5 ms·
Something something psychohistory
by jumploops 2y ago
Something something psychohistory
- paulddraper 2y agoIn Asimov’s Foundation series, a scientist Harry Seldon combines physiology, sociology, and statistics to create psychohistory. This allows him to predict planetary + galactic scale events, including a surprising and imminent regression of humanity into a new Dark Age.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2y agoNo need to explain the reference.
- solarengineer 2y agoThere are many who have not yet read the Foundation series.
- RestartKernel 2y agoI appreciated it.
- Carrok 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- jagged-chisel 2y agoFelt a lot like self-fulfilling prophecy when I read the series. Too many people were aware of the predictions.
- db48x 2y agoIt’s because there was no iteration. There was only one attempt to actually use the discovery to influence society. There should have been at least one smart bad guy who used knowledge of psychohistory to search for conditions that would favor his preferred outcomes over Seldon’s. There’s a smarter treatment of the idea in the John C. Wright’s “Count to the Eschaton” series.
- bobthepanda 2y agoThis is also eventually a plot point in Westworld.
- paulddraper 2y ago?? Do you not the know the Second Foundation?
- NineStarPoint 2y agoThe second foundation was also made by Harry Seldon though, there wasn't a completely separate force that attempted to change history using his research.
- db48x 2y agoCorrect. Meanwhile in the “Count to the Eschaton” series, all the bad guys know enough of psychohistory to do a lot of damage. The future does not at all go according to the plan made by the good guys, and as time goes on a greater and greater percentage of the population knows and employs the mathematics of psychohistory in their daily lives. In fact, that mathematics turns out to be much more widely applicable than mere Psychohistory, since it applies to all systems of all types and purposes, not just human societies. A small system like a web server is simple enough that you or I can confidently predict its eventual failure; the hardware simply doesn’t last forever so eventually a disk will fail or a capacitor will pop or whatever. But the company running the web server is a much more complex system that is much harder to predict. Does the company fail if it pivots to a different market and turns off the web server? Or if the cleaning lady unplugs it once a week to vacuum? If you want that particular web server, or the pages it serves, to last forever then you really have to design that corporation well. You don't want it to divert from the plans you gave it when the market changes and there is more profit to be made elsewhere. In fact to keep that web server running over the long term you really might have to design the society around it so that the situation _doesn’t_ change too much. Society will keep changing as fads come and go and people are born and die, but you want it to always orbit a chaotic attractor of your choosing in the phase space of possible societies. The series takes this idea to its logical extreme, giving the main characters access to and control over larger and larger systems until they are controlling vast galactic superclusters. The degree to which the many myriad intelligences, human and otherwise, in those vast systems can carry out the main character’s purposes over deep time depends on how well the rules they have devised work and how well those intelligences understand and implement them.
- paulddraper 2y agoThat doesn’t really matter, does it? The premise was that even being aware of the impending collapse was not enough to stop it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]