Slashdot Mirror
Socionomics: the Science of History and Social Prediction
Yet...it's also easy to see that people do a lot of nutty things, and usually do so in groups. They wear leg warmers, wide neckties, then narrow neckties. Long skirts, short skirts. No skirts. Paisley. They ride roller skates, then scooters. They buy Pet Rocks, collectible Beanie Babies, and stocks of dot-com companies with no profits and no business plan. They ingest odd substances, and subscribe to odd belief systems. They also fight wars, and blow up themselves and others.
This jackass behavior has lead to some telling but apparently casual observations, such as this gem by Charles MacKay: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Offhand observation aside, it remains true that the non-rational behavior of human beings in society has usually made monkeys out of those who seriously attempt to forecast it.
This is why Robert Prechter's 2-volume opus Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction is such a joy to read. It's a credible and provocative attempt to found a predictive science of human social behavior. It's also a truly different work. The number of new propositions and arguments advanced in Socionomics is matched by their highly controversial nature, and by the amount of evidence put forth by Prechter and his co-authors. Readers looking for non-fiction that is wide in scope, provocative, and meaty will enjoy these two books.
What's It All About?
It's helpful to think of Prechter's massive argument as if it was structured like an hour-glass. The first volume of the set, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socionomics (hereafter: HSB) is the fat upper part of the glass. It provides the theoretical justification for a shorter set of linked propositions or principles that constitute the narrow neck. The second volume,Pioneering Studies in Socionomics (hereafter: PSS) consists of a series of essays and articles that apply those principles to a wide swath of human endeavor: music, sports, politics, war and peace, scientific and intellectual trends, religion, economics and finance. This is the fat bottom of the glass, the payoff of analysis and prediction.
The Propositions
Socionomics has been defined as
the field of study encompassing the origins and effects of an endogenous human social dynamic called the Wave Principle, a specific sequence of progress and regress that regulates the complex system of collective mood and social interaction. It examines and forecasts market and social trends on the following basis: that the character of social, political, cultural, financial and economic trends are the product of collective human psychology, which is based upon an unconscious herding impulse deriving from pre-rational portions of the brain.
This definition shows why Socionomics... is a two-volume set: it's not easily summarized.
Any science must have a way to measure its subject. Prechter claims that human social behavior can be measured with several meters, but the most accurate meter is the movement and fluctuation of economic values, as expressed in stock markets every trading day. He believes that markets provide a real-time reflection of the collective social mood. Measuring social mood is important because:
1. The events of history and culture are driven by the engine of collective social mood. Social mood temporally and logically precedes social events, and is the cause of social events. War and terrorism don't cause distressed people; distressed people create the conditions and events that lead to and comprise war and terror. A booming economy does not create ebullient people; ebullient people produce more, consume more and participate in and contribute to market manias.
2. Social mood is itself the product of the interaction of the society's members. Collective mentation -- herding -- arises from the interaction of the players in a process similar to the emergent behavior of other complex, non-linear systems. Prechter quotes philosopher Eric Hoffer: When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
3. Social mood fluctuates between polarities of primitive emotional states, such as confidence/fear, skepticism/credulity, optimism/pessimism, benevolence/malevolence, etc. These fluctuations are not effected by outside events, but move according to their own internal logic. They appear to arise in a dynamic that is endogenous to the social system.
4. Social mood fluctuations are patterned by the [Elliott] Wave Principle, a specific sequence of progress and regress that regulates the complex system of collective mood and social interaction. Prechter cites the work of market analyst R.N. Elliott, who, in the 1930's, discovered the patterns in the markets that bear his name. These patterns -- Elliott waves -- are measurable and may be charted.
5. Elliott waves, which are typically used to chart and forecast the movement of stock market valuations, are self-similar at different degrees of scale; i.e. a monthly chart of the Dow looks a lot like a weekly chart, or a 5-minute chart...or a 5-decade chart. Elliott apparently discovered that the market movements are fractal, decades before Mandelbrot invented the term and took credit for that observation.
6. The specific patterns described by Elliott Waves are in close relation to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. The Fibonacci sequence, and the Fibonacci ratio derived from it, appear ubiquitously in natural forms ranging from the geometry of the DNA molecule to the physiology of plants and animals.
7. The behavior of these fractal, Fibonacci-based waves is specific and patterned. Hence, it is (probabilistically) possible to predict human social behavior.
Given the emphasis placed upon it, it's probably not too gross a distortion to define socionomics as the science of social mood: its genesis, behavior, and effects.
Justification
Any one of the propositions above is controversial; taken together they an extraordinarily claim. In the first volume of the set, Prechter attempts to provide extraordinary evidence to support his claims, and he makes a strong case.
HSB surveys the evidence of fractals and Fibonacci in nature and finance. Prechter sites study after study that finds the Fibonacci sequence in phyllotaxis, in branching or arboral systems, in nautilus shells, pine cones, the DNA molecule, neurons and galaxies ... and in the Dow, Nasdaq, and other market indices. The implication is clear: human social activities are a natural process, no less than the growth of trees or the formation of solar systems. For some readers, this tour-de-force alone may be worth the price of the book.
Prechter then leans heavily on Paul MacLean's book, The Triune Brain in Evolution to explain his endogenous herding impulse. MacLean and others have found evidence that the pre-reasoning limbic system may be hard-wired to herd or flock. The reasoning neocortex may override the impulsive, emotional limbic system if given sufficient time -- and in this possibility lies our experience of free will. But the emotional limbic system is faster and more powerful than the reasoning neocortex, and often wins out. As Prechter puts it: If you doubt its power and speed, try to envision how you would react if someone suddenly dumped a dozen writhing three-foot blacksnakes in your lap. Understanding that they are harmless, try to decide how long it would take you nevertheless to train yourself not to budge upon being surprised that way in the future.
Building on this theoretical base, HSB goes on to develop detailed statements about socionomics proper, statements that Prechter identifies as observations, not yet a hypothesis. He categorizes various social polarities that seem to characterize all social interaction. He traces -- measures -- the ebb and flow between these polarities with various social meters, including popular culture (movies, fashion, music, sports) and, of course, the stock market. For one example, there is a chart of baseball stadium attendance figures in the U.S. that sports a clearly developed Elliott Wave pattern. Based on the pattern, Prechter predicted that baseball's popularity would wain, as it subsequently has.
Application
Pioneering Studies in Socionomics continues this analysis of contemporary trends and events as seen through a socionomic lens. Here's a short list of grist for the socionomic mill: restaurants, Broadway, religion, central-banks (e.g. the Federal Reserve System), Pro Wrestling and the Bull Market, Microsoft, the attacks of 9/11, macroeconomics, and song lyrics. All of these human endeavors are found to fluctuate over time, in the now familiar fractal, Fibonacci-based Elliott waves.
Many Slashdot readers will be amused/intrigued/outraged by the chapter on quantum physics, and its parallel to the social sciences. Here Prechter sites the work (published and unpublished) of physicist Lewis E. Little. Little's thesis challenges the conventional view of quantum mechanics and presents a new theory that places activity at the sub-atomic level on the same grounds of cause and effect as all other physics. There's enough controversy in this chapter alone to merit a separate book!
What's Missing?
As sprawling as these books are, there is no discussion of methodology, seemingly a critical lacuna in the founding of a new science. In the hard sciences there is today little discussion of methodology; the discussion has concluded. In the soft or social sciences, entirely libraries could be filled with the debates on proper methodology. Which subjects should be chosen for research, and how should they be chosen? How should experiments be conducted? Or is experimentation possible? Or even desirable? Is the use of mathematics appropriate? If so, how?
Answers to these questions, which Prechter may provide in due time, are needed to defend what's proposed. For example, an easy criticism to make of the various essays in PSS is that the subject matter is cherry-picked, and that choosing different subjects may have yielded different results. The particular criticism may or may not be valid; it will take a methodological argument to answer.
A Closing Analogy
James Gleick's Chaos tells the story of the scientists and researchers who founded a new science. Over and over, they tell a similar story: that chaotic behavior was ever-present in the physical world, but dismissed as noise in the experiment. It required a profound shift in perspective to realize that the noise was worth studying.
Is Prechter, with his Fibonacci-based fractal waves of human social behavior and socionomic insight, correctly pointing out a similar need for a profound shift in perspective? Is the noise of pre-rational human social behavior worth studying? Does our future lie in our reasoning mind, or our prehistoric brain?
Some Useful Links
- The web site of the Socionomics Institute
- An overview of socionomics by John Casti, of the Santa Fe Institute.
You can purchase Socionomics: the Science of History and Social Prediction from bn.com -- the official release date is September 23rd. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Sounds like a horoscope to me. I prefer the method of counting the bumps on the head, myself.
The web site of the Socionomics Institute
An overview of socionomics by John Casti, of the Santa Fe Institute.
The mob is fickle
...called is Psychohistory. I believe he predates everyone else. (See the Foundation series).
"You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy." You must not have any children living with you.
What would be cool is to use the principle to cancel out traffic jams before they become huge jams.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Amazing research!
People act without thinking?!
People follow the crowd in making bad decisions?!
People buy products without researching them?!
Bad products actually sell because of this?!
WOW!
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
I predict that many of the first /.-ers who post replies won't have finished reading the review, but will simply have skipped the entire long-winded, complicated review in order to go for a first post instead.
Remember, folks. Clicking on an Amazon referral link for ccats is a slap in the face for software innovation.
This was something that always drove me nuts about sociology: where are the predictions? There was a whole lot of explaining the past with very grand theories, but no measurable predictions were made. While I did have a great deal of fun with the subject and learned a lot, it annoyed me that the professors kept wanting to call it a science. I did dual major in physics and sociology. One of them is science, the other is not, but they are both important.
Bill Beatty started the conversation on this phenomonon, and the use of antiwaves to cancel it. You can read it and view the animations here
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
who's going to click on it? It's $18 more!
That's the reason for the variable speed limits around the M25 (London UK Orbital motorway). Every 500m or so, there are a new set of overhead speed limits. The idea is to dampen the phononically-modelled wave into a more laminar flow for the lanes. In theory the individual lanes can be controlled, but I've never seen it.
:-))
It is reportedly working better than the previous (fixed speed) system though, with friends of mine who have to drive a car around the M25 claiming their journey time is shorter. Personally I've got a 'bike
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"Fibonacci-based fractal waves of human social behavior"?? I guess that's just one reason why no refereed journal has published this load of crap, and the author (I would guess, a "free-thinker," "oppressed" by the "establishment") had to publish it as a book instead. There is a whole branch of economics (behavioral economics and finance) devoted to boundedly rational/irrational behavior, and in addition, there is the whole science of sociology.
1) Recently, there's been a lot of this "Economists assume people are rational but they're not!" stuff. Obviously, they're not purely rational and quantifying the non-rational behavior is important and useful. But I'd be astonished if there's not a lot of Stephen Jay Gould-style straw man argumentation here -- where the economists realize that they're working with simplifications and aren't as stupid as the new guys like to make them out to be.
2) Prediction: Reducing enormous chunks of social behavior to Elliot waves (!) and Fibonacci series is going to turn out to be at least as much of an oversimplification as anything any economist has done.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Insanity in numbers
A wise man once said that you will never go broke underestimating the stupidity of your fellow man. Now, like all catch-phrase pearls of wisdom, this one has a few stipulations to it. It does not mean that when you meet somebody, they should automatically be hauled down, hogtied and have a giant "I" branded onto their chest. If you believe that, odds are you have been or will be incarcerated for some length of time. The proper interpretation of the adage is: Given a sufficient population as a sample, which we will call X, at least one member is dumber than you give them credit for. Due to this fact, these people are easily taken advantage of, through no fault of your own, but entirely of theirs.
This fundamental truth of the cosmos means, that no matter how dumb your idea is, there will be at least one person in the world who will look at you as if you were standing atop a pool of water, with a giant neon sign blinking I'm the next big thing!, with an cartoon-style arrow pointing directly at your person. You could be selling little reverse periscopes for checking the growth of potatoes without disturbing them in their little earthen homes, and somebody, somewhere, would give you their credit card number for two: One for themselves (who probably has never even met someone who has read a book about growing potatoes) and one for their Aunt Tillie, back east.
Now, taking the fact that, given a large enough group, there is an equally large idiot, we can extend this universal truth further. Due to the facts as laid out, the larger the group of people, the lower the average intelligence becomes. And this is not a mathematical average, this is more of a biological or chemical average. People with higher I.Q.'s donate excess points to the less fortunate until all parties are at somewhat of an equilibrium. Psychologists have been calling this Mob Mentality, although they failed to explain the reasons correctly. They always talk about less fear of reprisal, or peer pressure, or too many parents aren't hugging their kids the right way, or some other piece of crap excuse that really doesn't make much sense to anyone who isn't a psychologist. Not to get too far off topic, but it has been my experience that most psychologists who call themselves psychologists are just angry people who couldn't hack it as psychiatrists. For the really few good psychologists out there, there are a million that graduated from a diploma printing shop they call a university, diluting the pool of good psychologists, and unwittingly stealing I.Q. points from whom they call their peers (Apparently a peer is somebody who would have nothing to do with you, who wouldn't piss on your head if your hair was on fire).
Okay, so where are we again? Oh yeah. We've got a mob of people practicing the dark art of I.Q. osmosis, a handful of pissed off psychologists (If they're too dumb to figure out that I'm not talking about them, then I probably was talking about them. If you're sitting next to a psychologist, point and laugh so he understands, then kick him in the nuts), and a rant to finish off. So let's get going.
So what are we to do with this newly acquired knowledge? Do we shun all public outings and essentially suffer a self-induced case of agoraphobia? The answer is negative with a capital 'Hell no'! Knowledge is power, and power is, at the very least, entertaining. We do not want to shun these situations, we want to foster these situations, without succumbing to the I.Q. leeches. First, build up your resistance to the masses by going to bars, sporting events, churches and the like, then (this is the tricky part) don't act like everyone else. Resist the urge. Resist as if your life depended on it, as one day it might.
Once you have successfully built up your tolerance, you can now attempt to exploit the mob. This is easy, once you are certain you will not succumb to it. The easiest way is to use key phrases, designed specifically to incite the crowd. My favorites are:
* The
terrence mckenna already has software prediction algorithms for it :D
OK, that's a bit strong. But read Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth.
Can't see any Foundation for the work myself. I'd say (with it being a tiny piece of research way out on fringe of science) it'd have *no* chance of making it big, unless of course there's some secret society within the scientific community willing to help it along, guide it through it's trials and tribulations etc.
[grin, for the humour-impaired]
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
A few moments more reflection, and I realize people occasionally do so, but not always. Even when they do try to act to further their own interests, they do so with inadequate and poorly-understood information, and often with poor understanding of basic logic. This throws a hell of a lot of noise into any theory based on humans acting out of self-interest.
Even aside from that, I think what happens at least as often is that people react emotionally, and then -- if they think they need to -- they come up with more-or-less logical-sounding "reasons" for their actions.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would fail to reach a conclusion. (If all socioeconomists were laid end to end, nobody would miss them.)
Why is PMS called PMS?
Because Mad Cow disease was already taken!
I'm here all week. Tip your waitresses.
I would argue that with terrorism, for instance, it's a symbiotic relationship between the people and the terror, rather than the terror causing the people to act a certain way or v/v. The world is a massively parallel machine, and in its complexity, it demonstrates the difficulty we have in producing a truly parallel computer that can produce a predictable result from a set of inputs -- mostly because the real world doesn't produce a very predictable result, and it never really has "inputs", it's just always in a "run" state (no offense intended towards any religions, of course).
stuff |
During our summer vacation this year, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides. (Well, not every sign; only the distinct ones.) For provenance, I also stood at the base of each sign and measured its GPS coordinates.
This turned out to be even more fun than a scavenger hunt, so we filled in some gaps when we returned to California, thereby proving my theorum of social prediction, which can be found in LaTeX format on my website.
Sincerely,
Donald Knuth, Esq.
Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University
The article said that the reason we need two incomes instead of one like in the 50's is because of Schooling and housing costs. But there was one comment by a economics professor that said that another reason is the 'cascade effect' That is we want homes like what the rich have. We want to emulate the rich. So if the rich have bigger homes now than in the 50's, we spend more on our homes to be like the rich. We are a copycat society.
Its obvious that entire ecomnies can be forced to collapse with a woman - American Express Card and shoe factory warehouse outlet....
When will the maddness stop!!!!
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
So, like, let's say I'm performing the action of posting this comment to further my own interests. So, if I know this comment will get modded up, when I am in the action of posting it, you could, arguably, say that I acted in order to further my own interests, which is, in this cases, a higher karma. Take the second case. What if I knew this comment would not be modded up, but I posted it anyway. That would not be acting in order to further my own interests, unless, ofcourse, my interest was to reduce my own karma.
But, since I don't know why I'm posting this comment in the first place, I'm a jackass.
And that is the Science of Social Prediction explained in 2 paragraphs.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Nixon Presidential Counsel John Dean is trashing George Bush for being a bigger criminal than Nixon ever was.
Dean argues that Bush committed an impeachable offense by misleading the country into war by falsely claiming Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030606.html
Dean charges the Bush Administration committed worse crimes than anything Nixon's boys did when a "high White House officials" leaked to Robert Novak the name of a CIA operative. The CIA operative was the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson who investigated the Niger uranium claims and found them false. Leaking the name of a CIA operative is a felony. And a heavy one at that. Ambassador Wilson says it was Karl Rove who made the leak.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030815.html
Dean claims that the facts demonstrate that either the Bush White House knew about the potential of terrorists flying airplanes into skyscrapers, or the CIA failed to give the White House this essential information, which it possessed and provided to others.
http://writ.findlaw.com/dean/20030729.html
In this same book, he advises cashing out 401(k)s in spite of the penalties and buying gold and storing it in safety deposit boxes, etc. Unfortunatly, a friend of mine followed the advise and ended up in a much worse financial situation as a result.
I am not entirely sure its the same guy, as this is Prechter Jr. I've noticed joint publications of the Prechters. Father/son?
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
According to the Seldon Plan, this book should not be coming our for another 5 years!
-Joe
Lose = not win
The wave theory Prechter is talking about is the Elliott Wave Theory addressing the cyclic nature of all aspects of human society including economic markets and cultural trends.
The waves describing traffic patterns come from fluid dynamics.
Prechter's theories may predict the number of cars on the road by looking at things such as good economy==move cars purchased, less use of mass transit vs bad economy==more two-income households, more commuters vs really bad economy==less two-income households because they can't find two jobs.
But that won't describe the behavior of those cars once they're on the road or explain why one interchange design is better than another. That's fluid dynamics.
Sorry to reply to my own post, guys, but this has to be a record for me :-) post to +5 in about 5 minutes!
...
[grin] Now off to watch the football, probably find it's at -1 when I get back
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Prechter's most interesting stances have been these:
(1) He predicted the dot-com burst and was calling for it when the dot-com's were strong. He was seen as extremely controversial in this respect and anybody who said this was considered an idiot who obviously did not understand the market. His predictions were based on the wave principle and also worked within other predictors in the market. Having read his theories, it is actually very impressive. To find more about his actual predictions on the market, you can find them here: www.elliottwave.com
(2) A few days or a week before the 9/11 attacks, he made the prediction that a terrorist attack would occur on American soil. At the time, this just sounded ridiculous. It sounded a lot less ridiculous when it happened almost immediately. Note: By his own admission he did not expect it to happen so quickly. This, by his theory, was because of the global downturn in social mood.
(3) Prechter also predicts deflation. Note that he talked about this when nobody else was talking about it. I remember because I mentioned this possibility to some financial people and they basically said this was nuts. And of course, it seems like not such a bad theory now and other books are publishing it. But if you made this theory a year or two ago, nobody was backing it. You would have been thought stupid.
Prechter makes a lot of assertions like these while simultaneously debunking the false logic in other financial predictors. He does look at history but he looks WAY back including all the depressions to find patterns. He finds and shows these patterns. I haven't done enough research to know definitively what I like and don't like but I have read enough to take it seriously.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Economics is the study of choice. This implies that there is scarity of something (otherwise you wouldn't have to choose). Economics theory suggests that individuals make rational choices in the context of the information that they have. "Rational" only means that the individual takes costs and benefits into consideration (although it is not as simple as whether the benefits outweigh the costs), as well as future expectations. Information is never perfect so individuals uses their own estimates of things like Expected Utility from a certain action, or inaction, in order to make their choices. Since money is scarce (meaning not-unlimited), money is a convenient ways to measure and observers individuals' choices. Economic theory attempted to describe behavior of some things in groups (businesses, whole economies), but the number of variables gets very large, and the number of "external shocks" makes measurement and prediction difficult, so normally we are only making observations of patterns rather than predictions.
When information is very incomplete and hard to quantify, then it becomes extremely hard to predict individuals' behaviors because they will all have different expectations and assumptions (which is probably why politics gets so heated). Socionomics sounds more like the prediction of the acts and decisions of groups of people when their information, assumptions, expectations, etc. are all very different. They could all still be acting rationally, but economic theory won't help much predicting how the groups will act.
No methodology? Then how is this a science?
Perhaps I'd pick up the book and skimthe intro, but either he's writing Economic Anthropology or he should be rich from the stock market by now.
act in their own interest, but then there are others who act in the interest of others, or then, there are those who pretend to act in others' interest to benefit themselves, etc.
You may be able to model this theoretical split of how people behave in groups, but because it's all based on probability there is no decision for an individual-or small groups for that matter.
JGG
Ummmm, don't you mean Hari Seldon?
So has the author ever seen Pi before, becuase the review mentions just a few similarities.
There's an olde English tale to sum up scarcity called The Tragedy Of The Commons. In a nutshell, at just the point when economic scarcity bites, our instinct tells us to maximise personal gain. By maximising personal gain, we accelerate and prolong the scarcity of resources. Look hard enough and you can see this model *everywhere* (just like the tiny voices).
It's a layman's Socioeconomic Theory of Everything!
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
this looks much like the 'science' founded in the Asimov foundation series, and promoted by Hari Seldon, galactic librarian and savior of social institutions everywhere :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Wouldn't Harry Wheldon have something to say on this subject?
Not only would he, but Hari Seldon would have predicted the broad psychohistoric context in which it would have been said.
It is the major alternative to traditional Macro-Econ and Marxism. Among the economists of this "school" of thought are Nobel Prize winners Freidrich Hayek and renowned economist Ludwig Von Mises. It explains all economics starting with the premise that all action occurs because people are uneasy. If they were not uneasy they would not act. People exchange act to exchange a less desirable set of circumstances for a more desirable one. What people desire is subjective but people arrange their wants in a scale choosing the most desired things and setting aside others they cannot have simultaneously. It then goes from there to develop theories of money, credit and the business cycle. They were the only ones to explain and predict the current economic malaise we are in now. A good sources for information on the Austrian School is Mises Institute.
They have a free library of online books where you can read the classics. Among some of those I recommend are
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth which gives some very interesting arguments as to why pure central planning is impossible that have to with problems of information distribution to the planners.
Economic Science and the Austrian Method. This is a good explanation of the school and why and how its methods and understanding are different from traditional macro econ.
Even if you understand the equations behind socioeconomic movements, it is impossible to turn these into medium or long-term predictions given the impossibility of measuring the current state accurately.
But it's likely that such theories can be used to make models - like weather maps - that allow short-term prediction of events with a certain degree of accuracy.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
yes, that's right, my highly technical history degree :) it tells me why everything happens (in the grand scheme of things) the way it does. smart people study history, which makes it the most popular undergrad subject to go into law, and what Napoleon Bonaparte read (copiously) before going off and changing history (ironic, eh?).
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Thanks for the explanation. Every time someone from the UK mentions a road designation, I spend a few moments thinking it is a nebula or star cluster.
Hegel introduced the idea of social conflict as the engine of history. Marx added economic forces to this idea. Marx also claimed that some "wise men" could force society in the "right direction", but much of the 20th century was failures of his followers.
Ehh, I don't know about this book. Perhaps I'll check it out someday.
After visiting the web site I can't say I'm a fan of "socionomics." It's like socio-economics, but half-ass. When I pulled up the "manifesto" I felt like I was reading the works of some of Karl Marx wannabe.
I don't think this guy has spent enough time doing sociological and anthropological research. I understand the cheesy "wave effect"
Things get good, people get happy and apathetic, people get taken advantage of in that state, things get bad, people get pissed, people fix what's wrong, people work hard for things to get good, things get good, people get happy and apathetic, etc etc
As over simplified as that may be, it's important to realize that not every society in the world works like this. You really need to look a broader perspective in order to get some sound research.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
http://slate.msn.com/id/2070182/
I think that's what the analysis of head shape as related to intelligence, etc, but my spelling could be totally off.
Best recent use of it was in the Simpsons. Burns has a phrenology bust and uses it to analyse Homer (I think) and definietly Smithers.
Erioll
Self-interest is rarely the main driving force in our life. To accept the idea that you are driven by self-interest is demeaning. ... It's like admitting
that you are essentially a dog, whose major preoccupation is five o'clock, when
the little food pellets go into your bowl.
-- John Ralston Saul, "A Wondrous Uncertainty" in Queen's Quarterly, Spring 2002
Can it model the Slashdot effect?
Top three reasons you're not Donald Knuth:
(3) Knuth doesn't use the internet any more (except to occasionally update his website). He's holed up in an undisclosed location working on TAoCP Volume 4. He has grad students slip him errata emails through a slot under the door, and that's about it.
(2) The text in this comment, as well as that in your userinfo, is cut-and-pasted from Knuth's website.
(1) Donald Knuth has never, to my knowledge, used LaTeX. All of his papers, preprints and books use his own homebrewed set of macros.
Besides which, the comment doesn't actually say anything. Dude, get your own handle. It's only cute to be an impostor if the imposted party actually has an account here.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
1. The events of history and culture are driven by the engine of collective social mood. Social mood temporally and logically precedes social events, and is the cause of social events. War and terrorism don't cause distressed people; distressed people create the conditions and events that lead to and comprise war and terror. A booming economy does not create ebullient people; ebullient people produce more, consume more and participate in and contribute to market manias.
I don't understand where the submitter is coming from with this. I think, generally, a booming economy CAN affect someone's mood.
Knowing that the economy is doing well can be enough to cause a person to be happier. Certainly it could cause them to be a bit looser with their purse-strings. Case in point, the dot-com era. With the tech boom, people would to spend more, knowing the economy was good, and there would be more where that came from.
I'm not saying that ebullient people don't contribute to a booming economy, but what creates a collective ebullience?
Good economy = Happy people
Happy people = Good economy
None of the propositions set forth in this review really seem all that shocking. How exactly does this go against the standard beliefs regarding socioeconomic trends?
Okay, the apparent reversal of cause and effect may come as a surprise to some people, but if we consider it from the perspective that backcasting sometimes yields more stable and accurate results than forecasting, it doesn't really take any major leap-of-faith to agree.
So... Why the big deal? Perhaps someone more familiar with this field than myself (who has experience in time series analysis, but not specifically with the social aspects of real-world datasets) can explain?
That would never work here in America--we don't even obey fixed speed limits.
"This is not a sig." -- R.
(in pseudocode to facilitate implementation)
//Unwashed masses! Danger!
declare a "human" object and instantiate it, passing along the IQ and education level (None, HighSchool, AA, BA/BS, MS, PhD).
if((human.IQ >= 105)&&((human.EdLevel == BA/BS)||(human.EdLevel == MS)||(human.EdLevel == PhD))){
Assume human will respond relatively sanely when provided with sufficient data. Check amount of data provided to human, and correctness of same, then make prediction based on what a reasonable, rational, normal being would do. Remember to take into account personal greed and conflicts of interest!
}else if (human.IQ >= 105)&&(human.EdLevel == AA){
Human will behave more or less rationally, but has less background information to go on. May not behave predictably based on available information. Bears watching, usually will do what a "reasonable person" would do.
} else {
Human can be counted on to do whatever other humans appear to be doing; all other information available is generally ignored. Predictions can be made via polls, provided the results of those polls are made available to the public AND enough time has been allotted for the public to view those polls. Prediction can be made much easier by nudging human towards one behavior and then predicting *that*. Two methods: A) Tell the human NOT to do the desired behavior, B) Tell the human that he is a member of a despised group if he doesn't do the behavior (examples include terrorists, communists, satanists, hippie freaks). Finally: the safest predictive technique is to imagine the stupidest, most nonsensical possible thing, and predict that. This will be accurate in at least 50% of cases, and can be used to hedge bets along with other mechanisms.
}
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Even though they're told not to 100 times, they still click on the attachments. . .
What we're talking about here is predicting human behavior because it acts like the stock market? Screw human behavior! Tell me how to predict the stock market!
Seriously though, I'd be cool to see a website with a graphical view of some of the things he's talking about. Shouldn't be to hard to put together assuming you know the math.
Those fancying this type of litterature, please take a look at: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgres s_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
At least the authors had some kind of humor.
Regardless, I'm so glad to learn that everything is natural. Thank gods everything's normal!!!
There is a whole branch of economics (behavioral economics and finance) devoted to boundedly rational/irrational behavior, and in addition, there is the whole science of sociology.
In my experience, not only is human stupidity infinite, but human irrationality is also unbounded. Even the most "irrational" economic models I've seen assume a certain level of implied rationalism which is sometimes completely lacking. But in business economics you can usually rationalize them away as being an insignificant portion of the market, and just deal with the more rational cases. Doesn't mean that the rest doesn't exist, just that they're bloody hard to predict...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just because a trend can be established doesn't, IMO, warrant that the conclusion that herding or flocking is in effect.
If one person realizes that baseball for instance (since such an example was given) has lost some of the appeal that this person watched baseball for, you can assume that more people will make that same realization.
So they all stop attending... on individual merit, not because other people did so.
I applaud the accuracy of prediction, but I wouldn't make any more assumptions from it.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
If you've ever seen a sociology (or literary criticism) journal, then "Fibonacci-based fractal waves of human social behavior" looks like plain English. ("Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", anyone?)
Funny how sociologists write about how scientists use jargon to create a cult-like atmosphere impenetrable to outsiders while doing so themselves.
And how exactly is sociology a science? What theories does it have, and what predictions has it made that have come true?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"it's obvious that people act to further their own interests".
.pdf format, see http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/E nsminger%20Feature.pdf
Though this may happen most of the time, a lot of fascinating research (beyond this book) explores times when it doesn't. For example, Jean Ensminger at Caltech has been doing a series of games with various cultures around the world (involving sizable chunks of cash so participants should rationally try to do well).
One game is the "Ultimatum" game. Person 1 gets to decide how to split up $X between himself and person 2 (whose identity is unknown to him). Person 2 decides either to accept person 1's distribution or reject it (in which case both players get nothing). If people behave purely rationally, player 1 will offer player 2 a penny and player 2 will accept because it's better than nothing. She even did a simpler game where player 2 didn't have the option of accepting or rejecting, but just got what player 1 gave him.
The results: (Un)surprisingly, people behaved irrationally and would often split 50/50 even when there would be no consequences for an unfair offer. Furthermore, the more integrated the economy is (i.e. industrial nations), the more likely people were to split 50/50 instead of maximizing their own profit. Playing fast and loose with cause and effect, one could almost say that non-rationality is a prerequisite for the formation of sophisticated markets!
For a non-technical article on Ensminger's research in
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"As sprawling as these books are, there is no discussion of methodology, seemingly a critical lacuna in the founding of a new science."
In any scientific endeavor, methodology is CRITICAL. It's awfully hard to believe the measures and subsequent analysis if there is no basis for what is trying to be proved or disproved. Not only that, if the guy indeed is as focused on the stock market trends as this reviewer seems to think, then perhaps the guy who wrote the book is a bit more interested in proving something he's found to be interesting, rather than investigating the actual truthfulness or fallacy of the claims he makes.
I don't think I'll be reading a 2 volume set of books on "socionomics" if all it contains is posturing over the author's belief system without solid, objective reasoning for his beliefs.
your first-year economics courses talk about the assumptions of rational, transitive choice and utility functions. The rest of the time you are studying theories and models explaining why the first-year models are incomplete.
This is NEWS?
Are you sure it's history and not political science? To be sure, the latter touches on the former a great deal, but they're not equivalent. Maybe it depends on the university.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...except, of course, when it acts like a particle. ;-)
Lets face it: If this guy's theories could really predict the future, he would have already applied them to get rich on Wall Street, not write a book about them.
Let me know when the author gets to be worth $1 billion, then I'll start taking him seriously.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
There's a comprehensive description of how to break up traffic jams using waves, at: www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html
"You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy.
Anyone who has ever been married and/or had the care of children ( of any age ) knows how laughably naive it is.
Ok, so people do things for their own benefit. A simple enough concept. The problem arises in the definition of "own benefit."
Clearly some people, for some peculiar reason, think it's in their own benefit to climb a clock tower with a 30-06.
All attempts to accurately predict just which individuals are likely to do so have proven futile and are likely to remain so. Any cursory examination of the record will quickly show that the clock tower people are roughly divided between those that "we always knew would be trouble" and "I never would have expected it of her. She was always so sweet and caring."
You might just as well needlessly sacrifice a chicken for scrying, or toss sticks about, to determine the likely behaviour of individuals.
Masses of people are a different issue, within limits. Do you know what tool they use to determine traffic patterns in shopping malls?
The kinetic theory of gasses, which assumes purely random motion of ideally spherical and inelastic particles.
Statistically large numbers of people confined to a corridor behave almost exactly like the molocules of a gas in a cylinder.
This has nothing to do with the herd like instinct that results in cultural fads though. Predicting fads falls much into the same catagory as predicting the behaviours of individuals and is much easier post facto than a priori. ( Go ahead, tell me you actually predicted the craze for Hula-Hoops or Davey Crockett hats)
Not that there aren't people ( can you say Jeanne Dixon) who aren't beyond making post facto "predictions" and claiming them as a priori.
Most marketing people fall into this catagory. No one makes a multi-million dollar salary for saying, "Gee, damned if I know."
Market predictors are people no better than ( and fall into the same catagory as ) the average, run of the mill, "psychic," astrologer or Tarot Reader. They give things their best guess, couched in weasel words in case things go wrong, disregard their misses and offer their odd hit as "proof" that their predictive theory actually works.
It's all hogwash, smoke, mirrors and a waving of hands so that you don't notice Dearly departed Aunt Millie is really just a ballon with a tissue over it being dangled about by a sting.
I'm not saying that all of these people are being deliberately fraudulent ( although many of them are, thus the cynicism among some of the populace who realize they are being treated like morons ), most astrologers actually deeply believe their particular line of bullshit. This doesn't mean they aren't deeply self-deluded though. Sincerity is evidence of nothing but sincerity.
But I'm being redundant. All of this is common wisdom.
Isn't it?
KFG
... do not form science.
A rough quick guess is that systems with a large number of interacting particles with only a limited set of behavioural degrees of freedom (or states, if this pleases more) must exhibit the type of pattern as described.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Right. The M25 isn't a nebula, it's just an orbital motorway.
I found this review of Socionomics interesting. There has recently been some interesting work in behavioral finance, so I thought that these books might be worth reading. That is, until the Elliot Wave and Fibonacci sequences were mentioned. There is no statistical evidence for Elliot waves, or at least for a predictable periodicity of market and economic cycles. At most the Elliot Wave is another name for the capitalist economic cycles of expansion and contraction. Yes, these cycles definitely exist. But they don't reoccur in the same way. Put another way, there is no predictability that anyone with a command of statistics and mathematical technique has found.
Only chartist cranks believe this stuff. And a quick Google search shows that the author, Robert R. Prechter is, in fact, a chartist crank. He runs a company called "Elliot Wave International" which apparently sells a newsletter for other chartist cranks.
There are people on Wall Street that believe in Elliot Waves. I saw a self-produced documentary on a very successful trader named Paul Tudor Jones. He and one of his colleagues are shown pouring over a chart and babbling on about Elliot waves. It then shows Jones trading. The market starts to move against his position. He then whips out his lucky gym shoes and his lucky inflatable dinosaur (I'm not making this up!) In the end Jones managers to profit from his positions. It it Elliot waves or was it the lucky inflatable dinosaur?
Successful traders have been notably unable to explain how they do what they do. Even a bright intellectual like George Soros has never been able to explain his method in terms that had any meat or meaning. His son once mentioned that after watching his father trade for years he thought that it was Soros' back that was the key - it started to hurt when it was time to get out of a position.
Successful traders seem to have a talent for merging information from a variety of sources and the ability to act on these almost unconscious patterns. So some of them may claim they follow Elliot waves, but it has no more meaning the the lucky inflatable dinosaur.
One poster claimed that Prechter has predicted this or that. Well, so has the Jenne Dixon (the psychic astrologer who wrote for the National Enquirer). Anyone who makes lots of predictions will be right sometime.
One of the problems in this whole area of discussion is that people switch topics when they argue that Elliot waves exist. For example, the presence of short term trends is sometimes used as evidence for Elliot waves. This is not true. There is a lot of work at Wall Street investment funds on doing statistical prediction in the markets (this is called statistical arbitrage). But none of this has to do with Elliot waves or Fibonacci series. Wall Street has one ideology: making money. They don't care what works. If it could be shown that voodoo worked they would do it. There was a fad for Elliot waves. It did not make money in a reliable fashion and now no major investment funds uses these techniques. They are discredited.
". . .just a ballon with a tissue over it being dangled about by a sting.,"
a Freudian, Pepsi Syndrome induced, typo, or what?
I have got to get around to cleaning my keyboard.
KFG
I certainly take issue with the notion that people always act out of self-interest. People are too lazy to do that. People don't even think about what they are doing most of the time and simply act out of habit.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Read a Usenet group or follow any online forum for a few months. Posts and responses to posts become painfully predictable after a while. Heck, you can predict the general flow of responses to almost any Slashdot story, not even counting the obvious Natalie Portman, Beowulf cluster, insensitive clod, etc.
See, proof positive that psychohistory is real.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Given that, how credible is the rest of your post?
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Children are far more clever than you give them credit for. My two year old realizes that to always follow such a simple pattern would make him easy to predict. The real secret is to keep the grown-ups off balance - just when the grown-ups think they have you figured out, throw them a curve ball.
John Nash's theory about cooperation was a very significant effort here - we'd teach this to our kids in school, but that'd be tantamount to brainwashing them with communist propaganda. So it's better to just let them live in an "every man for himself" world.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This particular book seems much ado about nothing, frankly. Other posters have mentioned the triteness of the concept that people do what they see other people doing. Again, is this supposed to be the core of human nature?
If the author's view is offered to counter the traditional economic view of "rational actors" then perhaps it has a little value. But nobody really believes that economic crap -- not even the economists. It's just used to explain the accumulation of economic power as being desireable, after the fact. Econcomics is a "science" for hire, after all. At best, the author's insights (if they prove to be true) are merely the refinement of a tool for centralizing wealth and power. That hardly seems like a reason to applaud.
Never at a loss for words... because of the voices.
Wrong. Human economic motivation is driven by two principal impulses: selfishness and compassion. Still, there is considerable variation across societies.
First consider Western society. Capitalism and free markets are essentially driven by selfishness. Each consumer and producer wants to maximize her own gain, regardless of the outcome to other consumers and producers. Adam Smith claims that selfishness is the only driving force. Is he right? Of course, not. Western consumers frequently prefer to buy environmentally friendly products that are neither the cheapest nor the highest quality. When organizations like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition advertise that certain companies receive a failing grade on how they recycle used computers, those failing companies suffer a drop in sales. Furthermore, Western consumers frequently donate money and time to organizations like Amnesty International (AI) yet receive no product or service in return. So, clearly, compassion is a strong component of economic motivation.
However, the degree of selfishness and compassion varies across societies. Consider Taiwanese society. When Westerners like the Americans withheld investments from China after the brutal incident at Tienanmen Square in 1989 in order to force Beijing to change, the Taiwanese immediately seized this window of opportunity and poured money and technology into China, completely thwarting any American economic sanctions. (reference: "Reality of Taiwan") Note also that all the Taiwanese companies mentioned in the environmental study done by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition received failing grades. Why? Most Chinese in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) simply do not care about the environment. They prefer to buy the cheapest product even if it damages the environment. Since the main customers of the Taiwanese companies do not care about the environment, those companies will do nothing to protect the environment. As for human-rights organizations like AI, most Chinese reject its principles. The Chinese are overrepresented in the business and engneering colleges of American universities but are underrepresented in meetings of AI. (You can verify this fact by just attending an AI meeting.) So, clearly, compassion is almost non-existent as a component of economic motivation in Chinese society.
Other societies fall somewhere between the two extremes of Western society and Chinese (or Taiwanese) society.
No, the "average" IQ is the average of the scores of everyone taking a legitimate IQ test.
Just like the "average" SAT score, it "drifts" from time to time, and at this point it needs to be re-centered. I recall hearing that it's somewhere between 105 and 110 at the moment (which seems like an improvement, but just as likely is due to the "test culture" in today's schools which obsessively prepares people for tests, but not the real world).
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Oh, there's also discussion about this research in The Economist
I live in the SF Bay area, and mostly go across the bay bridge on the weekends, so I end up sitting in traffic waiting for the tolls. Most of the people aren't commuters, and so it backs up differently than the commute.
I take the attitude of all the lanes are going pretty close to average speed, and 15 cars back there's no way to predict that. So when a lane goes significantly faster for a moment, I don't ditch out to try to get in that lane. However, there seems to be a lot of people who just keep switching lanes trying to be in the fastest one. I usually keep pace with them, sitting in my one lane. However, when around 5 to 20 percent of the people in the system are switching lanes, it slows everyone down.
Or at least that's my perception. Are they really slowing us down, or is it the people fumbling for change at the tolls? I think the same is true of the cut-and-weave pattern on the highway-- it certainly speeds up the person who is cutting and weaving, but it slows everyone else down. Or maybe I should stop thinking and start driving.
We might if they were set reasonably. Are UK speed limits more realistic?
Reviews are here and here, e.g.
And here is a google search on here and the book.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I predict copyright protection being extended so far into the future that Harry Seldon will eventually be sued for plagiarism.
...it's obvious that people act to further their own interests. And in fact, the science of economics is founded on this observation. So everyone should be a rational economizer, busy calculating their individual costs and benefits...
Without commenting on the broader review, this right here is the most flagrantly incorrect assumption in possibly any field of theory. It's amazing that capitalist theory can be predicated on this "rational actor" postulate, when it barely resembles reality at all. Of course, it's insidious because it flatters the consuming public by attributing generally intelligent behavior to it.
If individual economic actors are rational, then what's the Christmas buying season all about? How does half of the entire year's economic activity occur in December as part of exchanging mostly useless cruft to everyone anyone knows, in consideration of a Santa Claus-faced myth?
The "rational actor" economic presumption amuses me greatly.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I read a pretty fair book a few years back called "Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny" by Robert Wright. It dealt with many of the same issues, but from a more historic perspective, using game theory to find a direction and mechanism behind cultural growth and interaction. A lot of assumption involved, but an interesting read.
For the sake of argument, I'll put a temporary jumper around the BS alarm. Now, how 'bout a game of "let's pretend":
Standing back and looking at the situation from a "black box" perspective, I see two scenarios:
One or few persons apply a practical approach to modeling collective behaviour. They use it to control that same collective behaviour. It is a dark day for individual freedoms, as The Leaders decide that there simply won't be any more turkey subs because almost everybody suddenly prefers ham. But how would we know? Isn't this what Madison Avenue does to us every day? Why are cr@ppy boy bands so popular?
Modelling methods are developed which are simple and easy for anyone to apply. We all run around trying to manipulate one another. On a small scale, one person rises to control the family/frat/team/whatever. Persons with the best manipulative ability "rise to the top", and control larger systems--nations, corporations, etc. Again, this is not very different from what we see today
So, my conclusion is that even if this works, we won't see much change. It's another tool for controlling the behaviour of one's neighbors. But bribery, guns, taxes, bombs, and intimidation are tools as well. They're pretty effective.
Or, maybe I'm just whistling in the dark.
At any rate, I, for one, welcome our new overlords...
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"People are torn between their desire to stand out, and their need to blend in." - I forget Who
That says it all.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Not so as you'd notice. The fixed speed limit on a motorway is 70mph. The variable ones only reduce from that :-(
Of course, the average speed (apart from the M25, which has speed cameras behind all those speed-limit signs) is approx. 90, at least when the roads are clear...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Meanwhile I'll just put the horrible orange colored volume containing the original teletype generated printout of the Brooks-Matelski set back on the shelf.
Actually I'm pretty excited about finding this. It seems I'm not the only one who thinks that Mandelbrot is little more than a self-publicist. People should see him give a presentation. It's like a sales pitch for himself.
I wonder if there are any web pages about that other IBM-paid self-publicist - Chaitin.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Does anyone remember the movie "Pi"? All this talk about the universality of the Fibonacci sequence makes me wonder if the movie was referencing the wrong fundamental constant...
Uh... this sounds like game theory and diffusion research to me. Sure, diffusion research is just the study on the adaptation of things in a population, but it seems that it can be extended into larger economic forces by adapting it atop of game theory (e.g. assume that each individual makes a specific choice via a game, then extrapolate it out over an entire population to determine how quickly choices are made across it).
I guess it's an umbrella then, packaging these ideas into a single field. Still, it doesn't seem to be any more than a reorg of current economic theories.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I read that article myself and I see nothing wrong with it. Society simply WOULD NOT WORK if everyone was an individualist, counter culture or unique. Sometimes folks only see the negatives and downsides of conformity but it has its bonuses as well.
Think of it this way, what if your cardiac cells decided they didn't want to conform anymore? Where would that leave the overall organism? Societies are organisms too. And we all have a job to do and a role to play in order to keep ours healthy.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I have followed the market for 35 years and watched Prechter make some amazingly good predictions, then follow that by horrible ones. His calls on the stock market bubble were poor and quite useless for traders or investors. Check with Mark Hulbert's magazine for a better description of his failures. Also, about Elliott's "discovery" of fractals before Mandelbrot: it didn't happen. Just because he noticed self-similarity ( so did a lot of others: Poincare, etc. ) didn't mean that he knew what fractal dimensions were ( which is the basis of the name ). Finally, for the reviewer: the word you were looking for several times was "cite", not "site". Now I'll come down off my high-horse and become normal again...
You have never taken a statistics course, have you?
100 is always average, by definition. If there are 3 people, you graph the spread in A BELL CURVE. The MIDDLE SCORE IS THEREBY 100.
YOU ARE A DUMBASS. But, community college was pretty fun for you I suppose.
Now I am just recently thinking about starting my own business. I wanted to use this history-prediction theory. First to mind came the following applications:
- Sports Gambling (Super Bowl 04)
- Oscars (could licence to some Hollywood studios)
- Traffic jams (sell expertise to local radio)
- Holidays (book now - will be sold out)
Would hire Majors/PhDs
A slightly alternative and more precise examination of the economic study of social behavior can be found in the works of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.
You can read an interview with him here, or examine his book Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment, or check out his Nobel Prize speech.
I'm continually amused by those who feel that human behavior can be most accurately understood by studying the economy.
Case in point: the last time you clicked 'reply' in order to flame some git on Slashdot, how large of a financial reward were you anticipating?
If you want a comprehensive database of the foibles, follies, and fads in human behavior, study USENET, not the Dow.
Another blow struck for decisiveness...or was it clarity?
Heaven is better than Earth and we go to Heaven when we die so I predict Everyone will kill themselves immediatly (why wait).
Still alive? Try this: What will benefit and what will harm is in the imagination of each individual, so all the stories, tales, and guesses of each person plays a role in each persons evaluation of their situation.
Further, the subconcious also has a say about what each will do and cost/benefit analysis is not even close to its decision process.
Predicting human behavior is HARDER than actively CAUSING behavior, so I predict those who spend the most to cause behavior (e.g. ads) will best predict behavior (because they CAUSED it).
The author appears to be the same Bob Prechter who was a famous stock market guru in the early 90s. He made a number of successful predictions using Elliot Wave theory. Unfortunately, in the teeth of the raging bull market, he began predicting a huge crash. His Elliot Wave predictions of this crash went on so long, and were so unsuccessful, that he faded from view (apparently to work on this book). From what I have seen of Elliiot Wave theory, it is pure pseudoscience, since the rules for assigning movements (stock market or otherwise) to waves are very subjective and work much better after the fact, when you already know the outcome.
can't be more sociably predictable than that? mynuts won, again?
This Elliot Wave hokum was riding high around 15 years ago, and predicting a bad crash for the market. Only they didn't really -- they said they could predict that certain things would happen, but they couldn't say when, kind of like the world has been supposed to end about 300 times in the last 300 years and re-predicted after it didn't happen about 300 more times. Big deal. Wave theory dropped out of sight after coming up dry, and now it's back trying to predict history. I'll predict that sometimes it will be right and sometimes it will be wrong. You can take that to the bank and get checks printed on it.
I'm just tired of bad guys with tits using stats, courts, and preying on inflated sympathies to get even.
"and it's obvious that people act to further their own interests."
Not everyone is acting on their own best interest. Its this flaw that prevents us from using "logic" to understand and predict actions. Not everyone does whats logical, some people do the illogical thing because to them the illogical thing is whats best for humanity, its whats right.
Emotion prevents a person from being logical 100% of the time. Martin Luther King was not a logical man, hes dead because he was illogical, he wanted to try to save humanity from itself, and to him, this mission was more important than his life.
Now, can anyone say he was logical? No. Can anyone predict every action based on logic? No. Humans have emotions, humans often do things which do not benefit them in any way simply because they love or care, such as being a good father. You wont live to see the results of your action, so why be a good father? Perhaps because you love your son?
Some people however dont understand the logic, they think "why the hell be a father at all? just pay child support, live in the now, who cares what will happen, you'll be dead when it happens"
This is logical.
See the difference?
The war on terrorism is being led by emotion not logic, alot of decisions were emotional decisions, alot of laws which should have never been passed were passed due to emotion, emotion allows humans to be illogical. This is what seperates us from computers and its why you cannot use a computer to predict our actions. We dont always do whats in our best interest, alot of the time I'll do whats in the worlds best interest but which certain is not in my best interest, often i'll do something which is in someone elses best interest and not really in mine.
A good soildier will die for this country, because its in this countries best interest, not in their best interest. If a person is willing to die to protect the freedoms of this country you cannot say thats logical. You cannot say the kamikaze japanese fighter pilots were logical, you cannot say the terrorists of al qaeda are logical.Some things are more important than logic, more important than the individual, and to some people their actions in this world matter more than they do as an individual, the impact they make is what defines their existance.
To people like this, the whole prediction idea is crap, because the impact someone will have on the world is subject to so many variables that its impossible to predict.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
People act without thinking
People follow the crowd in making bad decisions
People buy products without researching them
???
Profit!
Please try not to operate heavy machinery until the drugs wear off.
"Here Prechter sites the work (published and unpublished)" That's cites, dammit
Or at least certain aspects of it. Every so many years someone, somewhere comes up with new predictive models for society, the weather, economics, etc. - and when you get down to it, these new models are usually just reiterations of General Systems Theory (Bertalanffy) which is applicable in general to many different types of systems (hence the name).
;-)
Chaos Theory is basically a subset/application of GST, and at first glance so does the theories expounded in these books seem to be derived from GST( I haven't read them).
Most books on GST may be a bit drier reading, but once you get the gist of GST, you start seeing its universal applications everywhere, and snippets of rediscovery here and there in new models of predicting behaviors of systems (including societies).
Read up on GST and get your 12 credits in "The Big Picture".
How? Umm... This isn't fiction? Just a thought....
People destin themselves by choice, socities are destined by circumstances.
Dear Dumbass-
"Flynn [35], in a survey covering 14 countries, has shown that the average IQ test score has significantly increased in recent years."
Read carefully, use your finger to follow -
*the* *average* *IQ* *test* *score*
That's right, not the average IQ, BUT the average TEST SCORE HAS INCREASED.
Average, by definition, WILL ALWAYS BE 100.
If 1000 kids take the test in 1980, then 1000 kids take it in 1990, if the AVERAGE TEST SCORE INCREASES 40%, the Average IQ of the children is 100.
BECAUSE IT IS A BELL CURVE, 100 is average, and the scores are distributed along a curve, with the median score in the middle.
Back to 13th grade for you!
it's obvious that people act to further their own interests. And in fact, the science of economics is founded on this observation
No, the science of economics was founded on the concept of alocation and distribution of scarce resources. While it can be inferred by extension that humans will typically act in their own best interests in order to maximize their share of these resources, the science of economics is hardly based on that fact.
The distinction is subtle, but important. So much of modern economics relies on the fact that greater economic efficency can be obtained through pariatio efficent solutions, it sort of flies in the face of the assumption that the course of study was founded upon entirly self serving interests.
The Internet is generally stupid
It's an insult to call modern day capitalist economics as true economics. All these fools who call themselves economists will all be discredited within 200 years... (capitalist) economists are nothing more than the modern day alchemists!!!
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
There is a bias with women when it comes to courts, employment, education, slanted reporting, etc... It could easily be reversed but to do so would mean punishing women who don't who don't support the climate. Frankly, I don't care about people who support the bullshit that can't stand up to the smallest bit of scrutiny. If a bad end came to one/all of them I'd say it was a long time coming.
Sympathy was driven out watching certain cliche groups in high school pretty much get away with murder.
My info might be outdated, but last time i researched the topic, the max speed on UK motorways was 70mph (112km/hr)
Other max speeds (from 90's data):
France 81mph dry/68mph wet, Japan 62mph, Sweden: 68mph. Germany has stretches of road without maximum speed limits, but the maximum posted limit is 81mph. Germany posts minimum legal speeds in
some places.
I was researching traffic fatalities. If you're interested, for year 2000, in deaths per 100million km vehicle 'milage': France 1.88, Japan 1.80, US 1.62, Sweden 1.04, UK 0.78, according to US Dept. of Transportation (www.dot.gov)
"This is not a sig." -- R.
This summary immediately made me think of "A New Kind of Science."
Both books are apparently about how seemingly complex behavior may actually follow very simple rules. I strongly suspect that this one, like ANKoS, presents interesting theories, while glossing over the inconsistencies and failing to provide any rigorous proofs.
Whooooooooooo!
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
There is a difference between the calibration of the IQ tests, and the statistical analysis of the results of an IQ test when taken by some group.
IQ is a relative, age-based measure. It is DEFINED in such a way that the intellectual age of the "statistically average" person, when divided by their chronological age, results in the quantity "1". This is then multiplied by "100", to allow for an integer comparison instead of dealing with fractions of decimals.
So IQ = (100) * ( (mental age) / (years old) )
For a person who is of average mental age for their chronological age, the result is 100, by definition of the concept of the Intelligence Quotient.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
All this stuff is not new. It was 'discovered' by Gabriel Tarde more than 100 years ago.
But the internet has already begun to affect public mood and affect the waves. You are correct in that the media tells MOST people what to believe. But the Net's day is coming....and it does....oh boy....I expect to see some ruling elite necks stretched a bit long....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I argue that the real problem for socio-economics is not irrational decisions, but is instead a combination of consumers having incomplete data and the naturally subjective nature of value.
I'm not a marketing expert, but let's start with value. Paying actual money for a pet rock is not apparently economically rational on the surface. People bought something they could as easily pick up in the back yard. I submit that the value was the belonging that came from the purchace itself rather than any intrinsic value in the object (an ordinary rock).
We can question the rationality of such a value, but that many consumers valued it is a simple fact.
The other big factor is lack of sufficient information. In general, that translates to the cost of gathering information needed for an economic decision. Too many economists (in particular armchair economists) assume that the consumer actually has all information relevant to a decision in hand at the time a decision is needed. That is almost never the case. I argue that it is less the case today than in the past. A consumer may place value on environmental friendliness but will have to spend a great deal of money and time to find out that brand Q is actually made by R which is a subsidiary of S which also owns T which has division U that makes V and in the process polluted the drinking water where they live. You can bet that R and S value the consumer's ignorance and spend good money making sure that the relevant information never becomes common knowledge. If it ever does, they'll form company W (wholly owned by S) which will 'buy' R and rename the product to X. That's how we have someone who protests polluters but at the same time economically supports one of the worst.
As an example of a similar practice, consider that many people value organic food. A great many companies are fighting hard to make sure that 'organic' never recieves a legal definition. Many object to GM foods. Nearly every company that produces GM foods is lobbying hard to restrict other companies from labeling their products as GM free.
Another case that confounds economic prediction is advertising specifically designed to create illusory value without actually lying by tying their product with unrelated but valued things (romance, family togetherness, big boobs, etc.) The only real question there is how suggestable are consumers really, and do the many conflicting false associations more or less cancel out.
I expect this will be totally ignored, but I guess after a half dozen or so of these arguments I will try.
_ _________
When I write professionally, British English is expressly forbidden from the journals I publish in. I would imagine that is because they are American journals. This is, effectively, an international website and no one adheres to any standards of any kind. You might want to try to write so that other people can understand you, but believe me there are people who do not. If I were to publish in an English journal, and they required OED spelling I would do it. If American physics journals switched to British English, I would adapt - and maybe even start writing that way in my personal communications - but they do not. I doubt they would even consider it.
I love local color. I want southerners to keep the accent they have, and the Welsh too (even though I have difficulty parsing it). Why would you want to destroy other people's long established traditions? Lots of people speak English in their own ways and lots of unique quirks would be lost if we all just stopped using our slang and aligned to the OED like iron filings in a magnetic field.
The funny thing is that you all can understand each other perfectly (thus you can argue about it) so this obviously is not about communication, which is what language is for, anyhow.
________________________________________
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Groan! Can't type today
:)
were->where
winners->winner (Von Mises did not win the Nobel Prize)
delete extra "exchange"
Had to type it kinda fast.. Slashdot and all
Interesting how memories deteriorate over time eh?
At least there's a phonetic similarity.
I guess Hari Seldon would have something to say about that too...
...called it Social Intermental Activity. I too believe he predates everyone else.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Tarde
http://www.wolframscience.com/reference/books/p.ht ml
"Books in Stephen Wolfram's library relevant to NKS"
Human goals come from physiology, psychology, sociology. I need food and shelter; I need to to feel useful and entertained; I need the people around me to support me.
Economics is the stufy of how people allocate scarce resources to pursue their goals. Economics does not explain what the goals are.
As another poster commented, the fancy athletic shoes are about the goals of status and sexual attractiveness, not about the goal of physical fitness.
For another example, a lot of business people buy more computer power than they need to perform their computer tasks, because they are concerned about status goals, not performance goals. Ditto with fancy wristwatches, fancy cars, and conspicuous consumption of many types.
If you want to step back from all this and get some perspective, read some Thoreau. There's a guy who had very low status needs.
First, a Western can be Caucasian, ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic African, etc. Unfortunately, Ozborn (the person who wrote the above quote) believes that an ethnic Chinese cannot be a Westerner. So, to him, making a negative comment about Chinese society but making a positive comment about Western society is essentially attacking the ethnic Chinese and, hence, is "racist".
Ozborn needs to join the 21st century. Only Ku Klux Klan (KKK) think like Ozborn. Both Ozborn and the KKK think that an ethnic Vietnamese cannot be a Westerner. It is sad and disgusting that people still think like Ozborn and his comrades, the KKK.
By the way, Reporter (the person to whom Ozborn was referring) was referring to Westerners of all ethnic backgrounds when he was making her positive comments about Western society.
Lastly, I see no evidence that Westerners care less for their elderly parents than Chinese care for their elderly parents. Further, the point about compassion is that you care about someone whom you do not know. We could interpret caring for one's elderly parents as paying back an obligation for their having cared for us when we were young. However, when you contribute money and time to Amnesty International, you are caring for someone whom you do not know and who will not be contributing anything to your prosperity.
Yes. I have attended meetings of Amnesty International. They have few, if any, people from the Orient. Reporter did not say that there are no Chinese in the AI meetings. She just said that the Chinese are underrepresented in these meetings but are overrepresented in college classes dealing with commercial-subjects like engineering and business. This observation is true. Many Slashdotters can verify the state of affairs since they are actually in college, studying engineering or business. Why does making an observation that AI meetings have few Chinese (i.e. the folks born and raised in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan province) cause Ozborn so much heartache?
Slashdot editors are certainly crafty enough, methinks. An attempt to give a rational examination of some very interesting forces at play within society, --from two different perspectives.
Kudos, guys!
I'm very impressed.
-FL
Sorry, but no.
When one looks at a herd of cattle functioning to the tune of its own internal social dynamic, all I need do is throw a bunch of firecrackers into the feed bin to demonstrate that outside events can very much change things.
Only extreme arrogance or blindness would assume that the same isn't also true of human culture.
-FL
I would have thought "Theory and History" would have been a more appropriate link |-)
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
I really doubt that Mr. Prechter did any research into financial economics. A great deal of effort has been spent refuting theories that link future prices to past price movements. The Elliot Wave Theory is one of the more frequently used examples.
damkoziol
Beautiful (and amusing) summary of Asimov's Foundation trilogy!