Comment by sarosh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sarosh | Hacker News Reader

This Economist article is from October of 2020. Peter Turchin is not a historian. He is instead in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Universtiy of Connecticut. He advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. The Nature article from about decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/

Some descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full

Sone of the work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1] and some recent (2017) related work [2]. Finally, in his own words, a comparison of Psychohistory and Cliodynamics (2012) [3]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full [3] http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliod...

"Psychohistory" has a better ring to it than "cliodynamics", IMHO.

Came here to say this :). Especially with the Foundation TV series coming out now this could almost be a PR stunt.

The thesis seems sound, though. When you have a large number of people who have the aptitude and have invested heavily in joining the ranks of the elite (both financially and time-wise), and there's just not enough room at the top, what do they do?

We see that in India with the rise of a huge number of engineering colleges. There's a massive over-supply of engineers, so people who have invested in a masters degree at great cost and 5 to 6 years of studying wind up working in vocational jobs that could have been done with a six-month diploma / apprenticeship. They're not happy.

The thesis is also nothing new, it was developed in quite some depth by early 20th-century sociologists. It has since become unpopular however, largely because the very notion of identifiable "elites" inherently problematizes popular and widespread notions such as democratic representation, or social mobility.

Sounds like an undersupply of entrepreneurs!

the problem is that there is an elite to begin with. being highly educated should not make people feel entitled to benefits, but rather it should make them feel obligated to use their education to contribute to society.

if education is free or even comes with financial support then there is no need for higher salaries to compensate the expense. a computer science master and a master baker should have the same incentive.

This has not been and never will be the case because of leverage. A master baker can serve maybe a 100 people with an oven, a developer can serve 100 million with a RaspberryPi. Short of violence-enforced "equality" this simply can't happen.

that's an interesting argument, but i it doesn't add up. i only need one baker to cover all my daily need for bread, but the software that i use requires thousands of developers to maintain. so, yes, while a single developer can reach millions of people, that single developer only contributes a tiny fraction to the life of each of them.

you have to really look at the recipient side of things. how much of a factor is IT in the life of an individual, compared to other professions?

of course they are not all equal. a hairdresser is needed once a month, the baker daily, the doctor once a quarter, IT, well, depends on what kind of work i do. of course it's not all equal. but we also have many more programmers than bakers.

the value of each of those varies for each individual, but in the end it all balances out. i am not advocating that everyone should get exactly the same pay, but there is no reason that one particular profession must be strictly more valuable than another.

Yeah, this gets messed up when money is the expression of value. Any profession with leverage will make more money, without necessarily being more valuable. Same way a HFT/quant fund manager makes more than my kid’s schoolteacher, or even my kid’s doctor, but the teacher and doctor are far more valuable than the fund manager.

time to bulk record macro predictive analytics and schedule them for release every century or so

Unfortunately, nobody has yet figured out a sure fire way to get people to listen to predictions when they are made. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/05/sixty-years-...

>"nobody has yet figured out a sure fire way to get people to listen"

Have they tried force? /s

These aren't the predictions you're looking for.

Yup, I am reading Peter's historical dynamism, still light years away from the psychohistory definition, but it's on the direction and is a vast leap of the conventional history study. Note that well before Peter's work, there were many quantitative study of macro history trends. But I am an outsider, and not an expert, so do your research if interested. Starting from Peter and his works would be fruitful route (I find Peter's book give much better introduction to prior arts).

The reason why it is called "cliodynamics" is because Turchin isn't the first person to have considered this topic.

The term "cliodynamics" comes from "cliometrics" (after the Greek god of history, Clio), which was a term invented in the 60s to describe the quantitative study of history (typically, economic history). Cliodynamics, the term invented by Turchin, seems to refer only to the background of those doing the studying (and using tools from the sciences) i.e. they are "scientists", not "historians".

I understand why "psychohistory" would appeal to Asimov fans, but it means something like "history of the mind". Whereas "cliodynamics" means "the study of history as a dynamical system". If you want to say that the way people thought has changed over time -- the kind of thesis Adam Curtis would make -- then "psychohistory" is better. If you want to talk about an ODE model of society -- say, you want to show how rising grain prices caused the Arab Spring -- then "cliodynamics" is better.

its named after Clio, the muse of history. Famously noted by Schopenhauer as:

“Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.”

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