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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:
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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tokolosh on Monday November 18 2019, @02:55PM (6 children)
Civilizations grow more and more complex, in the sense of rules, regulations, bureaucracy, overhead and cruft. Eventually a point is reached where it is more efficient to collapse the whole edifice, despite the resulting chaos. This is the basic theme. How it is triggered and plays out has many variations. A rise in inequality is a symptom, not a root cause.
I suggest reading "Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)" by Joseph A. Tainter. More recently, "The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets" by Thomas Philippon has much food for thought. The concept of "Fragility" as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is very useful.
I think it is impossible to predict the future mathematically, because it is a mathematically chaotic problem and hence the butterfly effect. Students of chaos theory will understand (and so should Mr. Turchin).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 18 2019, @03:37PM
In the Foundation universe, there might be enough data to start a successful mathematical analysis and prediction.
In Sol-Earth N of 1? With today's recently globalized all-connected society, first ever in known history to have instant communication? Please introduce me to the people who are funding this data analysis project, they seem... overly trusting.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @05:35PM (3 children)
i've seen jurassic park and the butterfly effect so i know all about it!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:52PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:56PM (1 child)
Entropy being what it is, chaotic systems *can* end up with negative feedbacks that tend to dampen oscillations and cause a sort of orbit around an attractor of some sort. The climate is my favorite example of this, being both topical and omnipresent. Chaos won't necessarily result in order, though, as if there's no stable attractor or otherwise no way to maintain these moderating feedbacks, what you get is collapse until a new equilibrium is established.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday November 21 2019, @01:27AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:30AM
This sounds like the technobabble in science-fiction shows; it sounds plausible, until one actually starts to think about it.
Who is the person/group who decides, "enough is enough, let's start over?" This isn't like a computer game with some deity controlling everything, and what individual or group of individuals is going to say, "yeah, the waste of government is too high, let's have a revolution." It also ignores the fact that many civilizations fail due to external pressures (e.g. the Aztecs, or the Hapsburg kingdom), not purely due to internal statuses.
As a more grok-able example, "why do companies fail?" Yes, some fail due to mismanagement. Others due to new technologies, or markets going obsolete, or scandals, or mistakes, or any number of any other things. If private corporations can fail for so many different reasons, why would the substantially larger and more complicated civilizations have any easier explanations?