Ask HN: will psychohistory ever become reality? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: will psychohistory ever become reality?

9 pointsRed_Tarsius11 comments

For those who have never read Isaac Asimov's Foundation, psychohistory is "the FICTIONAL science which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about mankind's future behavior. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. Asimov applied this concept to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions." http://goo.gl/09ypYw

Asimov's psychohistory is based on the following assumptions:

- The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.

- The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.

- The population must be in the billions for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.

- That human reactions to stimuli would remain constant.

Given a sufficiently large population, will psychohistory ever become reality?

Thanks for reminding me about psychohistory and providing an opportunity to reflect about it. I've got a few thoughts.

If we are very strict about sticking to the initial assumptions, psychohistory as formulated in the Foundation is impossible for several reasons. 1. The population is already aware of the psychohistory (though it may not change anything, see the tragedy of the commons). 2. Human reactions won't remain constant because humans as acting agents won't remain constant(transhumanist future is an inevitability).

If we relax our requirements a bit, the answer is quite complex :)

At first it seems that the random nature and black swan events (which both are qualities of an immensely complex system) of the human society would mean that psychohistory will stay in the real of fictional sciences.

However, it is quite possible that human future may be converging to a specific state, like total human annihilation or transhumanist ascension to a biomachine symbiosis. Both events effectively end the timeline of "mankind's behaviour" but these are sort of singleton hacks, not a working system.

What do you think?

You summed up my doubts perfectly, especially the black swan events.

The series conveniently puts a quintillion people through dark ages where no major technological breakthrough is supposed to occur. Psychohistory seems to be based on a more fundamental assumption: technological advancement is not going to change our baseline behaviour.

However, Mule aside, the real world shows a small sample of people changing dramatically in only +-200 years. Technology is not only a tool, but an environment that shapes us in an unpredictable way due to physical and biological unknowns. Deviations compound over time and, eventually, will result in the transhumanist ascension.

The same deviation makes any long term analysis flawed. I can't see how analyzing a much bigger population would make it any easier, like Boyle's gas law. Hopefully, time will prove me wrong. :)

Agreed, we are witnessing the last decades of "pure" humans and homo sapiens as a species. Someone else will be taking our place real soon and I am really happy about it.

The evolution ventures forth.

If you got to the second book in Foundation, you found out that (in universe) psychohistory is a scam -- that it is based on telepathic mind control, not on control based on predictive models.

If you look at the works of Wallerstein and Braudel, I think there is some basis for a science of civilization, but there are limits to prediction.

For instance some would say nuclear energy is our best hope for a sustainable civilization at our current level of energy use. Thanks to some bad choices and bad luck in Japan, however, progress has been set back 30 years or more.

No, it's not a scam. The mind control is used only rarely. The whole thing would not work if the predictions were not accurate.

Thanks for pointing out Wallerstein and Braudel, I'm going to check out their work.

Spoilers

The Second Foundation really creeps me out and definitely puts the Plan on a different light. 1) those sentinels are well aware of the Plan; 2) Seldon could not predict the behaviour of such a small community, yet they have tremendous power over the universe; 3) Mentalists behave differently from humans. They break psychohistory's fundamental assumptions – to be fair, Seldon himself is an anomaly –, yet without them the Plan is likely to fail. Overall, I like how the books never fully explain the actual extent of Seldon's strategy: Asimov is clever enough to let the reader draw his own conclusions.

On a side note, I didn't enjoy at all the last books about Gaia. Imho the writing seems rushed and lacking the quality and depth of the original series.

The closest you'll find right now is the theory of Schumpeterian waves, which can be applied to the resolution of an arbitrary-precision fourier analysis over continuous 3-space given sufficient input resolution. Schumpeter's theories boil down to conclusions about principal component analysis applied to the global macroeconomy, but he himself never made the jump to pure mathematics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter

One of the more recent champions of his work is Leo Nefeodow, who predicts that according to Schumpeter's theories the next spike will be in "psychosocial healthcare" and "bioinformatics". He successfuly deduced the emergency of Obamacare in America, and a unified European currency and subsequent debt crisis (blaming Portugal over Greece as the primary debtor) caused by lax central European lending practices. And he predicted the US real estate bust because the market wasn't as cyclical as it should've been. (His book, "The Sixth Kondratieff", was published in the mid 90's, updated in 2014, and is available on Amazon.)

http://www.kondratieff.net/#!the-sixth-kondratieff/c1rxx

Thank you letting me discover Leo Nefeodow's work, I'm going to get my hands on his book as soon as possible!

I strongly doubt it. Not only are real people anti-inductive, real people are capable of biologically self-modifying with as small a change as taking drugs.

One example is the PR industry. They come pretty close. Their techniques for modifying public opinion are pretty sophisticated.

‘‘‘The Psychohistorical-Dialectical Equations’’’ -- an Earthly Actualization of Asimov’s Fictional Psychohistory?

Asimovian, fictional psychohistory may ALREADY have begun to become a reality, with a core mathematics that is NOT merely statistical, but "structural"!

For those inspired, by Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory, to want to see it actualized on Earth, and who perceive analogies -- consciously intended by Asimov or otherwise -- between his decline of his fictional Galactic Empire, and the actual decline of our present civilization at the scale of this one planet, underway since even before Asimov wrote his first Foundation story, and more obviously underway today --

I have become aware of a new development in dialectical theory, using a new tool of “universal labor” -- a heuristic, ‘intuitional’, contra-Boolean, algebraic dialectical logic -- one that has enabled those who use it to develop a model of ‘‘‘The Dialectic of Nature’’’ -- of an unbroken, self-developing, mounting ‘meta-genealogy’, from pre-nuclear “particles” all the way up to the human, with a prediction as to what comes next: a model of the historical dialectic of natural history as totality.

Thus, this work differs in at least two ways from Asimov’s speculation -- its equations embrace all of cosmological evolution, and they are not “merely statistical”, but are based upon an undergirding, qualitative, ontological “scaffolding”, or “structure”, to the dynamics of Nature, including of human Nature, Nature’s latest self-development [at least locally], for which sample statistics can provide estimates for the values of the quantitative parameters.

“Inside” their totality-model, they have constructed models of the history of “the social forces of production”, and of the related history of “the social relations of production”, within “human pre-history”, culminating in the capital-relation/wage-labor relation, at the core of capitalist society, and the self-cleavage of that society into the wages-/salaries-class-vs.-capitals-class class struggle that this “social relation of production” imposes, until the capital-relation-incented growth of the “social forces of production” internally destabilizes that capitals-system, producing the decline, the “descendance-phase”, of global capitalist civilization.

Their models also predict/reconstruct the “lawful” emergence of a ‘HUMANOCIDAL’ capitalist-anticapitalist [totalitarian STATE-capitalist] ruling class in descendance-phase capitalism. They predict a terminal, descendance-phase ruling class ideology which is simultaneously ‘capitalist anti-capitalist’, ‘human anti-humanist’, and ‘anti-Marxian Marxianist’. Ruling-class ‘human anti-humanism’ was initially named “Eugenics”, but, after their Hitler-debacle, became their “Big Money” perversion of the global grass roots anti-pollution movement, into “People Are Pollution” ‘Earthism’. The “lawful” degeneration of capitalist, representative democracy into totalitarian, ‘humanocidal’ STATE-capitalism, in the “advanced” nations, is ENABLED by the hyper-concentration of capital-money in ever fewer hands, which, at length, totally obliterates the “checks-and-balances” among the political branches of government, as the descendant-phase plutocracy prostitutes all three branches, plus the news media. But the desperate, DRIVING MOTIVE behind the plutocracy’s rush to TOTALITARIAN HUMANOCIDE is a deep secret, still not discerned by most observers and theorists.

Using this model, they have derived detailed features of the probable higher successor system to capitalism, i.e., of the higher successor “social relation of production” to the capital/wage-labor relation, which they call the “generalized equity social-relation-of-production”, or “political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY” -- the “citizen externality equity / citizen birthright equity / citizen stewardship equity Human Rights”-relation. It is decidedly NOT a form of state-bureaucratic-ruling-class STATE-capitalism, a la Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Hitlerism, Maoism, Castroism, Ceaușescuism, Hoxhaism, ILism, UNism, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

The key is to revive checks and balances on political power, as well as to create new checks against concentrated economic power, by instituting unprecedented ECONOMIC CHECKS AND BALANCES.

The ‘Associations of [popularly elected, mandated, popularly recallable] Public Directors’ bodies, implementing the ‘Citizens EXTERNALITY Equity’ [‘GRASS ROOTS regulation of deadly local pollution’] Human Right, may be considered an ‘institution-ization’ of the historical experiences of the revolutionary, territorially/residentially-grounded “community councils”.

The ‘producers-democracies’ that are the MARKET-COMPETING ‘‘‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’’’ of the ‘Citizen STEWARDSHIP Equity’ [‘collective entrepreneurship’] Human Right [the ‘socialized venture capital’ right] may be considered an ‘institution-ization’ of the historical experiences of the revolutionary, workplace-grounded “workers’ councils”. Each citizen-steward producer, as such, enjoys, by constitutional and human right, two streams of income: (1) compensation for time worked, determined via the Skills-Markets, not necessarily equal in amount to that earned by other citizen stewards, and (2) an equal share in the net operating surplus of their Citizen-Stewardship enterprise.

The prescription is that the -- concentrated-economic-power-obviated -- POLITICAL checks and balances be “aufheben” retained, as revived by the new ECONOMIC checks and balances, in a new societal system of SUSTAINED QUADRUPLE POWER, with sustained, ‘inter-mutually’ checking-and-balancing conflict among the elected executive, the elected legislative, and the judiciary branches of [popularly-elected] POLITICAL government, and vis-a-vis the ECONOMIC-DEMOCRATIC institutions of ‘‘‘Equitism’’’ -- the social institutions of ‘Citizen Externality Equity’, ‘Citizen Birthright Equity’, and ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’, described above.

This will require a VIGILANT social majority, that knows what it wants -- the better life for all of ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ -- and that knows the horrors of the alternative -- Police-State, Totalitarian, Humanocidal State Capitalism, already rampant today in its ‘STEALTH EUGENICS’, ‘STEALTH HUMANOCIDE’ incipient mode.

For more about these historic breakthroughs, see --

http://www.dialectics.org/dialectics/Welcome.html

http://www.dialectics.org/dialectics/Glossary_files/Glossary...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Mission/Mission.htm

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicLaw...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicDem...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/AmendmentXXVIII/AmendmentXX...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/MaladyAndRemedy/MaladyAndRe...

http://capitalismsfundamentalflaw-wayforward.blogspot.com/20...

http://feddialectics-miguel.blogspot.com/2014/05/part-ii-int...

http://feddialectics-miguel.blogspot.com/2014/05/part-iii-ep...

http://feddialectics-miguel.blogspot.com/2014/05/part-iii-b-...

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