And even Asimov admitted it. The theory was as follows: although individuals and small groups of people are impossible to predict, large groups of people will, statistically, behave in a predictable way to the given conditions. Thus, by modelling the influences on large groups of people, you can predict their reactions, and thus predict the future course of social history.
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.
Actually, theorically, the science is possible, the only problem being that you'd have to know every single thing thats happened in the universe at one point to have the perfect model. The problem facing the science isn't that we couldn't predict everything based on something before it, but that we don't know what was before. We'd need a starting point, and that starting point would need to incorpate everything thing in the universe.
Hari Seldon in one of the prequels says something to the effect (to lazy t
You need to get out of your Euclidian thinking and at least join the last century:
Even if you could somehow "know" everything, and Heizenberg's prevents that, you still face the possibility that quantum events are not pre-determined but in fact random in which case your predictions / or two universes start to diverge dramatically beginning a very short time interval after you made your magical recording of "everything".
That's a rather Newtonian viewpoint; it was already 50 years out of date by the time Asimov wrote Foundation.
A quantum-mechanical universe precludes being able to observe or predict the universe in infinite detail. However we can still make useful predictions about the universe (and smaller systems).
We do this by estimating probabilities that a quantum mechanical system will enter one of a number of states, and using a sample size large enough that essentially the most likely outcome always happens.
This hand-waving lets us make rigorous mathematical predictions about substances and objects that can be verified - such as "At 100 Celsius and atmospheric pressure, water will boil." And by George, it works!
You got it backwards really. Science works by observation first, then theory. The only reason our fancy quantum formulas "predict" water boiling at 100 celsius is that the math was modelled on observation of that fact (and others). Thus, science is mostly "curve-fitting"; start with data, force the function.
This is not just a trivial distinction either; misunderstanding this philosophy of science has lead to all sorts of confusion about science with people making foolish statements about the 'laws of na
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%.
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.
Statistics supports your first statement, it doesn't detract from it.
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.
In psychohistory, the past effects the future, so if you predict a city falling,
A point, but it's more complex than this. The world is a jumble of dependent and independent events, and it's often hard to tell the difference. My principle can be applied to some.
My coin principle doesn't help me if I want to predict when will city X fall. It will help me if I want to estimate how many cities will fall in the next 100 years.
....to your question.Markov Process is
a stochastic process in which the future distribution of a variable depends only on the variable's current value. Stock prices are widely assumed to follow a Markov process.So a Markovian analysis of Asimov's model might very well support his claims.who knows?
Nobody cares about averages here, you are supposed to predict the future, as in the order in which the coins will land as time passes. If you miss the order the results will vary to a great degree.
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'l
It's been a while since I read the series, but it seems to me that at a certain point, Seldon's predictions failed precisely because of the probabilities involved. I never saw the second foundation as a "bodge" however. It seems pretty intuitive to me that when a science is developed, people will continue to work on it - hasn't that been the case with most things? And the idea that the second foundation should be secret is really just a manifestation that knowledge of an observer changes behavior. And l
They were under the impression that the entire world would only needs about 5 or 6 computers, total. That's the difference between revolution and evolution.
That's a good point (I hate it when I agree with people who disagree with me!;-). I just need a better analogy perhaps, or perhaps I'm just being dogmatic in regards to Asimov's books - I always loved them.
Spot on. And in addition, chance accidents and natural occurrences can have significant effects on the direction that societal progress takes. Faulty O-rings or chunks of ice can delay or put an end to space programs. New viruses like SARS springing up can depress economies and change people's migration patterns. Hanging chads can lead to countries being invaded. Etc. etc. etc. They say that you should never say something can't be done, but I'm sorry, trying to predict the future this way is a lost ca
You're agreement with the other post proves you lack an understanding or even an appreciation for abstract science. I liked the comparison one person made to thermodynamics. Quantum physics works well, also, for a comparison. You can call psychohistory a lost cause all you want but I'm glad men like Newton, Carnot, Einstein, Young, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Watson, Crick, Hawking, and Asimov don't think in terms of "lost causes." Not everything is cut and dry and can be proved as "babble" because the wo
It is you who is being ignorant. Read a book on chaos theory already, you obviously have no conception of it. All the scientists you mentioned DID think in terms of lost causes; it's just that they only worked on things that they DIDN'T think were lost causes. I'm sure each of them in turn would put psychohistory in the same bin as astrology.
Where are the scientists working on psychohistory today? It would appear all the world's scientists agree with me. Including some of the ones you listed who are s
Psychohistory was intended to be exactly analogous to thermodynamics. Both sciences study particles whose individual behavior cannot be predicted, and both are inherently based on statistical mechanics.
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.
When Asimov conceived of psychohistory... [...] 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.
You are correct in connecting a statistical science like thermodynamics with psychohistory, but the truth is that thermo only works for systems that are near equilibrium where linear analysis still works. There are numerous hints that Asimov has some grasp of these difficulties even if he doesn't have an answer to them. The Mule being a prime example, as well as what you said about the first Foundation. He made the Mule into an aberation (a mutant) because an ordinary leader, no matter how extrordinary,
Even if you ignore the declining probability it still doesn't work. The problem is that is works with mob phsycology but forgets that mobs are usually led.
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?
Hmmm... This perhaps leads us to the ooold problem - what is the driving force/reason behind historical events ?
The state of the development of society/ideas/sciences/technology/philosophy/art/... at that point or some individual who is LABELLED as proponent of an idea/philosophy/movement/... ? In most of the cases (if you study history/inventions/...) one will see the same/similar idea/technology/literary work/... being produced by totally unrelated individuals/societies/...around the same period of
It's the same as trying to predict any system with non-linear chaotic dynamics (e.g. the weather)... it's fundamentally impossible to do on anything other than a very short timescale, and even then only if you're in a fairly smooth region of the solution space. Note how short term weather forcasts are generally good, but occasionally something comes out of the blue all the same, such as the storm that hit england a few years ago and did so much damage to Kew gardens etc.
In the stories, the Mule played this role. He was an individual with an outsized effect that could not be taken into account ahead of time, so the Second Foundation had to deal with him.
I'm guessing Seldon might say most of the situations you listed may have thrown things off in the short term, but long term trends would have brought things back to the predicted outcome eventually.
Both the Foundation and Second Foundation were affecting things in subtle and not so subtle ways to keep the long term tr
There are many reasons it wouldn't work, at least not as described, but it also does a lot of handwaving that could be filled in differently based on more modern mathematics and science.
You also missed that the Mule is a fairly obvious analogy to Hitler, and Asimov is acknowledging that an individual can muck up the models. In truth, I suspect that abberant leaders (list left as a excercise for the reader), are typically much more predictable and potentially controllable than truly visionary leaders who
Ah, but Kennedy's space program didn't really make that much of a difference, did it? When was the last time we sent someone to the moon? I think that the main result of teh Apollo program was to convince the public that space exploration was just about empty gestures instead of practical results, and thus the benifits of the new technology developed were cancelled out. This isn't neccesarily to say that leaders can't have a large effect, but that Kennedy was a bad example.
Didn't it? In hindsight it looks a lot different, but I don't think there were many who could even imagine people walking on the moon, much less provide the vision that it could be done inside the decade. Just because of the conspicuous lack of political leadership since that time has not followed through on this vision doesn't mean it doesn't represent visionary leadership. This leaves aside whether the space program is the best application of the skills and resources, but you can't say the original pus
I would certainly admit that important things cannot be done without historical opportunity, and that if the opportunity exists someone will take advantage of it sooner or later, but the specific results may vary greatly deppending on who is in charge.
If WWII Germany had been led by a Napoleon instead of a Hitler, we might have had a cold war with them instead of the Russians, and if revolutionary France had had a Hitler come to power, they wouldn't have been nearly so succesful.
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.
Congratulations, you've just stumbled onto one of the great debates among professional historians. Traditional Marxist orthodoxy holds that everything is deterministic -- in other words, if you know the startin
What if the Soviet leader didn't yield during the Cuban missle Crisis?
Maybe nuclear was.
So with psychohistory, you take 10,000 planets, with 10,000 missle crises, and you can report the probability of nuclear war occuring. Doesn't help on any particular planet though.
If you make 40 decisions of 95% probability, and they were all right, you still have a 95% chance of being right the next time still.
What you meant to say is given 40 decisions, choosing a an answer that is 95% right will only give you 50% chance of being right all 40 times.
I have to keep telling people this. If you flip a coin a million times, and lands on heads every time, you still have a 50% chance of landing on heads th
I have to keep telling people this. If you flip a coin a million times, and lands on heads every time, you still have a 50% chance of landing on heads the next time. If you say you are going to flip the coin a million + 1 times, the chances of not getting tails once is astronomical.
Actually, if it comes up heads a million times, I'd say there's a good chance that the coin isn't 'fair' anymore.:)
But I know what you mean. So if you meet a family with three children, and you don't know the gender, but two
Actually it's not quite 50/50, but close enough for government work. Last time I saw the statistics, boys were slightly more common births, but girls had a better chance of surviving. Source? My faulty memory of an article sometime in the past few years. [shrug]
I heard an argument that there would be 75% chance of a boy. It's because you don't know the birth order. There are eight combinations of sexes for three siblings; MMM, MMF, MFM, MFF, FMM, FMF, FFM, FFF.
If all you know is that there are two girls, the only options left are MFF, FMF, FFM, and FFF. And in 75% of the cases, the third sibling is a boy.
Basically... you were screwing up the permutations and left out a lot of possible outcomes by not uniquely identifying the females. If the order of birth matters for the male, then it should also matter for the females.
I like your arguement though... I'll have to let so
I think the puzzle was *based* on not uniquely identifying the females. If you look at a large sample of three-children families, half of them will have at least two girls.
Of that subgroup, most often the other sibling will be a boy.
I love this stuff, I don't care if it's a little off-topic.:)
The order of birth is relevant to the probability of a gender.
MMM MMF MFF FFF are the only possible outcomes of a family that have 3 children.
I wish I had the real data on the population, because I think there are the same number of families with three girls as 2 girls and a boy.
If you want to include the unneeded variable of order of birth, then you have to order the females as well as the males. In order to do this, you have to uniquely identify every sibling. Lets name the children A,B, and C.
Well... my table is wrong, but I'm sure if you draw out every possible option, you will see it will turn out to be 50% chance.
Yet another way to think about it:
There are 6 different orders of birth that could result in fff. There are 2 each orders of births that can result in MFF, FMF, and FFM. 2+2+2/2+2+2+6=.5
There *are* fewer families with three girls than with two and a boy! Just like your chances of getting a 50% by guessing on a true-false quiz are higher than any other score. The reason is obvious: flip a coin twice. Getting heads only once is twice as likely as getting heads twice. Really! Try it!
This is also why 11 and 12 stats are so much more likely than 18s when rolling a character in D&D - more ways for the dice to add up to those numbers. Basic laws of combos. This distribution is also what the
I'm counting it three times because it occurs three times more often that FFF; once as MFF, once as FMF, and once as FFM.
Look at it this way: of all the families with three children, there are eight ordered combinations (M=Male, F=Female, and left-to-right order = order of birth):
You can't use the fact that an event hasn't occured to boost the chances of it occuring. If you met two girls, how does that even matter what the other person is going to be
I'm sure the moderators are long gone, so what the heck...
I think you're saying this: I've met two of three siblings, and they're both girls. The other one we don't know. If it's a boy, then there are six combinations (MF1F2, MF2F1, F1MF2, F2MF1, F1F2M, F2F1M) and if it's a girl there are six combinations (F1F2F3, F1F3F2, F2F1F3, F2F3F1, F3F1F2, F3F2F1). I agree that there are an equal number of ordered combinations depending on the gender of the third child.
Birth order and unique assignment miss the mark. What matters is how you were provided with knowledge of two girls. If "you" came to know two entities *at random* and discovered they were female, discovery of a third girl would be fifty-fifty. If, on the other hand, you asked someone with knowledge of all three children to show you two girls, your interpretation would be undeniable. A similar illustration of knowledge-barriers exists in the Monty Hall Problem.
Yes, I was aware when writing that I should have been clearer about what I meant by a 50% probability... but then, it's Slashdot, so I also knew some math geek would pop out of the woodwork to add an informative comment about how statistics works to my own, so I needn't bother. Isn't/. wonderful?:-)
Compare this problem to that of the NCAA Basketall tournament. The vast majority of First round games were easy to predict. But for every game where you chose incorrectly, the predictions you made after that round would also be inaccurate.
With Psychohistory, mathematics were used to predict events hundreds of years into the future. So long as the basic data and assumptions on which each decision is made remain the same, each decision has your 95% chance of being correct. If that 1 in 20 is wrong, however
I have to keep telling people this. If you flip a coin a million times, and lands on heads every time, you still have a 50% chance of landing on heads the next time.
No, you have a weighted coin.
Any sufficiently large statistical data that should be random but instead shows a clear pattern means that there's an influence you're not allowing for.
Again, you can fix this using the Second Foundation bodge, so the books are believable. But the science itself is just not rational.
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 coup
But Asimov always spoke of the future (in his novels) as malleable. For instance, when Hari Seldon (in the novels) appears at certain dates, you hear him say things like, "Well, by all probablility..." and "You *should* be here at..." In other words, he always treated Psychohistory as a fluid art.
He obviously sets this up as a near 'unbreakable' device so that a character like the Mule comes along and destroys it. It made for a good story - forget the science. For more science to your fiction see Arthur C.
Will I have the moral right to spoil the ending of, say, Sixth Sense in about 2025 in a common forum? What is the threshold for this? 15 years? 20 years?
I red them all. I encourage my friends at work to read sci-fi, and encourage them to read/. at the same time. One is 21 years old. Poor kid, he would have "managed" to read them before turning into 10.
The fact that you spoiled (I insist), indeed, should be a surprise to the "reader" at any age and at any time.
My PhD supervisor (or dissertation advisor, as Americans would call it) often uses the example of psychohistory when explaining the role of statistics and prediction in social science. I personally like the analogy of those physics slit-experiments (can't remember the correct name of it, but the one where you pass individual photos through a slit and they form an interference pattern on the other side, thus suggesting the wave-particle duality of photons). You can't predict what an individual photon can do,
The mule was however a "freak", something that would happen only once in hundreds of years. However, unexpected new inventions happens all the time: consider how many there have been in the last two centuries, and how much they've transformed society beyond expectation in that time. It's not really a rare occurrence, as Asimov attempts to make it out to be.
Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so.
-- Josh Billings
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.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Hari Seldon in one of the prequels says something to the effect (to lazy t
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:4, Interesting)
A quantum-mechanical universe precludes being able to observe or predict the universe in infinite detail. However we can still make useful predictions about the universe (and smaller systems).
We do this by estimating probabilities that a quantum mechanical system will enter one of a number of states, and using a sample size large enough that essentially the most likely outcome always happens.
This hand-waving lets us make rigorous mathematical predictions about substances and objects that can be verified - such as "At 100 Celsius and atmospheric pressure, water will boil." And by George, it works!
Backwards science (Score:2)
This is not just a trivial distinction either; misunderstanding this philosophy of science has lead to all sorts of confusion about science with people making foolish statements about the 'laws of na
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: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:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
A point, but it's more complex than this. The world is a jumble of dependent and independent events, and it's often hard to tell the difference. My principle can be applied to some.
My coin principle doesn't help me if I want to predict when will city X fall. It will help me if I want to estimate how many cities will fall in the next 100 years.
Markov process may be an answer.... (Score:1)
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'l
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
That's a good point (I hate it when I agree with people who disagree with me!
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Where are the scientists working on psychohistory today? It would appear all the world's scientists agree with me. Including some of the ones you listed who are s
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 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.
Statistics vs. Complexity (Score:2)
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?
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
The state of the development of society/ideas/sciences/technology/philosophy/art/ .
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
I assume that one might be able to
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
You also missed that the Mule is a fairly obvious analogy to Hitler, and Asimov is acknowledging that an individual can muck up the models. In truth, I suspect that abberant leaders (list left as a excercise for the reader), are typically much more predictable and potentially controllable than truly visionary leaders who
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Kennedy and the Space Program (Score:2)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
If WWII Germany had been led by a Napoleon instead of a Hitler, we might have had a cold war with them instead of the Russians, and if revolutionary France had had a Hitler come to power, they wouldn't have been nearly so succesful.
Likewise, just based on po
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
scripsit quantaman:
Congratulations, you've just stumbled onto one of the great debates among professional historians. Traditional Marxist orthodoxy holds that everything is deterministic -- in other words, if you know the startin
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
So with psychohistory, you take 10,000 planets, with 10,000 missle crises, and you can report the probability of nuclear war occuring. Doesn't help on any particular planet though.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
I'm probably just nit-picking though.
If you make 40 decisions of 95% probability, and they were all right, you still have a 95% chance of being right the next time still.
What you meant to say is given 40 decisions, choosing a an answer that is 95% right will only give you 50% chance of being right all 40 times.
I have to keep telling people this. If you flip a coin a million times, and lands on heads every time, you still have a 50% chance of landing on heads th
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Actually, if it comes up heads a million times, I'd say there's a good chance that the coin isn't 'fair' anymore.
But I know what you mean. So if you meet a family with three children, and you don't know the gender, but two
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
If all you know is that there are two girls, the only options left are MFF, FMF, FFM, and FFF. And in 75% of the cases, the third sibling is a boy.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
You use a set of possible out comes based on a permutation with only combination data. Lets do this a more proper way:
M1F1F2 M1F2F1 F1M1F2 F2M1F1 F1F2M1 F2F1M1 VS
F1F2F3 F1F3F2 F2F1F3 F2F3F1 F3F1F2 F3F2F1
Basically... you were screwing up the permutations and left out a lot of possible outcomes by not uniquely identifying the females. If the order of birth matters for the male, then it should also matter for the females.
I like your arguement though... I'll have to let so
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Of that subgroup, most often the other sibling will be a boy.
I love this stuff, I don't care if it's a little off-topic.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
MMM MMF MFF FFF are the only possible outcomes of a family that have 3 children.
I wish I had the real data on the population, because I think there are the same number of families with three girls as 2 girls and a boy.
If you want to include the unneeded variable of order of birth, then you have to order the females as well as the males. In order to do this, you have to uniquely identify every sibling.
Lets name the children A,B, and C.
The poss
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Yet another way to think about it:
There are 6 different orders of birth that could result in fff. There are 2 each orders of births that can result in MFF, FMF, and FFM. 2+2+2/2+2+2+6=.5
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
This is also why 11 and 12 stats are so much more likely than 18s when rolling a character in D&D - more ways for the dice to add up to those numbers. Basic laws of combos. This distribution is also what the
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Look at it this way: of all the families with three children, there are eight ordered combinations (M=Male, F=Female, and left-to-right order = order of birth):
MMM - 12.5%
MMF - 12.5%
MFM - 12.5%
MFF - 12.5%
FMM - 12.5%
FMF - 12.5%
FFM - 12.5%
FFF - 12.5%
-----------
100.0%
Now if you meet a family with three children, and all you know is that two are girls (you have no idea aabout the order)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
MFF=MF1F2 + MF2F1=2 possibilities
FMF=F1MF2 + F2MF1=2 possibilities
FFM=2 possibilities
FFF=F1F2F3 + F1F3F2 + F2F1F3 + F2F3F1 + F3F1F2 + F3F2F1 = 6 possibilities.
So there are 12 total possibilities.
MFF=16.6%
FMF=16.6%
FFM=16.6%
FFF=50.0%
Either way you add it up, it's 50%.
You can't use the fact that an event hasn't occured to boost the chances of it occuring. If you met two girls, how does that even matter what the other person is going to be
Longest running OT thread? (Score:2)
I think you're saying this: I've met two of three siblings, and they're both girls. The other one we don't know. If it's a boy, then there are six combinations (MF1F2, MF2F1, F1MF2, F2MF1, F1F2M, F2F1M) and if it's a girl there are six combinations (F1F2F3, F1F3F2, F2F1F3, F2F3F1, F3F1F2, F3F2F1). I agree that there are an equal number of ordered combinations depending on the gender of the third child.
But the gender of the third child depends o
Re:Probability (Score:1)
Careful description of the "curtain" or "door"
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
With Psychohistory, mathematics were used to predict events hundreds of years into the future. So long as the basic data and assumptions on which each decision is made remain the same, each decision has your 95% chance of being correct. If that 1 in 20 is wrong, however
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
No, you have a weighted coin.
Any sufficiently large statistical data that should be random but instead shows a clear pattern means that there's an influence you're not allowing for.
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 coup
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
He obviously sets this up as a near 'unbreakable' device so that a character like the Mule comes along and destroys it. It made for a good story - forget the science. For more science to your fiction see Arthur C.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
And in real life, this is a spoiler without a warning.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
I red them all. I encourage my friends at work to read sci-fi, and encourage them to read
The fact that you spoiled (I insist), indeed, should be a surprise to the "reader" at any age and at any time.
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:1)
Re:Psychohistory was terrible science (Score:2)