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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.
The web site of the Socionomics Institute
An overview of socionomics by John Casti, of the Santa Fe Institute.
...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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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!"
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?
"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.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
Oh, there's also discussion about this research in The Economist
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.
"OK, that's a bit strong. But read Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth."
Uhm, Psychohistory wasn't a sham in the Asimov universe. Psychohistory was predicated on *human* behavior as a society. The Mule disrupted it because he was a *mutant*, a radical in the equation that threw everything off like a Visual Basic script-kiddy. However, the Second Foundation defeated him and returned the galaxy upon the Seldon course... Its like if Nostradamus had a powerful cult that policed our planet ensuring everything happened as he predicted...
Besides, the later Foundation books should be considered heretical anyways...a lot of that stuff came from his [Asimov] wife. And it of course, wasn't as good as the original stuff. The Gaia stuff was stupid.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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...
Its like if Nostradamus had a powerful cult that policed our planet ensuring everything happened as he predicted...
Mind your tongue! Revealing the secrets of the Brotherhood is a hazardous thing to do...
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...
Mind your tongue! Revealing the secrets of the Brotherhood is a hazardous thing to do...
Hey, I have a bone to pick with you. Where's my membership card? Did the mailman lose it again? If so, how come you guys couldn't predict that and sent the card via UPS or FedEx instead? Plus, I still don't have my ceremonial mask for the upcoming *Eyes Wide Shut* themed pot-luck!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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
Chaos theory will only be called chaos theory until we expand our understanding to encompass the underlying phenomena that bridge the events that today seem unconnected.
Um, no.
Chaos theory has nothing to do with a lack of understanding of the underlying phenmonena. One of the first chaotic systems that was well studied after all was Isaac Newton's three body problem. Everyone knew how gravity worked between two bodies, but the greatest minds of two centuries could not figure out what happend with three or more bodies. Finally it was proven that except for a small handful of exceptions, there is no way to determine what three or more bodies will do to each other under the influence of gravity. (Fortunately for life on Earth, our solar system appoximates one of those handful of solutions.)
Chaos theory is not about the problems understanding the causes, but the problems predicting the effects.
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.
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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.
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a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?