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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."
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!
Yes, thank you for the link. I skimmed through the article looking for the functions. The juicy stuff is towards the end of the article. The basic thesis of the article turns out to be that <obvious>the marriage is likely to be successful if the partners have similar functions</obvious>.
Reminds me of some wisdom I once gleaned from /usr/games/fortune:
Basically these researchers are admitting that social scientists generally understand the dynamics of the object of their study, but can't offer us poor saps any predictive formulae. All I can offer is this: flip a quarter.
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
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.
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 is really a deep issue, because if one believes as I do, that God exists and that human beings have souls, I do not believe such things like true love could be explained by numbers.
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
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.
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.)
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.
4. Do you think that woman's attractive?
"What woman?"