psychohistory

hopewrites

hopewrites

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In the thread the naivete of early SF I asked if this was a real thing yet.

The reason I asked was not just that I liked the idea that it could be done, but I remember watching a program a while back on the stalk market and how the mathematicians were running it, and how those that adhered strictly to the mathematics of it didn't believe in bubbles in the market, and those that studied a little psychology (or a lot) before entering the field did because they understood that mob-mentality was a thing and needed to be accounted for in the equations.

so is it a thing? is it almost a thing? all thoughts welcome.
 
Computer analysis predicted rises, ebbs in Afghanistan violence

What Asimov was talking about was taking large groups of humans who were unaware of the predictions and modeling the whole sweep of society analogous to the kinetic theory of gases where individual items are just that - individual and impossible to predict - but large masses develop a sort of bulk tendency. A more modern theory would have to account for aspects of chaos theory. The article I link to seems to be using large amounts of data and sort of brute-force calculating a specific type of behavior in a specific place. Whatever the specifics, something like psychohistory is probably possible and aspects of it are becoming more and more apparent, such as the above study (if valid). But whether it's possible to actually "predict the future", I don't know. It would necessarily have to be a statistical thing - the weatherman said it was going to rain today and it didn't. A psychohistorian might say it's highly likely that we'll have a war or a recession or whatever, and I don't think it could ever be 100%. It does raise interesting philosophical questions of freewill and determinism and complicates it by putting it on a species/social level. But, in terms of whether it's "a thing", I'd say something analogous to it is a small but growing thing. The more data and the more computational power, the more you can produce predictions that aren't wild guesses. So the more feasible it becomes to test those predictions and refine the principles you use to make them. So the more we'll find out whether it, or something like it, can indeed be a science.

But I'm not at all versed in the scientific literature on the subject - it could be here and I wouldn't know it (and, indeed, the corporations and governments with the computational power might not broadcast it) or it could be completely infeasible and I just haven't come across the reason why. ;)
 
Well if it is a thing we cant know about it can we. The encyclopedia galactica says the populations under study cant know they are being studied. The weather will do as it will whatever the weather man says, but people would make decisions about how to act based on the predictions of a psychohistorian thus altering the course of future history and making the predictions seem invalid.
 
Hi Hopesprings,

This is an interesting question. I believe there are scientists/companies that have claimed they can 'predict' 90% of human behaviour in simulations....but....what they are predicting is the day-to-day behaviour of US citizens in a society identical to current. (I think they use this to run simulations to try and predict traffic patterns, people flow in big public areas and what happens in emergencies etc...)

What I am sure they can not do at all is predict how this will fundamentally alter over time. So I think (this is just my opinion so I am happy for it to be superceded by those with more knowledge :D) there are some serious big reasons to suspect that a approach such as psychohistory may never really be possible:

  • You have no good data. Your history will always only show one path and what it did. Compare that to physics where the same experiment can be repeated time and time again, perhaps changing only one variable to see the effects on the results. We are not able to go back in time and see, 'Well what if food prices were a bit lower - what would happen to the Arab spring' It means we are almost powerless to really get to the bottom of exactly what triggered big events and hence history is relegated to interpretations.
  • The models you would probably need would be immensely complex (and forever incomplete) Ok, so perhaps it needs a Seldon-like genius to simplify the behaviour of humanity and society into a few number of variables...but...the usually simplification means that you are cutting down the question areas of research. Take the Theory of Everything - the idea that the basic equations that govern everything may potentially be able to be written on a T-shirt. Impressive stuff. But this is for most purposes a completely useless theory - it can't tell us anything about fluid dynamics, about how weather operates, how to build a bridges etc... On top of that, given that we only have the past to model on, how can we be at all sure that we have not completely missed whole boatloads of potential societies and modes of thought. I believe that humanity is at root a creative animal and we adapt in non-linear and creative manners to problems. Which brings me to...
  • The 'atoms' of the calculation, humans, never operate as 'theoretical' humans! This is the problem with another dismal science (their own name, not mine!) Economics. Here they are struggling because humans do not behave like our economists theoretical model - Homo Finance, who always gets the best price, invests wisely, has rational and predictable behaviour. Possibly this could be tackled by a more detailed look at proper psychology and brain science, but what this does do is add even more complexity to an already mind-boggling complex problem!
These are my main objections! But I should state 'Never say never' - who knows what will happen in the future.
 
The fundamental problem I have (and have always had) with pyschohistory is that it cannot take into account new discoveries that will inevitably be made in the future. These new discoveries, if significant enough, will change the social beahviour of the group/nation/species and so invalidate any previous predictions.

Just think, if pyschohistory, no matter how accurate it was, had been applied to the human race before the creation of the internet. It might have predicted stuff up to that point but beyond that it would have been invalidated as the internet has already radically changed our social behaviour. And this would then require new predictions to be generated. So basically you would still only be able to predict out to the next significant unpredicted discovery/development and since you can have no idea when that might occur the whole thing becomes, I won't say useless, but less that useful.
 
That's an excellent post, Venusian Broon, saying much of what I would have said (and probably more succinctly).

I think that much modern sociology and economics does attempt to use complex mathematics to model collective human behaviour. They cling to the belief that the inherent unpredictability of individuals can be averaged out by studying large numbers in a similar way that it is with gas molecules. But the advocates of such theories have a blind spot that they wilfully cling to. They will not let the fact that human's are purposeful beings inform their methods. They abhor the teleological approach as unscientific, denying themselves the logical, praxeological framework in which they can understand human behaviour.

Personally, I tend to think that psychology and sociology/economics are two categorically different disciplines. The former is concerned with ends, the latter with means. Economics takes the ends as a given and from there considers how best to employ the available means to achieve those ends. Hence it is strictly hypothetical and not predictive. It can be used as a tool to better understand how certain changes might lead to different behaviour becoming more or less likely but not as a tool to actually make specific predictions, even on collective scale.
 
Also you can't forget that the psychohistory in Asmiov's books is basing itself on the death and resurgence of an Empire...something that can be seen many times over in our history. So it is saying "looking at how all these Empires died, we can say that ours will die too, in about X years, and look how the new Empires rose, what did they have, what did they do? So if we engineer our people to have all this stuff, then we can create a new Empire in less time" To me it always seemed like cheating at Age of Empires, you know, that addictive computer game? You start at the bottom of the tech tree and then work your way up to the top...always easier if you play a map you have designed yourself because then you can lay all the wood and gold etc., right where they will be most useful for you, thus allowing you to reach supremacy quickest. They are using psychohistory to manipulate people, engineering a society that is most likely to survive and become dominant after the former Empire dies and people return to barabarian state...they are determining a single outcome - the resurgence of an Empire, of THEIR design...we are not determining a single outcome, you want something that will say everything...if you want an example, look at the people working on global warming, they are trying to predict how, compared to present and past use of the Earth, the Earth will change, based on the results seen in the past...
 
Asimov's Psychohistory, started as a mathematical idea, where large masses od people, and their interactions within each type, as well as with other types could be given accurate mathematical values, then those values used to calculate the probabilities of each distinct people's actiona and reactions to stimuli. Asimov took it further, in the concept to planning out how to speed up the re-emergence of an empire from barbarism. In short the path was set up, and ran using the periodic appearances of Seldon to make a direct influence on the Foundationers to the shorter path.

How Psychohistory as written differs from "real life" solutions, is that one strong leader can influence people in a direction he, or she, wants, which would skew a mathematical prophecy which cannot predict a wild card influence like one person existing. Asimov did touch the issue with the emergence of The Mule, who was a "mutant" and not human, but overall the entire science ignored strong and influential people who might change a group of people's direction by applying their own charisma to a situation.

Yeah it would be nice if Psychohistory could have existed, and to some small level (demographics and nillson ratings) there are some predictions of how people will react to things, but an overall social prediction is still fiction, not likely to happen.
 
Algorythms are being written and refined everyday that take into account what groups and individuals do and try to predict what they will do (or want). I'm talking about marketing of courseand obviously the motives are not as pure as those of Asimov's psychohistorian. That is, of course, the downfall of the Science. The funding will never be available to create the pure science necessary and the money spent in that direction will always be based on motives that would influence society in less than the purest of directions. Unfortunately, the idealism of an Asmovian future or even Roddenberry's pure motive based future must unfortunately be tempered by the fact that the allmighty Dollar (or Pound or Ruble or whatever) makes the world go round. In other words, if we had the motivation we would lack the resources, and if we had the resources our motivation would definitely come into question.
 
hopewrites said:
In the thread the naivete of early SF I asked if this was a real thing yet.

The reason I asked was not just that I liked the idea that it could be done, but I remember watching a program a while back on the stalk market and how the mathematicians were running it, and how those that adhered strictly to the mathematics of it didn't believe in bubbles in the market, and those that studied a little psychology (or a lot) before entering the field did because they understood that mob-mentality was a thing and needed to be accounted for in the equations.

so is it a thing? is it almost a thing? all thoughts welcome.
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Some aspects of what Asimov called psychohistory are included in economics, where individuals' utility (preference levels) can be grouped together in patterns and examined to give values for certain goods or services. It's used in the stock market and in everyday life.

Supermarkets have large car parks to draw you in, making it easier to shop there for multiple items than on the high street which has parking restrictions and requires you to go to several different shops. This helps make supermarkets more profitable and can squeeze out high street traders. It is more complicated than that, but you get the picture - factor X leads to predictable decisions, or a range of predictable decisions.

Behavioural economics, or behavioural game theory, concentrates on just this sort of question. It's even used to help national parks attract visitors, hence my limited knowledge of it. Ramped up to mass psychology and imperial history levels, I suppose it would be possible to make broad predictions. With a massive supercomputer (Deep Thought level (sorry to mix authors here ;))) you might even be able to predict an individual's response, but there are so many variables, you'd probably come up with an undecipherable number for an answer.

The concept of psychohistory always fascinated me in the Foundation books, though.
 
Another factor to consider is that Asimov started the Foundation series in 1941. Which means it was before TELEVISION. So if psychohistory is the study of mass thinking then the effect of mass media must become a relevant factor.

So apply psychohistory to the 9/11 Affair. LOL

psik
 
I just finished "Foundation" but haven't yet read the rest of the trilogy. I find this concept of psychohistory fascinating, and I do believe we may eventually develop a complete enough understanding of history and human behavioral patterns to make it work.

Today in western society, we put a lot of emphasis on the individual. Everyone is special, everyone wants to make their mark, everyone wants their claim to fame. But I don't see much of this attitude in Foundation. I think in a galaxy of a quintillion people in an Empire which had been stable for 12,000 years, group dynamics would be a bit easier to predict. The Empire functions on a mass scale only. We see during its breakdown that it no longer has the science to develop new technology - civilization had been stable so long there was no longer need for exploration or invention.

Even in today's world, the concepts of psychohistory should still work. If anything, the effects of mass media provide more - not less - predictable behavior because we are moving more as one unit instead of isolated small groups. Inventions such as television and the internet bring us closer to the society of the Galactic Empire.
 
One problem with the practical application of psychohistory for us is that we have only one planet from which to sample historical data. Seldon and co. sampled data from thousands of worlds, and in this way got large N for human responses to many similar events, and variations of similar events. We can't do that on a planetary scale. So, to copy Seldon, we'll have to wait until we've "conquered the stars".
 
It is my belief that Asimov himself, predicted the utter failure of psychohistory. The events of the Mule proved that a single individual could alter galactic history and psychohistory cannot be used in a practical way to study any individual.

This of course is also the case back here on Earth. There have been several individuals that have by their actions altered the course of human history. Jesus of Nazareth being the most obvious example. Also included in this category: Hitler, Thomas Jefferson, Nelson Mandela and Buddha to name but a few.

Asimov knew this and thus needed to insert a group of people with super-natural abilities (Second Foundation) to keep things running smoothly and this well before the Mule appeared on scene.
 
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The revelations regarding the collection and processing of metadata, the mass aggregate that social media has become, just make me feel more and more that psychohistory is (if not here than) just around the corner.
It seems to me that there are entities out there that are attempting to understand the race-mind-illusion through the aggregate data provided by social media and its "innocent" programming designed to tailor adds to the user. And understand it to the ends of controlling it.

So now my question becomes; should such understanding / control be feared?
 
Flyerman11 said:
It is my belief that Asimov himself, predicted the utter failure of psychohistory. The events of the Mule proved that a single individual could alter galactic history and psychohistory cannot be used in a practical way to study any individual.

This of course is also the case back here on Earth. There have been several individuals that have by their actions altered the course of human history. Jesus of Nazareth being the most obvious example. Also included in this category: Hitler, Thomas Jefferson, Nelson Mandela and Buddha to name but a few.

Asimov knew this and thus needed to insert a group of people with super-natural abilities (Second Foundation) to keep things running smoothly and this well before the Mule appeared on scene.
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This is an interesting perspective, and I'm not sure whether I agree.


I think the reason for the Second Foundation was to account for the fact that Hari Seldon knew he was only one individual - and not infallible. To make his long term dream come true, there would need to be guidance throughout history. Even according to his own theories of psychohistory, one person cannot change the social and cultural tides created by the masses. This would include him. He needed a following to correct any mistakes he had made and to continually make adjustments for events he could not foresee.


I'm not sure about your examples of individuals who have changed the course of history. One perspective is that religious leaders (like Jesus or Buddha) may be fictionalized figureheads for religious movements, not literal people who began a new religious belief. Joseph Campbell wrote several fascinating books on comparative religion, and patterns can be noted in religious development. I'm no expert on politics, but I think political leaders also tend to be part of a larger picture, not just individuals acting alone to change the course of history.
 
kythe said:
I'm not sure about your examples of individuals who have changed the course of history. One perspective is that religious leaders (like Jesus or Buddha) may be fictionalized figureheads for religious movements, not literal people who began a new religious belief.
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Jesus of Nazareth, at the very least, was a real person, there are various historical proofs, including the writings of Tacitus (a roman) and the Jewish historian Josephus.

Asimov, on the other hand, (I believe) in his book Foundation's Edge has his character Golan Trevize say that the Seldon plan cannot work, simply because it was impossible for Seldon to anticipate new technology being invented. Think, just 30 years ago, there was no internet, no smart phones and certainly no Facebook or twitter, things that have changed the way society conducts itself. What's the next disruptive technology? I sure wish I knew!
 
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Two things.
First, simple reliance on atoms and gas laws was eventually surpassed in the Foundation series. The heart of the matter is human psychology. This is why I dismiss "Big Data" type analyses and instead go for the incredibly deep and complex path of something like "computational psychohistory", which is far from mindless number crunching or stochastic probability.
Second, as has been stated, Asimov himself realized the problem of predicting the future (ie formulating psychohistory) without knowing all that might transpire on the road to it. There is a nice exploration of epistemology in Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" where Ben Franklin writes about a sect called the "Dunkers", who may have foreseen this problem even long before Asimov.
"The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time." - Neil Postman
 
I think it was pure hokum, and feel the same way about other claims to be able to predict events. What Asimov probably did do well was focus on the large scale rather than small group effects. I think that was insightful. But ultimately it was a product of a more optimistic time.
 
The very concept of mathematical (and computational) sociology makes people nervous because it lacks mystery and magic. We do love our teddy bears.
"to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance."
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
 
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