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The First Steps Towards Asimov's Psychohistory?
lawrencekhoo writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about the Gottman Institute's (a.k.a. the love lab) work on modeling the dynamics of marital conversations. These models are described in John Gottman et. al.'s recent book The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press). Should be an interesting read for anyone who ever wondered if human interactions could be mathematically modeled."
This sounds interesting but I can't afford a subscription to that site. :(
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Most marital conversations I witness involve ditching the kids, how much the man drank with his buddies last night, why the hell is he always looking at her bimbo sister with big boobs, and for what reason did the woman decide that it would be a good idea to pay $100 for that purse.
Here.
A subscription-only site link and an Amazon store URL. Thanks for all the content.
Researcher1: Is there anything to marital conversations other than shouting at the spouse?
Researcher2: NEVER! There's only one way to win a conversation: shout, shout, and shout again!!
Researcher1: You don't think that understanding and compromise have anything to do with it?
Researcher2: NO! It's all down to shouting. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHH!!!
"Should be an interesting read for anyone who ever wondered if human interactions could be mathematically modeled."
Finally, an answer to the question that has kept me awake at night tossing and turning for the past 17 years!
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
Mathmatical modeling of human relationships?
I thought that was the Sims!
Speaking of Psychohistory, I would love to see the book series turned into a movie. What do you think?...
only worked on a planetary leve.
humans are far too complicated to emulate IMHO. Biological factors have so much incidence on our emotions and feelings, plus the random part of it (food, weather, you name it). A rough emulation, maybe, but a true simulation.. good luck! Next step, find a match for your computer ;)
have you been defaced today?
Didn't Asimov's psychohistory require are certain minimum population (like 8 billion or something) before the methods were effective? IIRC knowledge of psychohistory was also supposed to affect the outcome in unpredictable ways.
Just goes to show how research dollars are being wasted these days. How about asking the couples why they split up. Or better yet, face the truth: Our overpaid, spoiled population has unreastic expectations about marriage and life, and they'll continue to be miserable, materialistics wretches until the day they drop dead while choking on a cheeseburger.
Fourth Post!
psychohistory is from Foundation, right? the whole Hari Seldon (or whatever his name was) thing?
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
I suspect that it will mostly be a series of conditional probabilities. I knew him at the U. of Illinois, when I was starting out as a grad student. I first met him when he was trying to get an IBM XT working for my advisor (who was the ultimate anti-geek). Neither Gottman nor his grad student could access the hard disk to load any software. He recommended my advisor return the thing because "the hard disk was broke." My advisor asked me to look at it. I'd never used IBM/DOS before, just my trusty Apple II, so I RTFM. I got it running in a couple of minutes and Gottman asked me, "How did you do that?" Um, I read the instructions... He's hard-core math geeky, but not too computer geeky.
What would the mathematics of relationships tell you anyway? Grumpiness is the inverse of pleasantness? I'm surprised to see MIT Press associate itself with such gibberish.
perhaps this area of mathamatics should be left alone, I would rather think I have a girlfriend becuase we love each other then our equations match or something.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Did anyone check that it works?
HOWEVER, if you follow the "free" links on the site, you can read it, here.
If you see Peter Jackson going anywhere near it, have him shot. That's what I think.
/.ers watch on "Sci-Fi" channel. Ugh, those shows are so terrible. I would celebrate every cancellation, except I know and even dumber show is in the works.
Honestly, I'd rather not. It would just be ruined. It is ill-suited for a 2-hour format. A cheapo TV series what just turn it into Kilgore Trout style gutter-fiction, like all those crap shows you
I can't see the article since it's registered users only, but if I recall correctly didn't Asimov's idea involve mathematics applied to the behavior of LARGE numbers of people? How does this apply?
Interestingly enough, I sort of think such a system might be developed, at least enough to make rough approximations about future trends, but there are limiting factors:
1. The population under study must remain unaware of the analysis, or the analysis itself has an influence. Think of it as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in human interactions. Asimov used this as a basic premis in his Foundation series. Whether people would make the prediction self furfilling truth or deliberately do the opposite - who's to say. The stock market is certainly an example of the former at times - everyone says the market will go up/down, and if enough people say that it will become true just because of the prediction, at least in the short term.
2. For this to work, the large part of the group under study must exercise some control over how events will be shaped, with most people having similar control. If a few individuals have all the power in a society it then becomes almost impossible to predict the directions it will take, since individual tastes/insanities/whatever are magnified in the society. (There are the usual ones about power, greed and corruption of course, but that's probably not what this is about.) Democracies are the closest thing we have to this, and even they aren't all that close (money talks, special interest groups, etc.) Dictatorships, forget it. You might be able to do some rough approximations, but both systems are rather difficult to predict.
And since we, the population under study, can't know anything about the study for it to be effective, we can't make use of it anyway! So it winds up being a fairly interesting but useless exercise.
This sounds different than such a system, but frankly I'm happier not knowing how people's minds work. They're scary enough as it is.
Here is An Interesting Essay on Psychohistory, discussing how it could be achieved.
I'm not Seth.
Speaking of Psychohistory, I think you are a really big sci fi nerd.
And even Asimov admitted it. The theory was as follows: although individuals and small groups of people are impossible to predict, large groups of people will, statistically, behave in a predictable way to the given conditions. Thus, by modelling the influences on large groups of people, you can predict their reactions, and thus predict the future course of social history.
This has a lot of intuitive weight. A few weirdos may do unusual things, but the society does seem fairly predictable. However, there's loads of things it doesn't take into account.
Most important is statistical probability. Even if you base all your decisions on 95% probability results, the probability of you being right every time gets lower as you go along. In fact, after just 14 decisions like that, the probability is less than 50%. In the Foundation saga, Hari Seldon (a favourite of mine, obviously) uses psychohistory to predict events hundreds of years into the future -- which couldn't happen, even with only 1 decision to predict per year. In the books, Asimov resolves this using the Second Foundation, who (secretly) guide the progress of society to make sure everything goes to plan.
The second is, simply, new ideas. You can base a model of future history on populations and variables if they are known; but with the future there are too many unknowns. What if someone invents a new weapon? Or faster ships, meaning planets get colonised faster than you expected? Or new medicines come out, increasing life expectancies enormously? Or conversely, what if we lose some of the technologies we have now? The kind of prediction in psychohistory only works in a stagnant model.
Again, you can fix this using the Second Foundation bodge, so the books are believable. But the science itself is just not rational.
on the purse...
(Never let her find a Gucci store in the area)
j/k
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Absolutely - it could be incredible. On the other hand, the movie version of Nightfall (an Asimov collaboration with Robert Silverberg) was just dreadful. I'd be especially interested in the Mule - that would be a really neat character if done right.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
For now the behavior of Alice bots is difficult enough.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What kind of slide rule did they use?
both take the starch outta my pajamas.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Lies! Damned lies! Statistics!
Or to quote Jimmy Buffett, "I don't want that much organization in my life! I want Junior Mints!"
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
(BTW: a working link)
scoring each sentence and facial expression on such measures as disgust (-3), affection (+4), whining (-1), and contempt (-4).
Aargh! They've discovered the Slashcode 3.0 moderation system! Someone stop them before it's too late!
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
It simply isn't possible to nail down all of the variables in advance, or even as events occur. Either economics or chaos theory will demonstrate that pretty clearly. The problem is that we can forecast general trends into the near future. The fewer variables we introduce and the shorter the time frame, the more accurate we can be. Marital conversations are quite predictable in many cases. The reasons are trivially obvious. Some marriages have unresolved issues that keep coming up. But even a good marriage without baggage involves two people dealing with day-to-day life, which involves tackling the same questions repeatedly:
"So, should we go to the beach for our vacation this year?"
"Yes, and don't forget to schedule enough time at Thanksgiving to visit both of our families."
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
This will kick open the doors for plenty of old-school D&D action!
Wife attacks! You are wounded in the (rolls die) pride.
Don drunkenness.
Roll die for level of drunkenness.
7
Your wounds' severity subsides.
Go out in shop, try to put lawnmower back together.
Wife follows! She is on the phone with your sister! Sister attacks!
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Moderated you as Offtopic.
GNOME.
KDE.
Each seemingly (at times) at odds, each carefully planned by a shadowy and secret originator to ensure that the job each thinks is its own will (we hope) be done.
But marital conversations? No. That's just too far out.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Asimov's psychohistory was the study of mob mechanics.
Pyschohistory is better explained in the tail of the Robot series and the prequels to the Foundation series than in the "main" Foundation series itself.
for gottman's wife
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I do apply a semi-algorithmic approach to dealing with my girlfriend. I find it works very well.
Sometimes she tries to step in and run my life. Sometimes she assumes her priorities should override my priorities. When that happens I express what is important to me, and stick to my guns.
Other times, and frankly more often, I don't have priorities of my own, and I'm happy to let her have her way.
Still other times, I try to get her to prioritize my concerns above her own. When that happens, she usually tells me to get bent. This is good.
When there are attempts to control some issue, I try to quantify how important it is to me, and how important it is to her, and let that be my guide. Its important to rely on one's own internal assessment of priority, because of course if you ask her how important something is, its typically infinity. ; )
God and/or monkeys created each of us to live OUR OWN LIVES. I see many people screw up their lives because they try to live for someone else (or worse yet, something else). This results in lost years and stunted freaky damage. Ya gots to get out there and defend yo turf, man.
So...would analyzing marriage conversations be like this?
Lyndsey Nagle: Why not both, then everybody's happy.
CBG: Oh yeah, everyone's real happy then.
Lyndsey Nagle: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
Professor Frink: (With sarcasm detector) Are you kidding? This baby is off the charts mm-hai.
(Sarcasm detector explodes)
Courtesy of The Simpsons Archive
Psychohistory is essentially Econometric Modeling, I took an undergrad course on that. The prof even mentioned that it was the same idea as Asimov's Psychohistory.
Even if Econometrics is much less precise or sophisticated, it is still a lot more than a first step towards it, and compared to Econometrics, the article is nothing.
Jason
ProfQuotes
*level*
Of course they are responsible for %100 of the problems in a relationship. Since men are perfect and think rationally the problem can not be with us. We all know the truth here.
I think the mathmatically answer is easy. If a+ rand(time(0))!=b then a=b. Or let A live alone and use porn to cure sexual fustration.
http://saveie6.com/
I gotta put this on the floor...
/. editors combing through stories post a story with a freaking link to register to read a story?!?!?!!!
Why the HELL do
SCROO THAT!
Now...mod this into the background
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
I tend to be sceptical of modeling subjective things like emotions. But there are lots of behaviors that are actually modelable, like voting, for example. I wonder if what it is really modeling is gender programming?
What I mean by that is at our least thoughtful, we all have fairly typical reactions that are culturally received. I can't think of a single time that the "toilet seat" conversation ("Why did you/ do men leave the toilet seat up/ why do men always.../why do women always complain about...") doesn't degenerate into a whole list of wrongs that each sex has done to the other, even when people of the same sex are having the conversation. I suspect that conversations like that, that tend to follow fairly typical patterns are easily modeled. And since psychology can alrady model aspects of emotional display fairly acurately, it isn't that far to modeling culturally patterned converstations.
Slashdot for Marriages is what their scoring system sounds like to me.
Stubborn and sterile
Anything can be mathematically modeled.
Having just watched the emminently entertaining Children of Dune on SciFi I am reminded that this psycho-babble-history really can work as long as you have the God-Emperor and his Wormy offspring chugging back enough spice of life to Make It So on the Golden Yellow Brick Path to the future ;-)
-- Mmm, apparently there really are only 7 plots to stories, or something. Note to self: stick with day job and forget writing next big novel.
Here's the key to writing married people:
Everything the man says revolves around wanting more and better sex, justifying his choice of woman.
Everything the woman says revolves around wanting more money and security, justifying her choice of man.
There may be digressions to an Umberto Eco degree, but thematically, this is what it's about.
I just wanna know how many karma points I need to get regular head like when we were engaged. Sigh.
...then women are irrational numbers. ;-)
RMN
~~~
Okay honey, love of my life, you have your wish. We're going to go shopping today. You pick out anything you want. In fact, get a shopping cart. Clothes, jewelery, perfume, small appliances, you name it.
.. follow her everwhere .. encourage her)
(go shopping
That's it honey.
Sure, you can put that in your cart.
That looks great on you! Sure, put that in too.
Oh I can't decide either. Get them both!
(at the cash register)
Okay honey, now we have to put it all back. No, I don't really feel like buying it right now. I just wanted you to HOLD it for a while.
You have to understand my unique masculine needs.
(okay you'll never play hide-the-weenie again but it will be worth it)
This is a paraphrased conversation between The Duke of Wellington and Blackadder dressed as the Prince Regent in the BBC comedy series, Blackadder. Specifically, it is from series III, episode Duel and Duality.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Is this in Pseudoscience Weekly?
I actually worked out the primary equation years ago:
happiness = 1 / ( 7 - years of marriage )
Thankfully I only have six more months before the whole equation is undefined
wow, I just notice that putting whitespace around operators is now automatic.
if you think this is bad, you should have seen my last sig
Marx was a philosopher, a historian and an economist. As far as this is concerned, it is Marx the historian we are concerned with. Marx had an idea called historical materialism, which was very much like psychohistory - that there is a scientifically identifiable march of history. He saw society as moving through stages - slave states (like the Roman Empire, or the early US), feudalism (like medieval Europe), and capitalism (a new system borne not long before Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations). He saw workers moving from being slaves to serfs/peasants to proletariat wage slaves. He saw the next stage as socialism, the workers seizing the means of production and the state for their own use, and then the stage past socialism, communism, where the main dictum would be "from each according to ability, to each according to need", where there would be no nation-states any more and so forth.
Anyhow, I haven't read The Foundation trilogy for a while but it would be interesting to see what I get different from it now that I know some more about socialism than I did then. For example, when I first watched the movie Spartacus directed by Stanley Kubrick, I though it was a good movie by Kubrick about gladiators with Kirk Douglass and Laurence Olivier. But with a more full perspective, I can see what a radical movie, with radical ideas spoken by characters, that Dalton Trumbo wrote - I think the radicalness of it is missed by a lot of people since they're not waving red flags and so forth, they're just speaking English. Anyway it's interesting.
As a footnote, I'm aware of Marx's historical materialism but that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it. Marx's ideas started being put into practice in 1917 - and five years later, Mussolini marched on Rome, the beginnings of fascism in Europe. From the 1930's through 1950's, a lot of leftists - Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt school, asked themselves - what happened? Why didn't Marxism work the way we thought it would? This doesn't just mean what was wrong with the Soviet Union, but why didn't Marx predict a fascist movement coming into existence, largely as a counter-force against socialism (sort of similar to the Jesuits and counter-reformation springing into existence not that long after Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenburg church). This is
-0
- 0
where
- is a penis
and
0 is a hole
oscillate whenever possible
For any conceibable behaveour there is a mathematical way of fitting the behaveour with a certain degree of probability. If something is not pure noise, then there must be some way to formalize it, though language itself or in mathematical notation.
This works, of course, don't add much value because they never explain how or why things are like that. With physics you don't have to explain the basic laws, they "just are", but with everything else, you better have some explanation of some sort because, in reallity, they are nothing more than constructs based on physical constraints.
On the other side, it might be funny to see how some people could see these formalizations as expressing more or being more accurate than "plain verb" explanation. "If it's hard to understand then it's real science!!" (wrong!)...
Just my thoughts so (I am biased yes, I've seen to many quantitative economics to believe equations express more just because the math is hard...they usually don't).
unfinished: (adj.)
A trolling I will go
/. or their mainstream herd mentality?
Cowoby Neal's Mom is a crackhigh ho
A trolling I will go!
Seriously why do they do that shit? And who is the homo blasting everybody's score that challenges
Well???
Go ahead...mod me down...there is more of us ACs then moderator points!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Odd; for me it popped an error message in a grumpy-looking font saying something about how if *I* didn't know what the problem was, *it* certainly wasn't going to tell me, and if I thought I could just click a link and waltz on in I had another think coming.
I'm just going to wait a while, and try again later (should I dim the lights, or something?).
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Actually, Dune and Children Of Dune were both pretty good. All of the characters were almost as I imagined them and there were only a few events missing or rearranged.
I would like to see something of that quality be made of each of the Foundation books, but I don't really see how that would be possible.
Now, the SciFi series are pretty dumb, (Tremors?!? They canceled Farscape for Tremors?!?) but their miniseries movies are pretty good.
I spent an hour this afternoon deriving a utility function modeling my preferences over relationships, since I know that they're unusual, discontinuous, and non-monotonic. At the end of it I was convinced I had finally, completely, truly, lost my mind, so I showed what I'd done to some friends/colleagues and they agreed.
... of course, this can just as well be written as:
For those who might be interested, it goes as follows:
where x = quality of man
x belongs to the set [0,1)
notice that the set of x is closed at the lower bound (since men graded 0 exist aplenty), while it's open at the upper bound (since the perfect man does not exist. This isn't sexist; I don't believe the perfect woman exists either.). Therefore x can approach 1, but never equal it.
and where p = intended level of commitment
where p belongs to [0,1]
with p = 0 implying no relationship at all, p = 1 implying a ring on my left hand. Further examples: p = 0.1 or 0.2, say, imply a casual fling; p = 0.4 or 0.5 imply dating officially; p = 0.8 or 0.9 imply living together with no intention of anything more.
We have:
For p between [0,1): u(x,p) = x^p
For p = 1: u(x,p) = 2*ln(x+p)
u(x,p) = 2*ln(x+1)
Those who take the time to solve it for a few representative values will notice a very clear mapping of preferences as under:
Committed relationship with highly-ranked man is strictly preferred to being single, which in turn is strictly preferred to anything less than full commitment. However, being single is strictly preferred to a committed relationship with a man with quality less than approximately 0.65.
I already admitted I'm insane. No irate comments on my irrationality please.
What's the point of this exposition here? Well, the posted article proves one of two things:
a. When I'm finally institutionalized, I shall have a cellmate, or;
b. Someone beat me to getting relationship math published, dammit!!!
Is that a negative zero in your equation?
Dumbass.
But don't forget,
-0 * -0 = 0
Um, you can interpret that however you want.
Did anyone ever notice that the first reference to psicohistory is not Asimovs? It comes from a Sherlock Holmes story. I read the complete SH stories, and it was there. Unfortunately, I dont remember which. Anyone?
Not in small scale like single marriage. But psychohistory could be used to predict behaviour in nationwide or global scale.
Let's say: A nation attacks another nation, and leaves some valuable historical relics unguarded. What does psychohistory predict will happen? A number of people (note: not all) will loot the unguarded relics with the intend to get rich.
All you need for psychohistory to work, is to model historical events, and the variables that most affected them.
A hobby of mine is writing SF, and when I read how this guy came to do this accidentally (reading his roomate's socio books, and letter getting a math book he didn't order), I just feel like people have traveled back in time and planted those things so he could start those studies, eventually foster "psychomathematics" that will later be evolved in psychohistory when we have computers fast enough (quantum) to handle the mathematical load.
The truth is out there.
Also, I'll remember what he said next time I have a fight with my wife.
Women are IMAGINARY numbers
Let me tell you all the communication could easily be broken down into about 5 categories.
1. Idiocy.
2. Money.
3. Boredom.
4. Sex.
5. Wrong numbers.
Of course in my book sex has a higher rating but then again I've forgotton what it looks like so I guess you slashdot bitchez better start puttin out a little more for us fugl3y g33ks (we pay g00d).
It simply isn't possible to nail down all of the variables in advance, or even as events occur. Either economics or chaos theory will demonstrate that pretty clearly.
In nonlinear/chaotic systems, errors in the initial conditions quickly expand, causing huge deviations on a macro scale. This is why long-term weather prediction is impossible. James Gleick mentions in his excellent book Chaos that a lattice of weather sensors, spaced just one foot apart all over the surface of the earth and up through the entire atmosphere, would still give seriously wrong weather predictions after only a month or so.
If you can't predict the weather in the long-term, then you can't predict human history either. Wars can be won or lost because of weather. Civilizations can starve or prosper. Economies can boom or bust. Maybe it's a beautiful day, so the future leader of the free world decides to walk instead of driving and gets hit by a bus.
Human behavior is a reaction to our surroundings -- and if it's impossible to predict our surroundings on a long timeline, then the same goes for human behavior.
QED,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
My own spouse is a marrage counselor and she has to deal with that all day. People are trained from day one to add emphasis by increasing their volume. Old habits die hard. Once you've reached the point where you are getting yelled at and yelling back more than once a day, then it's time to take deep breaths and use adjectives instead of volume. My wife suggests avoiding short adjectives like "very" and using multisyllabic words (extrordinarily, exceptionally, extremely) instead.
Didn't they already have the Mule in Shrek??
perhaps this area of mathamatics should be left alone, I would rather think I have a girlfriend becuase we love each other then our equations match or something.
WHAT? you have a girlfriend... wrong site buddy.
ohhh u would rather THINK that u have one.. well thats fine with us.
right guys?
With an arbitrary number of parameters we can fit a curve to anything and it doesn't help at all. True.
However, that does not mean that useful knowledge does not arise from mathematical modeling. To give a different spin on things, consider a bird. A perfectly self-consistent explanation for why a bird can fly and we can't is, "God made it that way." But, given some appropriate experiments and a mathematical model for their resulting aerodynamics, one can project that it is possible to build an airplane. So often there are many explanations. But it is easier to tell what will work when you try to implement a mathematical model than when you implement an explanation.
Now, we could rest with the explanation that, "Men want sex and women want security." But it is unlikely that things are nearly so simple. And just like the "God wants it that way" explanation, these types of explanations are self consistent, but self defeating. The true use for mathematical models of human behavior is to help us understand how the behavior of a complex system such as interpersonal interactions might be usefully changed. In other words, the hope for such models is to allow better learning and adaptation by the individuals involved. And, in cases where couples seek help, how a therapist might usefully, rather than destructively, intervene.
"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy" -- John Wharfin
The mathematics of marriage:
:-)
f(x) = sin (s * x) + b - c
Hmm... Perhaps something like that?
Where f is fun, x is time, s is sex frequency, b is amount of beer and c number of compromises in the marriage to your disadvantage.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Then Chaos Theory must be in this somewhere big-time.
OK everyone, there is a science of psychohistory. It already exists. Check out www.psychohistory.com.
The Only way that the Psychohistory works is that every individual in the group can make its decisions. In the actual system the president an a little group of a nation can decide a war or the change of the indiduals life style(laws). This groups are too small to get a precise probability.
But marital conversations? No. That's just too far out. Oh come on, it's so simple you could even do that in BASIC
10 Man is wrong
20 Goto 10
Basic rule: Never use a dynamic model where a static will do.
For example:
Frequency (f) of intercourse per week (x) after marriage: f(x) = 3/x.
That's not quite what it said. Key is not having similar functions, but compatible functions. Either strong response to whatever you spouse does tends to work, as long as it's on both sides.. Or being (somewhat) nice even when the partner's being difficult works. And, ahem, ignoring or not being able to respond never works. As does only reacting negatively. More negatively to negative input but ignoring positive.
You can say it's difficult to enumerate emotions, which is true, but you can enumerate interpersonal interaction, which is what they're doing. It's not about psychohistory (great editorial, guys), it's about studying in a scientific way how couples interact with each other. Nothing new there of course, just a new kind of analysis. Maybe slashdot editors are more familiar with SF-"science" than marriage..?
Catastrophe Theory
Which was, and maybe still is, used to predict both short term and long term behaviour patterns.
Suppose you did.
Suppose you did not.
Well, that seems to be what these investigators are doing, trying to find a better way of expressing emotions than language, in this case mathematics. Lets be real. Language is not a tool made to express emotions, it was only adapted to do so. But its still a bad tool. You speak about fishes, you can transmit something to your partner, even can describe a new fish you happened to find, with reasonable expectations that the image of the fish in the others mind be something like the image in your mind. But kids, dont try this at home with something you feel, because you will end up seriously confused. When you get serious about expressing emotions, you have to resort to images and metaphors, read Shakespeare if you dont believe me.
You speak about love, and this little word encompass everything from the sudden lust you feel for a good-looking neighbour, to the tenderness you experience when you see your just born baby, to the deep and complex relationship you have with your mother. Saying "I love you", therefore, means nothing. We should develop a vocabulary to be able to say something like "I feel physically attracted to you to a moderate extent, nothing like the first years though; enjoy your company a lot, your conversation too except when you are nagging; depend on you tremendously, and miss you but rarely (although its a certainty that Ill miss you when I feel down). Till we are able to express that with a couple of words (technical languages express more complex things with fewer words), but more important, till we are able to make those inner distinctions ourselves, well be destined to bad relationships. I think these studies are a good step forward, but better would be if something like elementary emotional education was mandatory from ten years on, and the final grade then tatooed on ones forehead as a warning to bystanders
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
and methods, i can say with regard to, "if human interactions could be mathematically modeled" the answer would be, not very well in this context.
I'm part of a major NIH grant ($2.5 mil) that uses a method based on Gottman's work, coding couples interactions in an attempt to quantify their communication styles. This is one part of the project, and as far as I'm concerned the weakest. It's remarkably cumbersome (coding every few secs the topic, the affect, behavioral responses, etc..) by trained observers, difficult to analyze, and unfortunately in our study, telling us nothing.
No question mathematical modeling is a great direction to go with regard to understanding human behavior, and we have very elegant mathematical solutions to the inherent measurement error in behavioral research. Its just that scientific psychology is so young, our ability to quantify human behavior in any reliable, valid way is in its infancy. And our statistical models allow us to learn something. But it truly is a garbage in, garbage out hill we climb.
We have difficulty measuring with great accuracy whether or not a person is "depressed." We're in the prehistoric period attempting to quantify and model something as complicated as social interaction on a psychological level. *Maybe* we'll get their someday, but I doubt in my lifetime.
later,
jeff
I just hope they'll finally be able to tell me why I'm ALWAYS wrong!!!
I'm young and arrogant and married so here are my answers.
1. How do we ditch the kids?
Give them something interesting to do, hire a babysitter. Many things can be fun with kids along too.
2. Why do you pay more attention to your buddies than me?
Don't pay more attention to them, you need "quality time" with your wife & family. You should have some compatible interests.
3. Why do you pay more attention to that computer than me?
see #2
4. Do you think that woman's attractive?
Yes, I do. What's with a bit of honesty, just because the 19yr old girl is hot doesn't mean your wife is a fat slob. Ask her what she thinks. Also sometimes you can be critical, pick on something dumb like the wrong coloured socks.
5. I can pay $100 for a new purse, but you can't pay $49.95 for a new game (see #3)
Create a system of personal disposable income to spend, this allowance works quite well for me. (But I ran out of money a LOOONG time ago)
6. You don't care about my feelings.
Ask what makes her feel that way. It's probaly something you didn't notice, guys are notoriously emotionally dumb.
7. You're not sensitive to my needs.
Then tell me stuff obvious to you isn't obvious to me.
8. Why don't you do something constructive.
I worked today, nothing critical needs to be done now, I'm taking a break you should take one too.
If something critical needs to be done, you should do it, if it can wait, it can wait.
9. Rub my feet.
Free gropeage? Move that into a leg massage, back massage, front massage and get it on. I don't see the problem.
10. Do we have to do that again? Why can't we just cuddle?
Cuddle afterwards, afterplay is foreplay for the next time.
What I say:
1. How do we ditch the kids?
above
2. Would you please stop grooming me!
Groom her back, Victoria Secrets is nice.
3. Would you please stop parking in the dead center of the garage!
Explain how you want to share the garage with her.
4. Would you please stop falling asleep in the dead center of the bed!
I honestly don't know the answer to this one, I have given up.
5. Not everything is cooked on 10.
Learn to cook, if you want something done right do it yourself.
6. For the last time, here's how to use the tivo.
Make written directions.
In the book "Learned Optimism" (1990) by Martin Seligman, he describes how he could do psychohistory (he is an Asimov fan):
We had, after all, the three essential things that Hari Selden demanded. First, we had a sound phsycological principal: Optimistic explanatory style predicts the ability to fight off depression, predicts high achievement, and predicts stick-to-itiveness. Second, we had a valid way of measuring explanatory style in people living or dead. Third, we had large numbers of people to study-numbers large enough to allow us to make statistical predictions.(p186)
A student suggested that they apply it to elections. So they did on the 1988 elections:
So there we were. Using only the explanatory style of speeches and the degree of rumination the revealed, we had attempted to predict the presidential primary results, the presidential elections, and the twenty-nine Senate elections. We succeeded completely for the primaries, predicting the winners and losers for each party long before the polls named a winner. The prediction for the presidential election was mixed...The fall speeches predicted a Bush victory. But so did everyone else. We called 86 percent of the Senate races right, including all but one of the upsets and squeakers. Nobody else did this well.
This then is the first instance I know in which social scientists have predicted major historical events-before the fact.(p197-198)
On a side note...being a hard core techo/sci type of guy, I tend to laugh at the waffle in "self help" books. But "Learned Optimism" is backed by hard science and is pretty good. Could someone do a review please?
Wife: Dear
Me: Dear
Wife: Dear
Me: Dear!
Wife: DEAR!
long pause, we look at each other with arched eyebrows
Me: Dear!
Wife: Dear...
and on it goes...
Miko O'Sullivan
...idea of psychohistory: Asimov postulated that, once human populations reached sufficiently large numbers, we could use the techniques of statistical analysis to model history in much the same way statistical mechanics allow us to model thermodynamics.
In the article, Murray quotes Lord Rutherford as saying that "If you need to use statistics, then you should design a better experiment."
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I've been with my wife for 10 years now. Only married the last few though.
I freely admit that I'm young and stupid, which is probaly on of the the only good excuses out there.
It's the same exact logic that prevails during marital conversations.
From http://digilander.libero.it/solciclos/template.pdf
The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity[2]:
1 The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the
science of Psychohistory.
2 The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
3 The population must be in the billions (75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.
Individual relationships fail all three theorems.
--Joey
In particular, check out the errata! How often do you see graph whose axes are Behavior, Fear, and Rage!
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
They're wasting their time, don't they realize that mentalics will soon mess up all the models anyway?
All is Number -Pythagoras.
Send in the scientologists!!!! They have been tracking the evil psychlos for eons. Or better yet read that wonder of SF from Lron-the-nut, 'Battlefield Earth'.
imho, looking back over my many years of reading Asimov's work, he preceded so many scientific trends and concepts; robotics usually being the most widely recounted by fans. he was also especially good at focusing on the ethical implications of science - to see the current public backlash against GM etc is almost like a flashback to one of his early short stories.
i wonder whether time will prove "psychohistory" to be one of his late great ideas, or one of the more un-scientific flops...? (i distinctly recall one bad story about almost infinitely powerful heatsinks, causing a space craft crew to nearly freeze to death while right next to the sun, that struck me as particularly unlikely...)
personally i think people are born with an inherent capacity for unpredictablity which presents chaotic complexities of the worse kind for someone creating a mathetical model. then again, with a sample group in the multi-billions, how much difference can the odd wildcard really make?
that is of course assuming that tv, mcdonalds and starbucks don't continue to breed the individuality out of us all... because then this theory'll work just fine!
8. Why don't you do something constructive. (see number 9)
9. Rub my feet.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I am tremendously amused that neurotypicals find themselves as difficult to understand (emotional, illogical, unpredictable) as autistics have been claiming all along. And yet you get to define what is "normal" behavior for humans.
You might also be amused to view this discussion from our perspective. A good introduction is available here at the parody site for the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical".
People are already using psychohistory, and have been for quite some time. Economists do this daily. The Federal Reserver (currently Alan Greenspan and Co.) have been able to accurately predict the movement of the world economy. The US hsa been doing (or attempting to do) this for about 80 years. If we acknowledge that people are their money, then we can say that the prediction of the movement of masses has ongoing for quite some time.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I feel pyscohistory would never be practical for the very reason asimov wrote about in his book. One individual can change the course of a peoples path. the mule was a great example of that. and don't forget what I like to call the x-factor the unknown unforseen variable that can influence the outcome of events. In a complex system there are too many varibles to forsee. The chaos theory strikes again.
The biggest problem with making money in the market is that when new algorithm for profitable information is discovered, it quickly neutalizes itself when everyone uses it. The 20th century is rife with the invention of new financial instruments- mutual funds (trusts), indexed buying, derivatives, leveraged-buyouts, hedging, instant internet trades, etc.- that when the adventurous minority first use them, make money. However, when EVERYONE jumps on the same bandwagon, people stop making money and may even lose.
SciFi Weekly has periodic reports on a possible upcoming movie. It sounds like there is an option, director, and a script, but not yet firm plans. The issue seems to be that the book is too intellectual, without strong action. However, I contend Dune had similar issues and was made into three movies so far. Also, you dont get more intellectual than "The Hours" which was successfully translated to the screen.
it's a bogus site full of hate (the Holocost didn't happen, send blacks back to Africa, etc).
What a sad fuck that posted this link.
Also, these equations will not reduce the awe and mystery of the actual reality of truely deep phenomena. It just gives us some better handles and knobs to grab hold of the small islands of stability and regularity and talk about them in ways that can lead to productive solutions. If you do fall in love and get married there is no substitute for a deep connection in getting through the rough spots, but if a little formal analysis can reduce the intensity or frequency of these it can go a long way in reducing pain and suffering for the whole family.
Who would play the Mule? de Niro? Tommy Lee Jones?
It's just a BloJJ
(Now that I've picked myself up off the floor from laughing at your question ...)
1. Say you have two kids. Now there are four people whose wants, needs and schedules have to be factored into every equation.
2. Two of those people can't drive, although they need to be taken lots of places.
3. They can't be left alone, so the two adults can't go anywhere together without them unless they hire a sitter. (Finding a teen-age girl to babysit your kids can be as hard as finding a date used to be.)
4. The kids don't earn any money, but they need a lot of goods and services. Ironically, the ability of at least one parent (usually the mom) to earn money is adversely affected by the demands of child care.
5. Non-parents don't have to worry much housekeeping, but when you have kids, (those very people who are going to make your house a wreck) suddenly you have to worry about cleanliness and sanitation to keep them healthy.
6. The larger the family, the more likely they are to live in a house with a yard instead of an apartment, entailing a mortgage, yardwork and home repairs.
7. The parents now have a great many more family-related tasks, obligation and financial responsibilities, but haven't lost their yearning for fun and leisure - yet there are only 24 hours in a day.
You do the math.
He goes on to say that this same part of our brain "instinctively" sees the patterns and mathematics in all things from how a tree grows, to how we fall in love, to how sofas get stuck in stairwells.
That's all paraphrase, and from memory; Adams said it MUCH better.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
In complexity theory, regularity arises from a different source, the requirements of self-organizing systems and their emergent properties.
There's already been a first step in the making for about a hundred years. Evolutionary psychology is a branch of psychology attributing all cultural and personality formations to the problems that individuals (humans or whoever) faced during their evolution.
Once a realistic, semi-quantifiable portrait of the human psyche is in place, we will begin to be able to treat human masses with the same kind of mathematical rigor that we treat humans with(admittedly weak, for now, of course.)
This shit is mad interesting. Check out "The Adapted Mind," (ISBN 0195060237) and prepare to be impressed. Free your mind, and your ass WILL follow.
The US military already has Psychohistory of a sort. It is called Spectrum. My discussion with some of its users revealed that the weakness is getting good subject matter experts for non-U.S. societies. Your simulation is only as good as your model, after all. But think about how well they can model U.S. society. From the link below:
"Spectrum is designed to simulate military units, government and non-government organizations, political, economic and socio-cultural environments of a country or region. It was developed by the National Simulation Center (NSC) in 1995 for the purpose of supporting Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW) and Stability and Support Operations (SASO) training. It is a training vehicle for commanders and staffs from company to National/Strategic level. Spectrum simulates combat, combat support, combat service support, medical, civil affairs, Psychological Operations (PSYOP), disasters, terrorist activities and just about anything else imaginable. It has an attrition assessment model and portrays thinking, reacting and unpredictable civilian populations of all types. Spectrum has a Regional Analysis model which measures the effectiveness of group interaction based on the populations' opinion over time. It is a stand-alone simulation with worldwide terrain availability. "
http://www.stricom.army.mil/OPS/CT/devices.jsp
Whenever I think I have a tough time in my relationship, I check out Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. This couple would make a good test case for Gottman et al's model, particularly in the sarcasm factor.
could have told you that for free... and possibly many other things about life that somebody will be paid a lot of money for...
Pi is an irrational number and women are just like Pi. You can spend your entire life analyzing and figuring things (the last decimal)but you will never get to the end.
Just accept the fact that they are all crazy. Knowing this, you should be happy if you can find one that's LESS insane than others.
Holly says:
"Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black! And the thing about space, the colour of space, yer basic space colour, is it's Black! So how are you supposed to see them."
Didn't it? In hindsight it looks a lot different, but I don't think there were many who could even imagine people walking on the moon, much less provide the vision that it could be done inside the decade. Just because of the conspicuous lack of political leadership since that time has not followed through on this vision doesn't mean it doesn't represent visionary leadership. This leaves aside whether the space program is the best application of the skills and resources, but you can't say the original push for this wasn't visionary and world changing.
F. Murray Abraham
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
newton was actually quite the mystic; towards the end of his life he focused more on astrology than physics. just goes to show that no one is perfect, thus, worship no one.
....to your question.Markov Process is a stochastic process in which the future distribution of a variable depends only on the variable's current value. Stock prices are widely assumed to follow a Markov process.So a Markovian analysis of Asimov's model might very well support his claims.who knows?
You got it backwards really. Science works by observation first, then theory. The only reason our fancy quantum formulas "predict" water boiling at 100 celsius is that the math was modelled on observation of that fact (and others). Thus, science is mostly "curve-fitting"; start with data, force the function.
This is not just a trivial distinction either; misunderstanding this philosophy of science has lead to all sorts of confusion about science with people making foolish statements about the 'laws of nature' or saying evolution is 'just a theory'.
Ecosystems and animal interactions can be - and are - very well modelled.
;) ).
Modelling human beings as animals is insanely easy. Which is exactly what wall street and "social engineers" have been doing to us over the last century plus (just a hunch
Which is also why so much effort is undertaken by the "system" to brutalize, simplify, and beastify humans and human interactions in society to that of a slightly feral herd (ditto). MKUltra, for example ?
But, since more subtle modelling seems to be necessary, here and there, one can expect to see their development for application in experimental, isolated and strongly controlled test communities.
You're the husband? If so, why is your name Mary? And if the answer is what I think it is, any chance of pictures?
Those clever guys at Livermore Labs could simulate social interactions with my ex-wife using their nuclear bomb simulation software. KABOOOOM!!!!
Let me put it another way, the paralegal who worked for my attorney, described my ex as the most irrational, vindictive individual the paralegal had ever encountered during the 25 years she had been dealing with people getting divorced!!
Pretty strong words but that's an understatement. My ex-wife wanted the world to believe she was sane so she toned it down for other people. She had no reason to do so with me. KABOOOM!!!!!
I tried to explain to our friends that my spouse of 22 years was acting pretty fuckin' crazy. So bizarre that it was like an alien from outer space had taken over her body. Those friends dismissed my comments as me just being bitter about the breakdown of our marriage.
Of course, when my ex suddenly joined the Jehovah's Witness religious cult AND gave them $80,000 from our divorce settlement, our friends were almost as stunned as I was. Then they agreed with me that an alien must have taken over her body. It was a viable explaination for her 180 degree philosophical flipflop and her joining those religous screwballs. $80,000 hard earned bucks, our kids college money. And it was from my IRA. Tell me that's not totally fuckin' nutz...
And this was only one of the insane stunts my ex-wife pulled. Geeez, like I said, KABOOOM!!!!!!!!!!
Big sigh....
best regards,
buck
I always imagined the Mule to look like John Malkovich...
Anybody got any other thoughts?
if your'e interested in this sort of thing, google the following topics: game theory, evolutionary game theory, network theory (graph theory), social network theory, evolutionary game theory in networks, agent-based modelling, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, memetics. For a general entry into complexity sciences, go to www.santafe.edu The Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, and finding the working papers page(s). Lots of stuff to read there. And for an excellent discussion of the reasons why we should use mathematics in sociology at all (why it isn't just descriptive) look for Dwight Read's paper, On the Utility of Mathematical Reasoning in Anthropology. google it.
Logic, macros, and more
Birth order and unique assignment miss the mark. What matters is how you were provided with knowledge of two girls. If "you" came to know two entities *at random* and discovered they were female, discovery of a third girl would be fifty-fifty. If, on the other hand, you asked someone with knowledge of all three children to show you two girls, your interpretation would be undeniable. A similar illustration of knowledge-barriers exists in the Monty Hall Problem.
.5 maleness.
Careful description of the "curtain" or "door" and what happens behind it makes all the difference:
If you checked a few hundred families into a hotel and visited the 3-child rooms, here is what may happen:
1. You courteously knock on each door and ask to meet two young ladies. Maybe you offer candy. From the rooms where it is possible to honor your request, the giggle fits deliver you two girls.
The probability that the unmet child would be a boy is 75%.
2. You use your bellhop access to break into rooms and count children. Regardless of whether you proceed by birth order, the nearness to your lasso, or any other gender-blind manner, the third child you count will approach
The possibilities of #2:
BBB BBG BGB GBB BGG GBG [GGB GGG]
The possibilities of #1:
BBB BBG BGB GBB [BGG GBG GGB GGG]
The crucial factor is a pre-sorting function. One may or may not have been implied by "two in the room are girls." Are there some in another room, R Kelley? Did you stumble upon the first two by chance, or did you ask for them? It seems there are two "yous" in your problem, the one who knows all three children and the one who doesn't.
I'm sure the moderators are long gone, so what the heck...
I think you're saying this: I've met two of three siblings, and they're both girls. The other one we don't know. If it's a boy, then there are six combinations (MF1F2, MF2F1, F1MF2, F2MF1, F1F2M, F2F1M) and if it's a girl there are six combinations (F1F2F3, F1F3F2, F2F1F3, F2F3F1, F3F1F2, F3F2F1). I agree that there are an equal number of ordered combinations depending on the gender of the third child.
But the gender of the third child depends on the distribution of three-child families with three girls. Three-girl families are 12.5% of the total number of three-child families. Three boys make up 12.5%. Two girls/one boy (in any order) make up 37.5% of the distribution, and two boys/one girl (in any order) make up the final 37.5%.
So once you know there are two girls, you've eliminated three boy families (12.5% of the population) and two boy/one girl families (37.5% of the population). 50% of the original population remains, and of that half, 75% are families with two boys and one girl.
Imagine I have a marble-producing machine that randomly outputs 50% white and 50% black marbles. I use this machine to fill many paper bags with three marbles each. Suppose you are placed in a room with 100,000 of these marble bags. You pick a bag, pull out two marbles, and they're both white. What are the chances the third one is black? 75%. Although this marble had a 50/50 chance when it was selected, you have chosen a bag from a sub-group of the unevenly-distributed population.
Similarly, when you pull the first white marble out, you know you're not dealing with any of the 12,500 bags that are black-black-black.