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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."
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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
What kind of slide rule did they use?
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!
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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!
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
...then women are irrational numbers. ;-)
RMN
~~~
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
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.)
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!!!
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
Then Chaos Theory must be in this somewhere big-time.
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
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.
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.
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