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> Foundation also fails because human society is chaotic so his psychohistory would never work. Ant's are also chaotic as individuals, but if you get enough of

> Foundation also fails because human society is chaotic so his psychohistory would never work. Ant's are also chaotic as individuals, but if you get enough of them you can model them easily. We can already semi-predict global human behaviour; population graphs, economic charts, actions of specific demographics. When enough humans walk down a street, you can model their flow with fluid dynamics. Psychohistory wasn't a study of the intricacies of the human condition, it was an iterative model that follows general trends. It just happened to be sophisticated enough to predict thousands of years into the future and to allow for outliers.

btilly 4y ago
The whole weather vs climate argument. However when you look back over the last 200 years, one of the striking features is that every 10 years or so people are concerned about something very different than they were before, and which was often a result of a crisis that few were ready for. For example nobody in the Clinton era would have predicted 9/11. The 2008 financial crisis caught most of us by surprise. COVID was on nobody's radar. Nor did we expect Russia to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (nor to lose if they did). And so on. I can't tell you what we'll all be worried about in 2030. It won't be COVID or Ukraine. My guesses include financial collapse, climate change, the collapse of Russia, the invasion of Taiwan, and so on. But odds are that it will be none of those things.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  COVID was on nobody's radar Pandemics have absolutely been on the radar. We already had plenty of hints: SARS, swine flu, heck the great influenza pandemics of the past. Increasing total population, increasing population density, and increased travel have been obvious risk factors for as long as anybody has talked about this stuff. one of the striking features is that every 10 years or so There are multiple things every decade. In the past 10 years we've had the pandemic, something resembling a coup in America, war in Europe, a nuclear disaster, accelerated global warming, and so on. Trying to fit it into a shallow truism like "every 10 years, it's something!" is some kind of magical lazy thinking, right up with "it takes 10,000 hours to master a thing!" and "celebrities always die in threes!"
  - btilly 4y ago
    It wasn't stated as a truism. It was stated as a practical limit to our ability to naively project the future forward. And therefore the centuries long sweep of Foundation fails.

btilly 4y ago

The whole weather vs climate argument. However when you look back over the last 200 years, one of the striking features is that every 10 years or so people are concerned about something very different than they were before, and which was often a result of a crisis that few were ready for. For example nobody in the Clinton era would have predicted 9/11. The 2008 financial crisis caught most of us by surprise. COVID was on nobody's radar. Nor did we expect Russia to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (nor to lose if they did). And so on. I can't tell you what we'll all be worried about in 2030. It won't be COVID or Ukraine. My guesses include financial collapse, climate change, the collapse of Russia, the invasion of Taiwan, and so on. But odds are that it will be none of those things.

JohnBooty 4y ago
COVID was on nobody's radar Pandemics have absolutely been on the radar. We already had plenty of hints: SARS, swine flu, heck the great influenza pandemics of the past. Increasing total population, increasing population density, and increased travel have been obvious risk factors for as long as anybody has talked about this stuff. one of the striking features is that every 10 years or so There are multiple things every decade. In the past 10 years we've had the pandemic, something resembling a coup in America, war in Europe, a nuclear disaster, accelerated global warming, and so on. Trying to fit it into a shallow truism like "every 10 years, it's something!" is some kind of magical lazy thinking, right up with "it takes 10,000 hours to master a thing!" and "celebrities always die in threes!"
- btilly 4y ago
  It wasn't stated as a truism. It was stated as a practical limit to our ability to naively project the future forward. And therefore the centuries long sweep of Foundation fails.