Ah, the pendulum / cyclic metaphor. It gets trotted out way too often IMO. The pendulum metaphor fails often; here are some examples where it cannot make sensi

Ah, the pendulum / cyclic metaphor. It gets trotted out way too often IMO. The pendulum metaphor fails often; here are some examples where it cannot make sensible predictions: species level extinction; major technological shifts; the overall growth of economies (upward), the growth of attitudes around human rights. Why does the pendulum metaphor fail? It has no explanatory ability to handle non-cyclic things. Mathematically, it has too few degrees of freedom and a poor functional form. How often does the pendulum argument make a testable prediction? Is there a prediction of _when_ something will happen? Is there a scientific study (or even statistical analysis) of the underlying factors? The pendulum argument often serves as some kind of wishful thinking; just wait, it says, and things will (somehow) “swing back” to the middle. For a while, at least, until there is some kind of overreaction. Enough. Let’s call bullsh-t on this vague metaphor. There are better ways of thinking. (In contrast, the statistical concept of “reversion to the mean” is a mathematical fact. Using it when observing real world data helps us assess the nature of the underlying statistical distributions.)