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