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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: 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?