for the equations. Seldon had the forsight to write an exception handler in the form of the Second Foundation.

I immediately thought of Hari Seldon when I read the opening sentences of the original article. And this quote from the blog post is so awesome

> But no, I don’t think of myself as a Hari Seldon...

And then goes on to explain why he's better. Love it!

Despite what Peter Turchin says in that quote, he is a lot like Hari Seldon: both of them model history scientifically, and both of them have a rough plan or roadmap for getting out of our current trouble. He says at the end of the above link:

> And my hope is that Cliodynamics will eventually pay its debt to History by showing that studying past societies is not just an academic endeavor — it can help us understand, among other things, our current Age of Discord, how we got into it, and what we can do to navigate the turbulent waters ahead.

Seldon was a magic prophet dressed up in scientist garb, rolling the chicken bones/making a Theory that his secret society of scientist/magicians carried out to save the roman empire/universe.

Foundation was popular not because it was actual science fiction, but because like much of sf, it flatters and states the prejudices the engineer class has-that politics leads to barbarism, that the mass of people need guidance from a rational class, and that science is magic and can solve and predict any problem.

Guys like this are doing the same, they are popular not because of SCIENCE but because they state the prejudices of the rational class. If he has a model, ask him how it applies to the town of Willimantic, CT, which is by Uconn, and watch him have zero to actually say about it

- In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility

- A person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.

- Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do.

- You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites

- Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners.

- If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels.

* it's a summary of main points of the article, if you cared to read it, downvoters

Thank you for the succinct summary. You might be interested in one theory on why Elizabeth Warren was so popular: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...

It's interesting to think about how covid interacts with this theory. Turchin suggests three major conditions that contribute to decline:

1. Overproduction of aspiring elites

2. Decline of living standards

3. Explosion of public debt

The pandemic could accelerate 2 and 3 in many parts of the world: governments are spending huge amounts of public money to cushion the economic blow, but they are unlikely to do so completely and it could take years for living standards to recover.

To further clarify, from his blog

“elites are simply a small segment of the society who concentrate social power in their hands”

and

“social power [is the] ability to influence other people’s behavior”

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/who-are-the-elites/

So we aren’t producing jobs for influencers fast enough, acc’d to point 3. What is the smallest ratio of influencers/influences an economy can support? And for what size niche of interest? And how many niches? The grand YouTube experiment...

I’m a bit concerned point 3 means that critical thinking, as influencer kryptonite, is a jobs destruction program. Seems unfair...

The postEmpire UK is a bit of a counterexample to point 6.

Point 5 is a little thesis/antithesis-ish without the synthesis.

A bit off topic but might be interesting to HN: Peter’s father was Valentin Turchin [1] - one of the prominent Russian computer scientists and inventor of REFAL programming language.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin

See Peter Turchin's write up to this http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-mad-prophet-of-conn...

He has already identified the selection process by which civilizations evolve: war. War is, historically, where your surplus goes. Surplus elites, surplus laborers, surplus resources, surplus manufacturing capabilities, all of these things are expended in war, and all of them have the same potential to cause the problems Turchin is describing. Surpluses threaten the distribution of power, precisely because they can be used to engage in war. Civilizations are always under the threat of internal warfare, and without external warfare, which nuclear weapons have essentially made impossible, the threat only increases with surplus.

For those interested in Peter Turchin's theories, as explained by himself rather than in the (somewhat sensationalist) manner in this article, the best book for a Hacker News audience would probably be "Ages of Discord", his latest. Here's my Goodreads review, if you're curious: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1796955228

Peter Turchin's "cliodynamics", discussed several times previously on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Peter%20Turchin

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cliodynamics

I'd love to read an academic analysis of modern cultural, economic, and political trends, and am intrigued by the idea that we can study history scientifically.

But as an outsider, I have a limited awareness for arguments that might appear to be purely factual to this layman but would be controversial to an expert, and don't want to be radicalized by reading some extreme socialist or libertarian academic writing as if it were politically neutral and unbiased. Where do the worldviews and ideologies of authors in this space like like Turchin, Taleb, or Milanovic fall on the political spectrum? What can I read to get an overview of the subject?

I really enjoyed reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", but was disappointed and surprised when I went to fact-check it later and found that that many of the neat and tidy organic-feeling arguments it contained were heavily disputed by many anthropologists.

Generally, the Santa Fe Institute may be a good starting point.

This approach also seems to be gaining broader currency, if you follow academic publishing trends (e.g., the New Books Network podcasts).

Has anyone checked out the actual math behind this? The hypothesis sounds reasonable enough (though so do a lot of others), but something like

>But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications

isn't enough for me to give it any more credence than any other "this is why society is breaking apart" explanation.

The math might be right but it doesn’t make the theory or assumptions correct.

GIGO is always an issue, especially in field where it’s very hard to make unbiased measurements of anything.

We have the same thing in economics our models that explain things in hindsight are actually quite good but their predictive power is often at the level of reading tea leaves and chicken bones.

There are a few hints in the article that might suggest Turchin is pre-cultivating his data. It smells like p-hacking, honestly.

GIGO == garbage in, garbage out

The best summary would be in "Ages of Discord", where he goes into more detail on which datasets he is using, and what the equations are that he is using that data to fit coefficients for.

The fact that it has the occasional equation in it, probably limits its sales, but I found it an interesting read.

I've been reading and discussing Turchin for over a decade with interested pseudo-intellections like myself.

I sense there could be a "loop hole" preventing disaster by recognizing a partial solution to the elite overproduction problem: cap the scale of organizations, forcing corporations, states and other larger entities to bifurcate into multiple smaller entities that must now compete to continue to exist.

Do this across the board, breaking up every larger entity into smaller entities. This provides roles for the large numbers of "elites" as well as provides a place for lackluster elites to drift out to pasture with other less aggressive organizations catering to their less aggressive demographics. This also forces economic efficiency, because the larger corporate and other giant institutions are filled with bloat-scale inefficiencies. This would also create product and service diversity, as well as force multi-organization cooperation at a scale rarely seen today.

Imagine how much room there would be if we broke up Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Having another decade of cut-throat tech competition might be good for us.

Why break up though? I believe there are ways to allow smaller companies compete against giants efficiently.

The point is to place a cap on the scale of organizations, enabling multiple smaller entities to provide the same services as the original larger organization, but with increased competition at all levels because the large organization's bloat and efficiencies of scale are eliminated. Part of the goal here is to remove efficiencies of scale because they suppress widespread employment as well as opportunity for individual skills advancement. Large scale providers eliminate employment opportunities and the skills advancement that goes with them simply because their scale eliminates any other players that could exist in the market.

If you're interested in such things, Lev Gumilev is another historian which delved into this, but is virtually unknown in the western world. I can't say that I agree with everything he says, but I still think it's unfair that his work is completely absent from the conversation.

Any specific examples of his work on this?

I second Lev Gumilev. https://www.carnevalemanfredonia.it/political/social-science...

If we accept Popper's falsification, one of the characteristics that distinguishes real science from psuedo science is the making of falsifiable predictions. Turchin's Cliodynamics reminds me of Elliot Waves, and other technical (as opposed to fundamental) analytic techniques for financial market price prediction. Which begs the question: do Turchin's models make tradable predictions?

Popper's falsification is useful, but may not be a truly universal test. It seems most ineffective in the case of systems theories, of which complexity research (closely aligned with Turchin's work), systems theory, cybernetics, and evolutionary theories and models are several examples.

Few of these produce reliable forward-looking predictions, most especially for anticipating specific states achieved at specific times. Much of this hinges on simple complexity and measurement error (uncertainty over initial conditions).

What these models do provide, though, are useful models for drawing associations, predicting or describing specific patterns, and establishing the likely existence of specific features or elements of a system.

Darwin predated concepts of genes, chromosomes, DNA, and mutation mechanism. But his notions of variation and inheritance presupposed these and outlined their general characteristics. Later discoveries conformed with, and further refined, these predictions.

Where humanities and social sciences (Turchin's cliodynamics somewhat spans this divide) run into additional complexity is that models and predictions themselves become part of the informational context in which individuals, groups, and societies see, analyse, process, express, and respond to the informational environment.

This is often compared to Heisenberg uncertainty, but this is a category error. Heisenberg is addressing fundamental knowability, where the act of ascertaining system state changes the state itself. Epistemic interactions affect not the state itself, but the informational loop associated with it. The model and derived understanding are part of the sensing, processing, learning, memory, communications, and control interactions --- the model operates within the modeled system, endogenously rather than exogenously.

How to incorporate this distinction into philosophy of science is an interesting problem, though I don't think it is impossible. Pseudoscience lacks not only falsifiability, but generally, consistency and causality. Sound systems theories should be consistent and denote causality.

To your point, I believe this why is we need to be careful when describing things like many fields of social science as a “science”. It’s more “social educated guesses” than real science.

Social sciences demanding to be taken as concrete as rigid sciences is a problem today I think. We even see them dismissing actual science in some cases not through falsification but through using their own theory to “prove” certain science is “problematic” of heterodox therefore restricting knowledge.

They demand to be taken as seriously, not as concrete, in my experience. Which is fair, we can maybe reach something like what is described in this article eventually - but as Turchin himself put it, it would not exist without History. If we are to devalue social sciences, we are giving up on ever expanding that knowledge.

Should we take religions seriously then? They demand it anyhow.

I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of the humanities or social sciences (or religion for that matter!) I do get concerned however with their motivations and the power they wield over public policy and politics in general. A certain claim to the truth they don’t really have.

I also find it curious that most elite universities and scholars come to more or less the same conclusions regarding subjects that aren’t falsifiable. You’d expect this to be the case in the hard sciences (reproducibility is vital) but not in others. For instance, in religions we can see great divergence. Even in the way economic theory (another thing that isn’t science but often claims to be) has differing conclusions based on the same observations.

I also see today in the application of some of these social sciences that asking to debate or to ask for more evidence is taken as a challenge to it and in fact evidence that the theory is right. See some national best selling books from this year, for example.

At what point do social sciences look more like religion than “science”?

Religion does not claim to be scientific. Its source of knowledge varies but is typically revelation or tradition.

Science is empirical, based on experience, experiment, or observation.

You're mixing up Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the observer effect. The former limits the precision at which certain linked properties can be known.

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

> Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a related effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the system, that is, without changing something in a system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

Given that the case I had in mind (On the Media's Bob Garfield) specifically mentioned Heisenberg in his discussion, concerning of political polling, the error if any doesn't originate with me:

BOB GARFIELD What you're saying seems to be describing the Heisenberg effect, where the act of measurement actually affects the experiment itself. You believe that voters are actually behaving influenced in part by what they're reading in the polls and particularly the models.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/forecasts-... (select "transcript" for full text)

The mechanism of the HUP resembles the OE in parts at least.

Sure, sorry for any misattribution.

> The mechanism of the HUP resembles the OE in parts at least.

OE was initially proposed as a mechanism behind the uncertainty principle, but it's actually just an attribute of the wave nature of quantum physics:

> Heisenberg utilized such an observer effect at the quantum level (see below) as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty. It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems, and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects.

In the article, it is briefly brought up. Turchin dodges the falsification issue by saying, to paraphrase, "I don't make predictions. That's somebody else's job."

To me, right there, is when my suspicion that this was all huckster social-darwinism malthusian doomsday preaching solidified into certainty.

Put up, or shut up. Or you are not mathematically rigorous, as Turchin claims to be.

I’m curious what you’re looking at to create that paraphrase. He says that about how to fix the problem, but I don’t see him dodging predictions.

Back in 2010, he made prescient predictions about our current state of affairs. That’s why he’s getting attention.

He called 2020's civil unrest. A trader would have to extrapolate to place a bet on that.

The hypothesis "if I come too close to this ledge, I will fall into the precipice" is falsifiable. The question is, do we really want to test (falsify) it?

It seems to me when it comes to threat of civilization(al) collapse, we will have to accept incomplete evidence.

The principle strength of history is in providing a set of extant examples. There's the risk of overfitting, but models can be tested.

Present-day models are at least exogenous to the past, if not its present interpretation.

Here is your epistemic "eat your own reflexivity" of the day: Is Popper’s falsification falsifiable?

> The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions

And yet, we continue to heavily subsidize the miss/over education of more who will be un/under employed upon graduation, and who will have no hope of paying off student loans.

Instead of heavily subsidizing these schools that have billions of endowments, we should be requiring them to provide their own financing. If their product is so great, they should have no trouble standing behind it.

The shakeup COVID has caused hopefully will result in some reforms in higher education, which is just such a bloated top-heavy mess with self-serving administrators and boards that it makes the military look efficient.

you should see academia collaborate with the military. It took me eight months to get a firewall exception in place with NASA.

Love the reference to Hari Seldon, the famed psychohistorian from Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. If you haven't read the Foundation trilogy, get a copy to enjoy during lockdown, it is fantastic.

Ah, the foundation trilogy. Prepper culture apocalypse fairy tales – but for academians.

> Ah, the foundation trilogy. Prepper culture apocalypse fairy tales – but for academians.

It was written in the early 1950's. Did prepper culture exist then to the same extent as it does today?

I did not mean to describe the creation of the book – I only wanted to describe the current role of the book and an explanation for its enduring popularity in some circles. Come to think of it, this is possibly an undiscovered genre; Anathem might belong there, too, as might Sucker Bait and A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Interesting, I didn't realize it was popular in prepper circles. I read it in early teenage years and just loved the mega-history of a book spanning several thousand years. Same with some of Olaf Stapledon's books-- before, I had only read books spanning a single persons lifetime. I guess it makes sense that preppers would also be drawn to it, given the nature of the galactic collapse and underdog civilization making it through.

I have no knowledge of its popularity among preppers – I explicitly said it was for academians.

I think it is an important reference.

Hari Seldon wasn't real. Psychohistory isn't real. I find the response to Turchin's work from the STEM and Humanities communities fascinating. STEM people drool. Here is this scientist who has systematized human civilization! Humanities people roll their eyes so hard they fall out of their head after encountering mountains of basic errors in Turchin's analysis.

His work is not good.

One of the most interesting aspects in Turchin's hypothesis is the notion of counter-elites: those who are groomed for power and then excluded from it, who wreak their vengeance by turning against the existing hierarchy. The Atlantic article cites Trump as one example, which is plausible.

The tech industry is a better example. Tech cultivates counter-elites who essentially reframe many of the structures of society. This goes back to a point made by Peter Thiel (classic counter elite Stanford-trained lawyer cum entrepreneur), who advocates abandoning the tournament in which there can be only one winner (traditional hierarchies), and embarking on greenfield projects. HN readers will be aware of Thiel's many other counter-elite activities, which range from taking down Gawker to challenging traditional academia to backing seasteading.

One might argue that tech absorbs the counter-elite in ways that are initially useful to the powers that be, but ultimately fatal to them. We started with the Internet, and ended with the destruction of traditional media. We started with "digital cash" and ended with the erosion of the Fed.

Another book that speaks to this is Martin Gurri's "The revolt of the public" (from Stripe Press!), which argues that gradual breakdown of liberal democracies, and other forms of revolt like the Arab Spring, result from a new "information sphere" created by social media and the Internet. The public is rejecting the control and authority of the existing elites, now that other narratives are available and can spread easily.

https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millen...

Gurri does not cite Turchin, but he mentions similar historical trends, including the privileged children of the middle class confronted with high unemployment, who lead movements like Spain's indignados and Occupy Wall Street.

Many revolutions are revolutions of the upper-middle class disappointed with its own prospects. I would count the American and French revolutions among those.

"the notion of counter-elites: those who are groomed for power and then excluded from it ... The tech industry is a better example ... Peter Thiel (classic counter elite Stanford-trained lawyer cum entrepreneur)"

Is what sense was Peter Thiel ever "excluded from power"? That's not my understanding of his career (but maybe my understanding is faulty).

More generally, is "wreak[ing] their vengeance by turning against the existing hierarchy" really a sensible way of thinking about the tech industry? Yes, the tech industry has certainly disrupted existing hierarchies in very significant ways, but it seems to me that the motivation there is not vengeance but rather profit.

Maybe I'm focusing too much on the word "vengeance". Is your claim more that there was significant "elite overproduction" in the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, and that absent this elite overproduction we wouldn't have the tech industry at all, or that the tech industry would be much smaller?

Thiel appears powerful now, but there were years when he wasn't. But he gave up attempting to climb to the summit of the traditional hierarchy when he abandoned his career as an attorney to become an entrepreneur. This notion of counter-elites is about their position in traditional hierarchies. Do traditional institutions of power have room for them? Thiel decided too many people were competing for too few positions, and left to found PayPal. One thing to note about counter-elites is that they are partial elites. They have some of the degrees and trappings. Thiel has a Stanford degree. But But founding a no-name startup is not a high-status job.

You're right, vengeance is too limiting a word, although I do sense some of that in the crypto community vis a vis the Fed, and also in the current discourse within tech about traditional media.

I could see a lot of the university types who teach critical theory as counter-elites. I can agree about Trump, but would add Bernie Sanders.

Personally I think this is mostly correct. But I like to hold out a tiny bit of hope based on the movement towards digital sovereign currencies and the improvements to cryptocurrency scaling such as Ethereum 2.

My belief is that the economy is really a technical problem. And I feel like there is a technocratic movement which is partially in the right direction as far as holistic measurement and action to some degree but also partially outdated. If you can upgrade technocratic ideas with an understanding of networks and decentralization technologies, I want to believe there is a chance to create a new type of money and government that is functional.

But I do believe that if we don't make radical changes then there probably isn't going to be a resolution barring some kind of very unlikely truly massive debt forgiveness.

What I think is going to happen is that there will be a very strong movement towards effective taxation of large corporations and the wealthy. But that seems like it probably is not going to be adequate in the face of expanding entitlements for all segments and the existing debts as well as the accelerating automation.

If every day trader is picking stocks at random, a small handful will beat the market.

In my own naive reading of this, I feel like the article seems to imply that the happenings of 2020 validate the theory laid out when but the historical examples given to backup this implication seem rather cherry picked. Further these theories imply that "elites" should maybe be purged which historically has been attempted to horrific outcomes (see the chinese cultural revolution or cambodia). Perhaps I am being reactionary in that concern however. Either way this article seems to over simplify the subject while also somewhat claiming that it explains more than it probably does.

Ignoring the sensational nature of this article, I'm intrigued by the idea of applying data science to the study of history.

Perhaps even machine learning, if such a thing can be applied to historiography.

And the next decade could be wonderful. No article in the Atlantic is going to convince me one way or another. The choice of headline does convince me that journalism isn’t getting better.

I’m old enough to have a certain...reaction...when a Russian starts telling me his “science-informed political theories” are worth a second glance. Still looks fun to talk about. Grand theories have had a way of self-destructing in Eurasia...

> The choice of headlines does convince me that journalism isn’t getting better.

I think it is a decently chose headline. Moderately sensational, yet eye catching and conveying the premises, that it is going to be about a gloomy prediction that may or may not turn out true.

It's not clear from the article, but is Turchin only looking at US/North American history? And so do his propositions only apply there?

He says he's looking at the last 10,000 years of history, so no. He also makes explicit reference to the French Revolution.

Thanks, on further though this reminds of Strauss–Howe theory [1] that there are generational cycles in history which tend to related to certain archetypes which repeat again and again.

I really do need to look more into Turchin.

EDIT: LOL, I read the Wikipedia article more closely [1] and it seems Turchin has actually talked about this theory, which he feels is more like prophecy than an actual scientific theory.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...

Has anyone carefully checked his work? Skimming through his first few papers it seems he just built datasets covering the past several millennia and ran PCA (or models with similar complexity). Fine for explanatory purposes, but not so great if you want to make predictions when most complexity of the society arguably comes from the past few centuries.

The second half of the article argues that sweeping historical predictions are typically done by former scientists who trend towards reductionism.

Hopefully he's wrong, we're wrong (because technical people love reductionism) and society responds flexibly to the challenges presented to it.

Interesting intellectual exercise. The process seems rational.

The thing with chaos theory, though... it takes only one swing of a coefficient to produce a wildly different outcome.

I really think we are not competent to manage this, but it is great that we try, kudos to all who make the honest/good effort, and we really can be OK. Truly make an ongoing effort to practice honesty and treat others the way you would want to be treated, encourage others in all good you see, and things can be OK. (More at my web site, in profile).

There's an epistemological dilemma/equivocation inherent in the phrase "elite overproduction". Obviously, the number of true elites is limited by the actual amount of elite input taken by society's institutions (in the same way the number of rocks on top of a pile is limited by the surface area).

When you measure an "elite overproduction", what must be happening is that one noisy signal (metric) of eliteness (e.g. Harvard degrees) is showing a much higher false positive rate than true positive rate, as determined by comparison with a more sensitive (but often useless) metric, in this case "actually being elite" (working for USG or The Atlantic). When you have this problem in any other field, you switch to a different metric!

In other words, when Turchin says "elite overproduction", he is implicitly trusting the very metric he is criticizing. Of course trusting academia as a kingmaker is not a surprising stance for... an academic, but we are not and plow on. If you reframe the question, you instead see "inability to identify elites", that is, a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio of the metrics used to identify people who are trustworthy.

In this framing, it is less surprising that this "elite overproduction" viz. "qualification debasement" is happening at the same time as a general decline in the public trust of institutions! After all, isn't it rational to stop trusting a noisy metric? We could of course spend many paragraphs picking over the nitty-gritty mechanisms by which these increasingly noisy signals eventually produce mistrust, but what we want is the crow's perspective [1]. There is also the question of whether "trustworthy" should have anything to do with "elite", but it does usually have some connection to social achievements.

What bothers me is that I personally can't really recommend my own method of trust-but-verify to most people: I have a pretty good command of mathematics, and I determine who to trust, in many cases, by checking their math. This is an odd privilege: for example, a brief glance at Trump supporters sharing graphical claims of voter fraud is enough for me to immediately detect lying-with-statistics, but for someone without a graduate degree in a mathematical science it may not be so easy.

1: http://chaosbook.org/FieldTheory/01-Intro.pdf#%5B%7B%22num%2...

I think what they really mean by "elite overproduction" is overproduction of people who feel that they deserve to be elites.

> people who feel that they deserve to be elites

Well, that’s not a criteria that really separate "real" elite from "wanabe" elite, is it?

No. But the emotional consequences to the rejected elite are the same as to the rejected wannabe elite. And if they are too many of the wannabe elite, the social consequences are the same, too.

“a brief glance at Trump supporters sharing graphical claims of voter fraud is enough for me to immediately detect lying-with-statistics”

Same background. No, you can’t and you know it.

The presented data may not support the assertion for any number of reasons, but a “brief glance” will not “immediately detect” much of anything. Maybe a bunny in a cloud.

What data was collected, how was it collected, what data is not presented, how is the data processed, how the data is presented and what interpretations can we reasonably make, and which we can’t. You need to be able to answer all these questions. Takes some actual work.

Were you a NASA manager on the Challenger mission, by any chance?

>What data was collected, how was it collected, what data is not presented, how is the data processed, how the data is presented and what interpretations can we reasonably make, and which we can’t. You need to be able to answer all these questions. Takes some actual work.

That's assuming that the presented argument is not pants-on-head stupid, of course. However...

Reminds me a lot of Terrence McKenna.

Or it could be even better!

Why are Russians so depressing?

Have you seen their playgrounds? :P

https://weirdrussia.com/2014/08/20/russias-disturbing-playgr...

It's a society that had a severely oppressive regime for at least half a century (people were often sent to jail for virtually no reason). Severe weather in the north (and all of Siberia) made for harsh living. Glance at Google street view around a non-major city to see what it looks like. It's rough. I grew up there.

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