The First Steps Towards Asimov's Psychohistory? 293
lawrencekhoo writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about the Gottman Institute's (a.k.a. the love lab) work on modeling the dynamics of marital conversations. These models are described in John Gottman et. al.'s recent book The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press). Should be an interesting read for anyone who ever wondered if human interactions could be mathematically modeled."
non-register link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Psychohistory? (Score:5, Informative)
"Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again."
Correct! (Score:2, Informative)
Asimov's psychohistory was the study of mob mechanics.
Pyschohistory is better explained in the tail of the Robot series and the prequels to the Foundation series than in the "main" Foundation series itself.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I'm pretty sure you're wrong, the thing is, when you're flipping a coin the past results don't effect the future results. In psychohistory, the past effects the future, so if you predict a city falling, and a new city coming into existence and making a war fleet and the city never falls, just by chance, it messes up your results causing your plans to mess up.
Re:The married life (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot bachelors might not understand this concept.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:3, Informative)
In other words, you could easily predict the NEXT coin flip (i keep on using the coin flip, but i am thinking on the physchohistory of humankind, so this experiments are NOT radom as in a normal coin flip) with near 100% accuracy. But you cannot predict the 10000 coin flip, because to predict that coin flip you'll need to know the exact flips that came before and in what order.
I think I made a short explanation long, but the point is the original poster does know that statistics work, but NOT so well when future predictions depend on the accuracy of all past predictions. Errors do get accumulated as any time series analist (or any econometrician) will tell you... prediction does lose accuracy as you get further away from "present time"...
I'd say phychohistory would be possible if and only if ALL individual acctions and all physical fenomens could be traced, and we'd be talking just about physical on a grand scale. We'dd be just attoms in deterministic paths...
Re:Psychohistory? (Score:2, Informative)
so sorry cowboy (Score:4, Informative)
if your'e interested in this sort of thing, google the following topics: game theory, evolutionary game theory, network theory (graph theory), social network theory, evolutionary game theory in networks, agent-based modelling, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, memetics. For a general entry into complexity sciences, go to www.santafe.edu The Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, and finding the working papers page(s). Lots of stuff to read there. And for an excellent discussion of the reasons why we should use mathematics in sociology at all (why it isn't just descriptive) look for Dwight Read's paper, On the Utility of Mathematical Reasoning in Anthropology. google it.