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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.
"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!
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.
(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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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!
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.
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.)