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Asimov actually invented the Black Swan Event half a century before Taleb. Mind control was such an event that psychohistory could not account for. Sometimes t
by thriftwy 2y ago
Asimov actually invented the Black Swan Event half a century before Taleb.
Mind control was such an event that psychohistory could not account for. Sometimes things just happen and spoil our plans.
- therobots927 2y agoThat’s a fair point. I just wish there was a clear cause and effect behind the black swan event. Part of what makes the big short so interesting to me is seeing exactly how the black swan event transpired in the 2008 housing crisis.
- thriftwy 2y agoI don't think that 2008 housing crisis had any serious black swans around it, instead of bad planning caused by chasing the dollar. The point of a black swan that there doesn't have to be a cause.
- ben_w 2y ago> The point of a black swan that there doesn't have to be a cause. That's the first I've heard that suggested. It's a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight; based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did not exist which stopped being used that way in 1697 when people found actual black swans.
- pjlegato 2y agoThe point isn't that black swans don't have causes. The point is that nobody is expecting those particular causes at all when the event happens, due to prior assumptions being wrong.
- WorldMaker 2y agoAsimov did eventually explore some of the ideas of the hidden causes/effects of that Black Swan Crisis in deep sequels and things you don't expect to be sequels ("The End of Eternity" for example). The answers basically boil down to "meddling from Robots and Aliens" both groups of whom the Empire worked to destroy and/or claimed/believed didn't exist (and so Hari Seldon was entirely blind to them as actors in galactic politics). Though certainly at the time of writing Second Foundation he had no idea what caused it, was writing by the seat of his pants, and was just looking for a MacGuffin that would confuse everything he'd built in the first Foundation novel.
- therobots927 2y agoYeah I think because the series was written so far apart, there were sacrifices made in the plot integrity (imo). I’m a big fan of Asimov mainly because of the concepts he explored but I would never compare the foundation series to the lord of the rings for example, which had a much more well thought out universe.
- WorldMaker 2y agoSure, but to be fair, strong cohesive worldbuilding was never the goal with Foundation. It was a gedankenexperiment to take an impossible but scientifically plausible sounding technology (psychohistory) and find lots of ways to break it and/or explain it. If you were actually looking for Asimov at his most "Lord of the Rings" I'd actually suggest probably "The Gods Themselves". There the worldbuilding was far more central and important to the narrative.
- therobots927 2y agoThank you very much for the recommendation, I’ll check it out. That makes sense that he was trying to find a way to break it, I just think chaos theory would break it very well on its own. It’s not possible to forecast weather accurately past what, two weeks? And the second foundation was going to predict the evolution of a million-planet galactic population 1000 years into the future? You don’t need mind control to poke a hole in that, lol.