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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 VLM on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:53PM (1 child)
Didn't invent sarcasm with the declaration of independence or whatever, I'm sure they did not operate under a delusion of "approaching an objective truth"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 19 2019, @02:19PM
My kid's high school history fair project is about declarations of rights in the U.S. - starting with "All men are created equal" in 1776, "ex-slaves too" 90 years later. "...and women can vote" ~50 years after that, now, nearly 100 years after that we seem ready to declare women equal to men under the law of the constitution. It's progress, of a sort.
Late 1950s, ~90 years after emancipation, the supreme court struck down federal funding for "separate but equal" schools on the basis of race. Then, around 1974 they decided that the handicapped and disabled deserved schools under federal funding, but in many cases they are provided on a "separate but equal" basis, and the 1990 "Least Restrictive Environment" laws do little if anything to improve that.
Life is a journey, I doubt we'll ever achieve nirvana, but as long as it feels like we're moving toward it, I suppose that quiets the calls for open rebellion.
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