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Asimov's Psychohistory Becoming a Reality?
northernboy writes "Today's LA Times has an article describing how a Wikileaks data dump from Afghanistan plus some advanced algorithms are allowing accurate predictions about the behavior of large groups of people. From the article: 'The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.' Considering they did not discriminate between types of skirmish, but only when and where there was violence, this seems like an amazing result. It looks like our robotic overlords will have even less trouble controlling us than I previously thought."
Researcher Sean Gourley discussed "the mathematics of war"on TED already. Not a new phenomenon, but an interesting extension.
In the absence of change in circumstances, it is quite obvious that areas of conflict will have more conflict. TFA doesn't say enough about the methodology for one to be able to estimate how valuable it is.
On the other hand, yet another good thing about the Wikileak emerges. Were those data hidden by the secrecy wall, this research would not have been available to the NATO forces over there. Is secrecy really productive? Was the leak good or bad? Are the costly measures to make future leaks less likely a good investment?
Predicting what a group of people will do is fairly easy; Determining what a particular member of that group will do is very hard. So it can't predict who will attack; It might be able to tell you where though, and possibly when.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The first rule of Asimov's psychohistory is that you cannot tell the people you're monitoring that psychohistory exists. So publishing this has now invalidated the possiblity, showing yet another example of a headline that is a question to which the answer is, "no."
Given the history of conflict those seem like some of the easier predictions to make. Alas Psychohistory does not give specifics and only works in secrecy. Like time travel acting on knowledge of the future can alter the future.
Even in Asimov's world, psychohistory only works on groups that don't practice psychohistory themselves. Harry Seldon only kept things from going off the rails by making the science die out, and by starting a Second Foundation of telepaths.
Once someone starts making predictions from data aggregation more effective, the race will be on to duplicate or improve on it, and then nobody's prediction algorithms will work.
Almost sounds like someone should write a dystopian Foundation book, where the mathematicians race to predict each others' predictive abilities (and of course, stop them!)
This is model building, not prediction. They tried to find a model that can calculate the events of 2010 based on data from 2009. This may sound like prediction, but the important thing is that the researchers started this after the events the model "predicted" happened. Thus, they were able to tweak their models to fit reality. This is not a bad thing, that's how you create working models, but a prediction is a statement about things in the future. They only made predictions now that they have published their results, and whether they are right or not remains to be seen.
for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109
Most modern Americans are unaware of the worldwide ideological debates of the early 20th century, and thus they miss the boat on what psychohistory obviously is. From a variety of things, including knowing Asimov's involvement with the Futurians in the 1930s, it's obvious that psychohistory is a parody of the Marxist conception of historical materialism. In fact, to anyone familiar with Marxian historical materialism, it is incredibly easy to see that this is what is made reference to by psychohistory in the book - although in the book the technique has been further developed. I've always felt the Mule was a reference to charismatic leaders like Hitler and Mussolini - ugly at close view, but with the ability to persuade large masses of people nonetheless, something which Marx did not foresee. That's just my interpretation though, it's not completely clear. I think that Hari Seldon is a Karl Marx figure is even more of a sure bet than the Mule possibility. To people who don't know the ideas of the Futurians, or the ideological ideas within the milieu of left-wing Jewish intellectual circles in New York City in the 1930s, I think it is easy to miss a lot of the references being made.
And there is no accounting in any of this for the actions of a dumbass Lance Corporal and his buddies inducing utter chaos into the system.
Scene: Djibouti near the Ethiopian Border. A bunch of Lance Corporal Marines and their CO.
"Stand watch here, and if anyone in Ethiopia comes over, you need to tell us and chase them back into Ethiopia. But under no circumstances are you to go into Ethiopia yourselves, not even if they're firing upon you. We mean it. Got that?"
"Sure thing"
Armed Ethiopians of doubtful allegiance cross the border into Djibouti
Lance corporals enthusiastically chase them back and cross into Ethiopia themselves while armed
Possible outcome that didn't happen:
"Daddy, what did you do in the Ethiopian War?"
"Our unit started it."
This may or may not be true. But I tell this story to make a point. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone to trigger a hurricane, the action of a few dumbasses can trigger some serious shit. Since we're talking psychohistory here, Hari Seldon's Plan broke down under the chaos of the Mule. You can do all the modelling you want, but complex systems such as human societies and such, are prone to chaos introduced by small numbers of influential people, whether they know it or not and good luck trying to model *that* and predict on it.
--
BMO
But I thought that The Mule left office in 2009...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
mv /home/* /dev/mule
We are protecting oil pipelines in Afghanistan
Why was I never told that Afghanistan being an important oil producing country?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The idea of psychohistory was also explored by Michael F. Flynn in a novel called In the Country of the Blind; he didn't use that word, but rather the word "cliology". In that novel, cliology was independently invented by multiple people at approximately the same time, and there were several secret societies trying to use cliology to model what would happen and steer the course of history. But with multiple societies working at cross-purposes, things got a bit messy at times. (But at least one of the secret societies just used cliology to pick stocks and get fabulously wealthy.)
http://books.google.com/books/about/In_the_Country_of_the_Blind.html?id=xVqB5-DLRAgC
It's not a perfect book, but some of the ideas are really interesting.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I read the Foundation Trilogy about 40 years ago and have been terrified ever since that this type of technology would be used in marketing. Thank goodness we're only using it in war.
wasn't there a bit that said the farther in the future you go, the more accurate the prediction? For example, you couldn't predict that a group of soldiers would do something horrific next month, but you could predict that a year from now hostilities would begin... the same ones partially caused by previously mentioned incident
The longer you extend the time frame, the longer your prediction will come true - for example:
If one predicts that an air plane will crash today, killing hundreds, that prediction might have a very slim chance of becoming true
But if one predicts that event to happen sometimes in the next decades
You get my drift
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
That's utter bull hockey. We have patrol bases in areas that have nothing but marijuana fields around them. We have Police Mentoring Teams (PMTs) working with Afghan National Police in towns that are on the major highway that runs in a kind of circle around the country. In all my time there, I never once even SAW an oil pipeline.
Your information is complete drivel.
And in the countries the US hasn't gotten to yet, they just stone women who've been raped for adultery, sell daughters into marriage and generally work against any sort of progress.
Yeah. Like some electrician in a shipyard in Gdansk who gets pissed off about politics. The Warsaw Pact nations never saw that one coming.
Note to architect: Don't upset the electrical contractors.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's very true! In the Bible a prophet like Ezekiel would "prophesy" that the city of Tyre would be sacked, and low and behold, three centuries later, Alexander II sacked that sucker. Tyre sacked, who woulda thunk it?
And in the countries the US hasn't gotten to yet, they just stone women who've been raped for adultery, sell daughters into marriage and generally work against any sort of progress.
From Wikipedia:
Current dowry practices
#India
#Bangladesh
#Pakistan
#Nepal
#Afghanistan
#Vietnam
Good luck with getting through that list. Are they starting their way from the bottom and working upwards? Perhaps should have ticked the bottom one off before moving to the next one.
"If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it." Sun Tzu, Art of War, Datalinks.
(Actual psychohistory, though, was supposed to predict events over a thousand years. Not happening.)
You mean countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, staunch US allies who receive billions in funds?
Your naive trust in the congruence of progress and American involvement astounds me.
I never understood why people believe it's okay to kill people as long as you "respect" their dead bodies afterward.
no taxation without representation!
We have patrol bases in areas that have nothing but marijuana fields around them
I seriously doubt you've ever been to Afghanistan
People there don't plant marijuana there
O RLY?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"