Reminds me of Asimov's "psychohistory". He conceived of a science capable predicting future events with probabilities but two of its foundational principles ar

Reminds me of Asimov's "psychohistory". He conceived of a science capable predicting future events with probabilities but two of its foundational principles are that 1) the population sample is sufficiently large 2) the population is unaware that they are being observed or unaware of the variables/mechanisms used to predict their future. Part of what made his writing interesting was that this science was very believable.