Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!