Asimov's Psychohistory Becoming a Reality? 291
northernboy writes "Today's LA Times has an article describing how a Wikileaks data dump from Afghanistan plus some advanced algorithms are allowing accurate predictions about the behavior of large groups of people. From the article: 'The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.' Considering they did not discriminate between types of skirmish, but only when and where there was violence, this seems like an amazing result. It looks like our robotic overlords will have even less trouble controlling us than I previously thought."
Obligatory TED reference (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory TED reference (Score:5, Informative)
Quoting Asimov:
"... and so I assumed that the time would come when there would be a science in which things could be predicted on a probabilistic or statistical basis"
What Asimov talked about, had actually been researched by many - in a principle known as "group dynamics" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics [wikipedia.org]
The LA Times TFA described is mere an extension - by tapping on the powerful computing ability that we have today, and by tapping on the enormous databases that are being gathered (and kept) by private/corporate/governmental agencies around the world, including Facebook, FBI, and so on
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Actually, this is more impressive than the fictional Dr. Seldon, since the real scientists didn't have the use of any mind-reading robots, or a machine to enhanse the brain function of... er... I forgot what Seldon't partner's name was, been a while since I read the series.
That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
In the absence of change in circumstances, it is quite obvious that areas of conflict will have more conflict. TFA doesn't say enough about the methodology for one to be able to estimate how valuable it is.
On the other hand, yet another good thing about the Wikileak emerges. Were those data hidden by the secrecy wall, this research would not have been available to the NATO forces over there. Is secrecy really productive? Was the leak good or bad? Are the costly measures to make future leaks less likely a good investment?
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
On one hand, I know a person (personally) who knows another person (personally) who was named in the leak who was currently deployed over there. On the other hand, who can say that their identity wasn't already known? On the gripping hand, what the fuck are we actually doing over there anyway?
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> On the gripping hand, what the fuck are we actually doing over there anyway?
We are enforcing Afghanistan's 1941 signing of the Declaration of Universal Right of Man. Hopefully by providing an environment where an alternative to the Taliban can establish power we will provide a lasting buffer against their tyranny.
For those who say it isn't our business to protect the rights of others, that line of thinking was invalidated by WWII and previously in the Civil war.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
For those who say it isn't our business to protect the rights of others, that line of thinking was invalidated by WWII and previously in the Civil war.
So what's our policy for deciding which people's rights get protected?
Roll the dice, and if their country is important to our strategic economic interests we intervene, otherwise we don't?
And whose right were we protecting on those occasions that we knocked off or destabilized democratically elected governments to put some thuggish warlord into power?
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
And whose right were we protecting on those occasions that we knocked off or destabilized democratically elected governments to put some thuggish warlord into power?
The fact that people who happened to be born in the same 3.5 million square mile area as us did bad things decades ago does not mean that we should never do anything ever again.
I'm against most wars for purely practical reasons: they're expensive, rarely work, and they kill lots of people. But intervening in other countries to stop atrocities can be a good thing, when done right. Suggesting we should never do so simply because we don't have a good way of deciding where to intervene is foolish. To use the requisite car analogy: I can't come up with a definitive method to make sure I always buy the right car, but that doesn't mean I should never buy a car, just that I should try my best to get it right.
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So that's why we jumped right into Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide from happening there, right? Oh yeah, we didn't, we just let them be slaughtered because there's no oil there.
And that's why we're in Somalia now, helping to set up a new government, right? Oh yeah, we're not, we're just letting anarchy reign, because there's no oil there.
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That line of thinking was invalidated by WWII... how?
Do you mean the part where the US came in after the Soviets had won the war in Europe and declared itself the winner?
Or the part where the US took on an opponent that could barely challenge them... and used nuclear weapons in a war already practically won?
Americans contributed very little to the defeat of the Axis. Most of the fall of the Axis can be attributed to the Nazi military leaders being just plain incompetent. And of course, the Soviet Union, to
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Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also curious how you conclude that the US only showed up after the Soviets had won the war. Seeing as the US declared war on all the Axis powers in early December of 1941, at which time Soviet forces were in full retreat, and the decisive turning point in the Eastern front - the Battle of Stalingrad - didn't even begin until late summer 1942.
I also question how you conclude that Japan could barely challenge the US, when the Pacific Theater (which, if I might remind you, the US that contributed "very little to the defeat of the Axis" fought essentially its own while simultaneously fighting and/or arming two others in North Africa and Europe) began with the US Pacific Fleet getting sucker-punched and suffering defeat after defeat for over a year. Yes, for many reasons it's certainly true that for Imperial Japan to start a war with the US was a suicidal proposition in the long term, but you dishonor the memory of all the men who died fighting towards the home islands to say they were barely challenged.
And the war was most certainly not practically won - The Imperial Japanese Army's own internal documents say they were ready to send every person in their entire nation to die fighting, and not until the US demonstrated unequivocally that we could now grant that suicidal wish and not lose a single man doing it did they surrender (unconditionally surrender - Japanese has about a dozen ways to yes and no without actually saying yes and no). Our own generals were forecasting literally millions of dead (to say nothing of casualties) if we finished the island hopping strategy and invaded the Home Islands conventionally.
Was the Axis doomed much sooner by Hitler's strategic incompetence? I'll let Operation Barbarossa speak to that, along with several other potentially critical decision points that shouldn't have gone in Allied favor (like the decision not to release Panzers at Normandy because the Fuhrer was asleep and not to be disturbed). Was America's industrial and manpower committment to the war a footnote? Not on your life.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Informative)
Restrepo dude. Afghanistan has a culture of repelling invaders. As in, it is in their shared cultural heritage and defines them as a people. It should be one of the last reformed places on earth. They just want to be left alone.
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> On the gripping hand, what the fuck are we actually doing over there anyway?
We are enforcing Afghanistan's 1941 signing of the Declaration of Universal Right of Man. Hopefully by providing an environment where an alternative to the Taliban can establish power we will provide a lasting buffer against their tyranny.
For those who say it isn't our business to protect the rights of others, that line of thinking was invalidated by WWII and previously in the Civil war.
When you invaded Afghanistan, you said it was because they were harbouring terrorists (presumably because they had a connection to the 9/11 attacks). There are many other countries where human rights violations on the same scale have been committed, that you haven't intervened military in.
Pulling out of Afghanistan means the country will probably be in chaos for a long time, which not only means lots of human rights violations, but also that it'll remain a breeding ground for Islamistic terrorism. So I thin
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>We are enforcing Afghanistan's 1941 signing of the Declaration of Universal Right of Man.
Negotiations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights began in 1946, the year after the end of World War 2 and were concluded when the document was signed in 1948. The document you cite does not exist nor has any document by that name ever been signed, least of all by Afghanistan. Assuming you meant the UDHR the date is actually very important. The UDHR has it's origins DURING World War 2 when the Allies based t
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On the contrary, the civil war was about slavery. The "Preserve the Union"/"State's Rights" slogans were largely marketing BS designed to get people to sign up even when they didn't care to abolish slavery/defend rich-ass slaveholders.
The notion that the Confederacy was in favor of "State's Rights" is belied by the fact that among their earliest acts ratified was one that decreed that no state in the Confederacy would have the right to abolish slavery within its territory. The Confederacy defended s
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He weren't broke during WWII and the Civil War was not about slavery.
The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Informative)
My U.S. History professor, who wrote a dissertation about the civil war, agrees but in a slightly different way. He said it was an economic war. It just so happened that the economics of the South were based on slave labor. So while Congressmen in both chambers of Congress from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were debating economic strife, the underlying issue was that the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers who were exploited just as bad but were free to walk away from their jobs.
Nothing was good about either side in those times, but the North was slightly less bad.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:4, Insightful)
while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers who were exploited just as bad
Yeah, all those whippin's and amputations and such that the poor lower-class workers got... er, wait.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
Working in crappy factories where injuries were common, to include losing digits, limbs, etc., yeah. Where if you quit, the only other jobs were just as bad. Sure, slaves had to deal with stuff like being whipped, raped, etc. but the living conditions of a slave were comparable to the Northern working class, and the hope of changing one's situation was equally as abysmal. Meanwhile, the crime and other crap the working class in the North dealt with (including beatings, rape, etc) were almost as bad.
Slavery is evil and was never good. My point is the plight of a non-slave working class in that time was almost as bad. Look at the whole picture: not just the employer/slavedriver, but where did those people live? What did they deal with on a daily basis?
Makes me grateful that the worst I deal with is my tendonitis and the risk of CTS.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right, but you are forgetting the frame of mind of that time.
I'm sure most lower class workers took it as part of the job, and were happy that they were at least free, and had a job.
When looking back on history, it always seems cruel, because we are used to higher standards of living.
For all we know, somewhere in the future, people will pitty us because our foods contained to much salt.
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And MSG, corn syrup, propyl glycol, cellulose gum, ect...
I think future generations will look back at our diets in horror and ponder the question of how much our (poor?) decision making was a direct result of the 'food' we ate.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:4, Informative)
Working in crappy factories where injuries were common, to include losing digits, limbs, etc., yeah. Where if you quit, the only other jobs were just as bad. Sure, slaves had to deal with stuff like being whipped, raped, etc. but the living conditions of a slave were comparable to the Northern working class, and the hope of changing one's situation was equally as abysmal. Meanwhile, the crime and other crap the working class in the North dealt with (including beatings, rape, etc) were almost as bad.
IIRC, Lincoln was questioned on the conditions between Northern factory workers and Southern slaves, his response was that none of the children of the factory workers were forced by law to be factory workers when they grew up.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:4, Informative)
I've read that same argument from slaveowners in the Confederacy.
Alas, the evidence does not support your position.
The mistake you make is the "because replacing a slave is expensive" - they're not. They reproduce just like free men do. And while a child isn't good for as much labor as an adult, they were certainly put to work as children...
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
My U.S. History professor, who wrote a dissertation about the civil war, agrees but in a slightly different way. He said it was an economic war.
I think it was a broader cultural schism, basically the same thing the parent country worked out in their own civil war a couple of centuries earlier:
north = roundheads (modernity)
south = cavaliers (medievality)
Of course, our esteemed Founding Fathers set us up the bomb with the 3/5 compromise. They wanted a union more than they wanted to deal with the issue of slavery, so they left it for their great-grandchildren to solve.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers
And that made a big difference in the cultures and politics of the two; the South was focused on agriculture, mainly cotton, and failed to develop a diversified industry. Slavery also led to a more highly stratified society, where large slaveholders held a majority of the wealth and the middle class was much smaller and less powerful than in the North. One of the effects of the concentration of political power into the hands of the big plantation owners was the smaller government and lower levels of taxation in the South. Import tarrifs were also low, because Southern manufacturing was so backwards and oriented towards the needs of farmers that most of the industrial products had to be imported. As a result, the quality and availability of public education were low, leading to widespread illiteracy. Those trends produced a conservative society, oriented towards the past, with little interest in science or progress.
Thinking about it, It's surprising how many of those same differences between the (broadly defined) US North and South cultures are still there today.
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The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
And if it were the Federal Government could have ended slavery for a LOT less money and an ENORMOUSLY lower number of lost lives by just buying all the slaves and freeing them, as was suggested at the time by Peter Cooper.
This would meet the constitutional requirements - or of a minor constitutional tweak was deemed necessary it would likely have succeeded if tried.
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You're making the charmingly naive assumption that all the slaveowners would be willing to sell, and that it would be easy to ban further importation.
Actually, no. That's kind of a retarded assumption.
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How are you going to /enforce/ eminent domain without it leading to a shooting war? You already had the foamy people howling about secession over ending slavery. You're making a bunch of assumptions, basically Monday-morning quarterbacking Lincoln and the Union.
Naive, and a typical Internet Libertarian way of assuming that people are /rational/ and intelligent. People, in the main, are not.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
[W]e weren't broke during WWII and the Civil War was not about slavery.
Actually we were pretty broke during WWII. Remember WWII was right after the great depression and many think it was the event that allowed us to pull out of the depression. The US treasury debt was ~$40B in 1941, and $250B in 1946 when the war ended. The US financed WWII with lots of warbonds...
FWIW, I don't think any historians would agree that we fought WWII to protect the rights of any people (other than US self interest). The US entered WWII to stop Japan from gaining too much influence in the Pacific (of course we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany, but that wasn't really to protect their rights either). History records that it all came to head when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US pretty much gave us no choice but to go over to Europe for real too...
And of course the Civil war wasn't about slavery, but states rights. Is it okay to secede from the union when you don't get your way? Apparently, no say the winners.
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we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany
IIRC lending, not giving. They had to pay it back, and they eventually did.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Informative)
we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany
IIRC lending, not giving. They had to pay it back, and they eventually did.
Better review your history on lend-lease. Basically the US (and Canada) gave stuff to England for token payments (e.g. giving England 50 destroyer in "exchange" for lease payments for new US base locations to be located in former British colonies). Then after the war was over, the US depreciated the value of the lend-lease items by 90% (because now they were "used") and allowed England to "buy" them at the depreciated value with a 2% loan stretched out over 50 years.
Eventually, the residual of lend-lease was "paid" back on these terms on Dec 2006. Of course England could have paid it back earlier, but a 2% loan was a good deal and they of course paid it back in 50 year inflated money value...
If that kind of loan would have been made to members of congress, I think many people would have called it a gift... (e.g., lend them a $1M house, depreciate it 90% in 4 years, give them the opportunity to buy it for $100K with a 2% 50 year loan) What would you call it?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it, just calling a spade a spade. That whole lend-lease fiction was just to do an end-around the isolationist republican congress. It wasn't reality...
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Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
History records that it all came to head when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US pretty much gave us no choice but to go over to Europe for real too...
The attack on Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, D-day was in June 1944. The turning point in the war was probably in late 1942 so by the time the US got seriously involved in ground combat it was pretty obvious Hitler was going to lose. The invasion was to stop the Soviet Union from taking all of Europe, it was to stop communism not fascism. Ironically that was one of the reasons Hitler got to do all he did, the other European leaders thought he'd stop the commies. You might say that backfired a little when he made a peace treaty with Stalin and invaded westwards instead, if you're going to let a rabid dog loose you'd better make sure he'll bite in the right direction.
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The slavery issue was the main reason for the north/south split, not the reason for the war...
The US Civil war was certainly about states rights. The north could have just let the southern states leave the union, but the north was not keen on having a resource rich, wealthy adversary nation right next to it that might align itself with Britian, France, and the native americans against the union. Of course there isn't just one reason for the US civil war, but this was the big deal.
To support this states ri
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Slavery was the most sensationalist and persuasive argument for the Civil War. It made good press coverage and personalized the argument on whether to engage in the war. Slaves did exist and slavery needed to be abolished but the Civil War was a fight against Balkanization. Instead of 50 states we could have ended up going down the path of creating 50 different countries and boy wouldn't that be fun.
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"Besides, the world as a whole would currently be better off with a smaller and less aggressive USA..."
Sure... Right up until 1917, when the US entered WWI and helped turn the tide against the Kaiser.
Right up until 1940, when Germany (again) had conquered most of Europe, and Great Britain was holding on by its fingernails (and supplies from the US that made it past the U-boats). Nevermind the millions more Jews who would've been slaughtered when the UK fell.
Right after WWII, when all of Western Europe lay
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With regards to "On the gripping hand", I think you are confusing Larry Niven with Asimov...
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Oil pipelines in Afghanistan ? (Score:3)
We are protecting oil pipelines in Afghanistan
Why was I never told that Afghanistan being an important oil producing country?
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We have patrol bases in areas that have nothing but marijuana fields around them
I seriously doubt you've ever been to Afghanistan
People there don't plant marijuana there
O RLY [nydailynews.com]?
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Depends on the distribution. I'd venture a guess that if the process of distribution creates large asymmetries, more people will be cheated and that will create a stronger perception of the "system" being dishonest and more drive for aggression. If the process removes asymmetries, and people are able to deal with each other honestly, then that source of conflict would be resolved, and one will have to only deal with the various historical and accidental biases. Which may be very significant ;)
Macro versus Micro (Score:4, Informative)
Predicting what a group of people will do is fairly easy; Determining what a particular member of that group will do is very hard. So it can't predict who will attack; It might be able to tell you where though, and possibly when.
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Re:Macro versus Micro (Score:4, Interesting)
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Huh? Entropy may be synonymous to "disorder", but "chaos" is a completely different thing. Chaotic systems are characterised by the fact that arbitrarily small differences in initial conditions will eventually propagate into large differences. That's not something you find in the typical high-entropy system (like a bucket of air at room temperature and pressure).
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Or, more likely, assign probabilities for where and when.
That was the point of "psychohistory." The idea was you can't predict the individuals, just the mass/net effect over time.
Of course, if all you can predict is probabilities you quickly diverge from reality.
The analogy between this and psychohistory is ridiculous.
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Of course, if all you can predict is probabilities you quickly diverge from reality.
Hence the Second Foundation.
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I expect them to "foreclose" on Greece any minute now. Maybe they're waiting until they can get a Greece/Spain/Italy/Portugal package deal...
I read some analysis that said the whole Euro crisis is because they accepted countries that had a long track record of not following the rules that the Union required, and that the reason for the "accept everybody" mentality was that the whole thing was driven by the post-Berlin-Wall German leaders to show everyone that they were going to be an integrated part of Europe and not start any more debilitating wars.
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The EU is often pushed as a "peace project", but I'm not sure if anyone actually believes in it or it's just propaganda.
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I'd argue against that. Each conflict between the German peoples and France, even before Unification was more destructive than the last. Just look at the Napoleonic Wars to the Franco-Prussian War to the First World War to the Second World War. Each conflict more destructive than the last. Even as far back as the Congress of Vienna, there. Was recognition that the only long lasting solution was greater economic interdependence between France and Germany. What has happened since WWII is exactly that; a close
Re:Macro versus Micro (Score:5, Funny)
A permanent Franco-German political union called,,,wait for it,,,Germany.
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based on past history the germans should have gone to war with the french, the british or both by now. it's been almost 70 years since the last of their wars. a record over the last 1000 years
Of course, "Germany" hasn't existed but about a century and a half.
An interesting thing, some Allied general looked at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and remarked, "That's not a treaty, that's terms for a 20-year cease fire."
If Germans ever develop a revanchist attitude toward the territory they've now lost in *two* world wars, there will be trouble. But the risk is probably far lower, since the partition allowed time for a couple of generations to die off. The fuel for what happened in the
It can't be reality now that you published it. (Score:2, Interesting)
The first rule of Asimov's psychohistory is that you cannot tell the people you're monitoring that psychohistory exists. So publishing this has now invalidated the possiblity, showing yet another example of a headline that is a question to which the answer is, "no."
Re:It can't be reality now that you published it. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It can't be reality now that you published it. (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, the citizens of Foundation knew about psycho-history and that they were destined to succeed (Hari Seldon's messages emphasized this aspect in every crisis message). The thing that needed to be kept from them was how the science actually worked so updated predictions wouldn't modify the large plan. In the meantime, the second foundation would be secretly checking that there were no deviations.
As the data we can store about are lives, systems and connections grows in volume and richness, these kind of statistical analysis can prove quite useful.
What's the stat here? (Score:2)
And by "simple code to extract dates and locations", I'm sure they meant regex [xkcd.com].
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Thats the public face of the region.
Then you have that strange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_airlift [wikipedia.org] event that shows the world the reality of what the US is really doing.
What can the US do now? Follow a MI6 vision of small drug growing areas dependant on outside help but stable enough to hold local "elections"?
The Soviet idea of
It's only temporary (Score:5, Interesting)
Once someone starts making predictions from data aggregation more effective, the race will be on to duplicate or improve on it, and then nobody's prediction algorithms will work.
Almost sounds like someone should write a dystopian Foundation book, where the mathematicians race to predict each others' predictive abilities (and of course, stop them!)
Re:It's only temporary (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like algorithmic trading.
Re:It's only temporary (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like algorithmic trading.
That's EXACTLY, EXACTLY what I was thinking. We've solved a lot of the secrets of the atom (and seemed to decide mostly as a society that we don't want to harness that power), the two great superpowers have essentially made peace (superpower defined as a great power that can project regional-great-power-level globally... something that China will not be capable of for decades, hemmed in as they are on all sides by powerful rivals), money for "big science" has started to dry up (partly because of "starve the beast" politics starving the US of greatness, partly by the fact the Cold War is over), and we've just found the Higgs, basically confirming the Standard Model. So, what do we do? Well, theoretical physicists turn out to be really good at modeling arcane, abstract things. They've been moving en masse (remember, they're still a tiny group compared to all the MBAs out there) into quantitative finance. A lot of technology that once went to building faster and faster supercomputers (such as interconnect technology similar to Infiniband) is now being used to reduce latencies for financial transactions, where nanoseconds matter.
And while I've often felt pretty skeptical (as a graduate student physicist myself) about the purpose of string theory, a theoretical physicist-turned quant said, "It turns out that string theory is useful in valuing mortgage backed securities."
Somewhat unlike physical laws, the nature of financial systems changes constantly, so you have to redo your models (not just the constants in your models, but the models themselves) quite often, meaning endless job security for these physicist quants. And we're talking about the world's economy, meaning the potential profits aren't marginal, like they might be for designing a slightly more efficient laser or semiconductor, but is literally all the liquid or semiliquid assets in the world. After the end of the Cold War, physicists have found a way to be indispensable again.
It's an arms race of quantitative finance going on out there. Personally, I think it's unsustainable and will eventually result in an enormous clampdown as we have more flash-crashes or something unforeseen, but even then, there will still be a market for quantitive finance as long as there is money.
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I think it will eventually kill non algorithmic speculation. Then they will only have each other to feed on.
It's much harder to model investments. Long term it's more about having the information or not. losing 1/4 penny per trade isn't a huge deal if you stay in positions for months at least.
Speculation is a basic market distorting problem.
On your post: I've worked with a bunch of underemployed physicists on utility system models. It must have sucked reporting to an engineer who wasn't even a PhD. I
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Exactly.
I had an interesting chat about how economy is taught and this popped out. Having a science where the mere prediction of an outcome might influence that outcome makes it absolutely interesting and quite chaotic.
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Asimov also wrote a short story, "Alexander the God", which predicted algorithmic trading and its downfalls. It's not a particularly good story, in truth, and was only published posthumously, but it was rather insightful in its prediction. In it, a man develops a computer algorithm to predict shifts in the stock market, and uses it to become fabulously wealthy. However, it all comes crashing down, when the one thing his algorithmic trading cannot account for is algorithmic trading.
Not a prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
This is model building, not prediction. They tried to find a model that can calculate the events of 2010 based on data from 2009. This may sound like prediction, but the important thing is that the researchers started this after the events the model "predicted" happened. Thus, they were able to tweak their models to fit reality. This is not a bad thing, that's how you create working models, but a prediction is a statement about things in the future. They only made predictions now that they have published their results, and whether they are right or not remains to be seen.
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The full paper ... (Score:5, Informative)
for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109 [pnas.org]
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Psychohistory (Score:5, Interesting)
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Considering Asimov's political leanings, I doubt it was meant as some sort of parody.
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Thanks. Very interesting.
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Very interesting idea. This would definitely explain why, upon reading the trilogy, I found psychohistory so distasteful.
I felt the Foundation trilogy was nowhere near as good as people made it out to be. The Dune books far far outpaced it in creating a complex galactic human empire.
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To people who don't know the ideas of the Futurians, or the ideological ideas within the milieu of left-wing Jewish intellectual circles in New York City in the 1930s, I think it is easy to miss a lot of the references being made.
In the defense of the ignorant masses, one can say the same of just about any literary work ever made. It's generally thought that the author makes references, but really it's the reader. And the more creative the reader is, the more such references they will find no matter the work.
but... (Score:2)
Butterfly effect. (Score:4, Interesting)
And there is no accounting in any of this for the actions of a dumbass Lance Corporal and his buddies inducing utter chaos into the system.
Scene: Djibouti near the Ethiopian Border. A bunch of Lance Corporal Marines and their CO.
"Stand watch here, and if anyone in Ethiopia comes over, you need to tell us and chase them back into Ethiopia. But under no circumstances are you to go into Ethiopia yourselves, not even if they're firing upon you. We mean it. Got that?"
"Sure thing"
Armed Ethiopians of doubtful allegiance cross the border into Djibouti
Lance corporals enthusiastically chase them back and cross into Ethiopia themselves while armed
Possible outcome that didn't happen:
"Daddy, what did you do in the Ethiopian War?"
"Our unit started it."
This may or may not be true. But I tell this story to make a point. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone to trigger a hurricane, the action of a few dumbasses can trigger some serious shit. Since we're talking psychohistory here, Hari Seldon's Plan broke down under the chaos of the Mule. You can do all the modelling you want, but complex systems such as human societies and such, are prone to chaos introduced by small numbers of influential people, whether they know it or not and good luck trying to model *that* and predict on it.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Butterfly effect. (Score:4, Interesting)
But I thought... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He was replaced by The Jackass.
Hmm (Score:2)
So the only way to change the world is to create someone who is unpredictable.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. Like some electrician in a shipyard in Gdansk who gets pissed off about politics. The Warsaw Pact nations never saw that one coming.
Note to architect: Don't upset the electrical contractors.
Predicting the present (Score:2)
But (Score:2)
Seldon's plan only workrd because he had the Second Foundation to keep the Empire on track.
See also _In the Country of the Blind_ (Score:3)
The idea of psychohistory was also explored by Michael F. Flynn in a novel called In the Country of the Blind; he didn't use that word, but rather the word "cliology". In that novel, cliology was independently invented by multiple people at approximately the same time, and there were several secret societies trying to use cliology to model what would happen and steer the course of history. But with multiple societies working at cross-purposes, things got a bit messy at times. (But at least one of the secret societies just used cliology to pick stocks and get fabulously wealthy.)
http://books.google.com/books/about/In_the_Country_of_the_Blind.html?id=xVqB5-DLRAgC [google.com]
It's not a perfect book, but some of the ideas are really interesting.
steveha
2012 (Score:2)
The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm (Score:4, Interesting)
"If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it." Sun Tzu, Art of War, Datalinks.
(Actual psychohistory, though, was supposed to predict events over a thousand years. Not happening.)
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My memory on this is fuzzy.... but wasn't there a bit that said the farther in the future you go, the more accurate the prediction? For example, you couldn't predict that a group of soldiers would do something horrific next month, but you could predict that a year from now hostilities would begin... the same ones partially caused by previously mentioned incident.
I hope I'm remebering the correct story...
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wasn't there a bit that said the farther in the future you go, the more accurate the prediction? For example, you couldn't predict that a group of soldiers would do something horrific next month, but you could predict that a year from now hostilities would begin... the same ones partially caused by previously mentioned incident
The longer you extend the time frame, the longer your prediction will come true - for example:
...
If one predicts that an air plane will crash today, killing hundreds, that prediction might have a very slim chance of becoming true
But if one predicts that event to happen sometimes in the next decades
You get my drift
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Predictable without algorithms or data dumps (Score:2)
Re:Other uses? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Other uses? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never understood why people believe it's okay to kill people as long as you "respect" their dead bodies afterward.
Re:Moslem beheading non-moslem (Score:5, Insightful)
And in the countries the US hasn't gotten to yet, they just stone women who've been raped for adultery, sell daughters into marriage and generally work against any sort of progress.
From Wikipedia:
Current dowry practices
#India
#Bangladesh
#Pakistan
#Nepal
#Afghanistan
#Vietnam
Good luck with getting through that list. Are they starting their way from the bottom and working upwards? Perhaps should have ticked the bottom one off before moving to the next one.
Re:Moslem beheading non-moslem (Score:4, Informative)
You mean countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, staunch US allies who receive billions in funds?
Your naive trust in the congruence of progress and American involvement astounds me.
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With his secret weapon, hot cider.
No, he's from Kintyre.
(oh mist rolling in from the sea)