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."
Psychohistory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just goes to show how research dollars are being wasted these days. How about asking the couples why they split up. Or better yet, face the truth: Our overpaid, spoiled population has unreastic expectations about marriage and life, and they'll continue to be miserable, materialistics wretches until the day they drop dead while choking on a cheeseburger.
Fourth Post!
Re:non-register link (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, thank you for the link. I skimmed through the article looking for the functions. The juicy stuff is towards the end of the article. The basic thesis of the article turns out to be that <obvious>the marriage is likely to be successful if the partners have similar functions</obvious>.
Reminds me of some wisdom I once gleaned from /usr/games/fortune:
Basically these researchers are admitting that social scientists generally understand the dynamics of the object of their study, but can't offer us poor saps any predictive formulae. All I can offer is this: flip a quarter.
Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:5, Insightful)
This has a lot of intuitive weight. A few weirdos may do unusual things, but the society does seem fairly predictable. However, there's loads of things it doesn't take into account.
Most important is statistical probability. Even if you base all your decisions on 95% probability results, the probability of you being right every time gets lower as you go along. In fact, after just 14 decisions like that, the probability is less than 50%. In the Foundation saga, Hari Seldon (a favourite of mine, obviously) uses psychohistory to predict events hundreds of years into the future -- which couldn't happen, even with only 1 decision to predict per year. In the books, Asimov resolves this using the Second Foundation, who (secretly) guide the progress of society to make sure everything goes to plan.
The second is, simply, new ideas. You can base a model of future history on populations and variables if they are known; but with the future there are too many unknowns. What if someone invents a new weapon? Or faster ships, meaning planets get colonised faster than you expected? Or new medicines come out, increasing life expectancies enormously? Or conversely, what if we lose some of the technologies we have now? The kind of prediction in psychohistory only works in a stagnant model.
Again, you can fix this using the Second Foundation bodge, so the books are believable. But the science itself is just not rational.
Psychohistory will never work (Score:4, Insightful)
"So, should we go to the beach for our vacation this year?"
"Yes, and don't forget to schedule enough time at Thanksgiving to visit both of our families."
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to be right every time to predict trends. If we are flipping a coin, I have only a 50% of predicting the next flip. But I can be quite confident saying that after 200 flips, you are going to get about 100 heads. More repetitions work in my favor, and I can predict more accurately.
Statistics supports your first statement, it doesn't detract from it.
Re:hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
The Calculus of the Girlfriend (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes she tries to step in and run my life. Sometimes she assumes her priorities should override my priorities. When that happens I express what is important to me, and stick to my guns.
Other times, and frankly more often, I don't have priorities of my own, and I'm happy to let her have her way.
Still other times, I try to get her to prioritize my concerns above her own. When that happens, she usually tells me to get bent. This is good.
When there are attempts to control some issue, I try to quantify how important it is to me, and how important it is to her, and let that be my guide. Its important to rely on one's own internal assessment of priority, because of course if you ask her how important something is, its typically infinity. ; )
God and/or monkeys created each of us to live OUR OWN LIVES. I see many people screw up their lives because they try to live for someone else (or worse yet, something else). This results in lost years and stunted freaky damage. Ya gots to get out there and defend yo turf, man.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:5, Insightful)
Now thermodynamics only works because the number of particles in any real-world system is so mindnumbingly large. If we tried to predict the behavior of only (!) a million or a billion particles, you're right, the errors would add up pretty quickly. But by using a sufficiently large sample size, we give the system so many states that deviations from the average become essentially neglible.
When Asimov conceived of psychohistory, one of the most important characteristics of the science was that the sample size needed to be inconceivably large - quadrillions of people spread over half a million worlds. IIRC, this was in fact one of Hari Seldon's first postulates. (The second was that the people in the system could not be allowed to learn that their actions were predictable.)
Also consider that psychohistory was not used primarily to predict the actions of the Foundation: the sample size was too small and the Foundationers knew they were being tampered with. Psychohistory was used instead to analyze the future of the Empire in general and the barbarian kingdoms of the periphery in particular.
As you might have guessed I'm a big fan of the books and all of Asimov's writings. His writing style was not what you would call sublime, but you can't beat his production of great ideas and well-conceived universes.
Re:Psychohistory? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? If people had the faintest ability to accurately answer that kind of questions, they wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
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Dum de dum.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:5, Insightful)
What would of happened if Hitler was killed in WWI?
The rise of Nazis easily may not of happened if Hitler wasn't there or if the Nazi's had a leader who was a little more sane they may of won the war.
What if the Soviet leader didn't yield during the Cuban missle Crisis?
Maybe nuclear was.
What if Napolean or Genghis Khan never existed?
Would their nations still have fought the wars they did? What if Napolean got more sleep band made some better military decisions?
What if Washington was a nutcase and the US was a third world nation today? (assume Canada didn't conquer them
Heck what if somebody if Florida knew how to design a ballot and Bush wasn't elected?
How different would the current world situation be, maybe Iraq wouldn't of been invaded, maybe even 9/11 wouldn't have happened.
When it comes down to it the path of society is decided by individuals. Sure for things to occur some pre-existing social conditions have to be there (government in complete disorder in Germany and county broke). But a HUGE amount depends on the whims of powerful individuals. I can't see psycohistory working.
On the other hand some general rules on crowd control and being able to control some powerful people could be very useful.. Conspiracy theory anyone?
I will say it only once... (Score:5, Insightful)
This works, of course, don't add much value because they never explain how or why things are like that. With physics you don't have to explain the basic laws, they "just are", but with everything else, you better have some explanation of some sort because, in reallity, they are nothing more than constructs based on physical constraints.
On the other side, it might be funny to see how some people could see these formalizations as expressing more or being more accurate than "plain verb" explanation. "If it's hard to understand then it's real science!!" (wrong!)...
Just my thoughts so (I am biased yes, I've seen to many quantitative economics to believe equations express more just because the math is hard...they usually don't).
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not defending the science here, but please remember that the absense of proof doesn't always mean it is impossible. For example, the "state of the art" is laughably imprecise right now. Often predictions are often made just a few months into the future.
For a bolder approach, check out the Foresight Exchange [ideosphere.com]. It's a reputation-based betting market that trades on a couple hundred eclectic claims ranging all over the place. I've been trading on it since mid 1996.
IMHO, the real problem with predicting the future or solving just about any problem of significance, is that the most vocal people aren't interested in facts or rational arguments. Instead, they feed off of uncertainty. Then it devolves into a choice between which Pascal's wager has the better payoff or which scenario of doom to avoid. What is deliberately suppressed is information that could be used to make rational decisions. If the controllers of society weren't so keen on suppressing information, then we might find out whether society is really as unpredictable as you say. Ie, is society unpredictable because it is dynamic or because we really don't know what's going on?
more to it than that (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2, Insightful)
[...]
As you might have guessed I'm a big fan of the books and all of Asimov's writings. His writing style was not what you would call sublime, but you can't beat his production of great ideas and well-conceived universes.
N.b.: Asimov didn't conceive of psychohistory; it was his editor who supplied that backbone and told Asimov to go off and write a story around it.
Re:The married life (Score:2, Insightful)
"What woman?"
Re:Psychohistory? (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is that non-linear systems, particularly when they involve large energy flows and/or positive feedback behave in ways that cannot be captured by statistics and averages. To some extent, Asimov's trilogy (actually originally published as a serial) hints at some of the difficulties of using then current mathematical models as the basis for psychohistory, and implies that there is something special or different about the models used, but he doesn't have any good ways to describe it, talk about it, or put it into the story. I'm quite certain he would have made the founder (Harry Seldon, right?) a big innovator and user of complexity theory, chaos theory and dynamic systems.
WRT the article, I don't think these connections have been explored thoroughly enough to get the full value implied. Perhaps this is still coming in future research and papers.
Re:The Calculus of the Girlfriend (Score:3, Insightful)
Come to think of it, it's all for the better. Kids are great; they make you reanalyze everything in your life. It's amazing how trivial some of your old problems become in the face of a kid with a fever at 4AM. And there is nothing in this world that can beat a 2 yr old charging up to you, squealing your name with arms out for a hug as you walk in from work.
The above poster is correct; you now have twice as many people to care for, and twice as many priority sets to acount for. Factor in that two of those people are either impossible (5 yrs old) or exceptionally difficult (5-16+ yrs old) to reason with, and you are in for some difficulty. Explaining and accounting for priorites with people who's persoanlity, and therefore priorities, are in constant flux is very challenging.