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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 18 2019, @11:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the Wait-long-enough-and-sc-fi-always-becomes-sci-fact dept.

In 1951 Isaac Asimov inflicted psychohistory on the world with the Foundation Trilogy. Now, thanks to data sets going back more than 2,500 years, scientists have discovered the rules underlying the rise and fall of civilizations, after examining more than 400 such historical societies crash and burn - or in some cases avoid crashing. More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-future

Turchin's approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. This "big data" approach is now becoming increasingly popular in historical disciplines. Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University, believes we are living through "the glory days" of his field, because scholars can pool their research findings with unprecedented ease and extract real knowledge from them. In the future, Turchin believes, historical theories will be tested against large databases, and the ones that do not fit – many of them long-cherished – will be discarded. Our understanding of the past will converge on something approaching an objective truth.

Discuss. Or throw rocks.


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  • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday November 18 2019, @01:30PM (8 children)

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Monday November 18 2019, @01:30PM (#921489)

    that psychohistory could actually predict (will predict) human behavior (as long as people are unaware of the prediction). If you can predict human behavior right now, go trade some stocks. The proof is in the pudding.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @03:34PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @03:34PM (#921529)

    People "predict" the lottery numbers every week, not with any certainty better than chance, but with the infinite number of monkeys trying, the lotto organizers want to make sure everyone knows about (and believes there are) winners.

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    • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday November 18 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)

      by shrewdsheep (5215) on Monday November 18 2019, @03:57PM (#921548)

      The interesting thing about lotto is that you can actually "win". A larger proportion of players bets on patterns be it numbers important to them or previous drawings or anything else patternlike. You can use this fact not to increase not your winning chances but to increase your payout in case you win, if you avoid those patterns (all winners share the amount in the jackpot). If lotto were fair, i.e. the payout would equal the contributions, you would have positive expectation using this strategy (you would win money in the long run). Depending on how much money is diverted (I believe around 30%) and how much pattern-betting is going on you could still have positive expectations. Pooling a lot of bets on high-payout number combinations is actually the business model of some (semi-)legitimate companies.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @04:53PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday November 18 2019, @04:53PM (#921570)

        I believe Florida's Lotto diverts 50%, they used to say that the 3+ multi-week rollover jackpots were a "winning bet" - but that's only if you win the big prize... there's something about opportunity cost, you can only bet on so many numbers. In the early days a consortium of investors tried to buy every number after a 5 week rollover, but the Lotto commissioners wouldn't let them and it was not cost effective for the investors to attempt to generate 14 million retail purchases within a 7 day period. You don't have enough opportunities in a lifetime to make that big payoff anything other than a longshot.

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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Monday November 18 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday November 18 2019, @04:46PM (#921568) Journal

    The proof is in the pudding.

    No, it isn't. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:19AM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:19AM (#921767) Journal
      Depends. A good run-flavoured pudding literally has the proof in the pudding. Just saying. And the higher the proof, the better. Just keep away from open flames.
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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday November 18 2019, @05:08PM (1 child)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday November 18 2019, @05:08PM (#921580) Journal
    We predicted global warming in the '70s, as well as overpopulation, which is the main factor driving global warm. People won't change their behaviour until they're forced to. Just look at all the smokers who won't quit, admitting that it will probably kill them.
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    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @07:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @07:08PM (#921633)

      psychohistorian smokes because his trade predicts that he will die one day in a accident AFTER dying from lung cancer one day BEFORE ^_^

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 18 2019, @05:44PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 18 2019, @05:44PM (#921602) Journal

    Actually, I suspect the main difference is the level of detail in the predictions. Even Toynbee could predict the general flow of history. (Possibly not accurately, but that's a different matter. And the psychohistorians made some blunders in their predictions.)

    For that matter, I've made some predictions that have, unfortunately, been accurate. I predicted that power would tend to centralize in current civilizations by analogizing to the Roman Republic. And I feel the US is just prior to the transition into the Empire...though the external factors are different, and I feel that the US power may wane as the Empire is taking form, and someone else will become dominant. This is a very dangerous period, when foolish wars become increasingly likely. And given modern weaponry it may end civilization. Possibly even humanity. If civilization falls, it's not clear it can ever recover as a technical society, as the easily accessed resources have been so depleted. Even coal tends to be deep enough to require mechanical pumps to be accessible. Of course, one can do a lot with charcoal and ceramics. But I'm not sure that modern metals could be refined with primitive techniques.

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