Tilde Lowengrimm on Nostr: Isaac Asimov described the idea of psychohistory three quarters of a century ago. ...
Isaac Asimov described the idea of psychohistory three quarters of a century ago. We've seen visual representations of "the timeline" in more sci-fi shows than are worth counting. Has anyone published this sort of retrospective tipping point analysis?
(Though they probably wouldn't call it psychohistory, in part because that name refers to a different thing, and in part because contemporary naming would probably call it something like "computational-" or "analytical-" rather than "phsycho-", and might even consider it sociology or economics?)
It doesn't even have to be incredibly thorough to be super useful & interesting. You think back over the last year or decade or century and decide on your area of interest, then try to pick out what seem like major tipping points like elections, assassinations or near-misses, major crises… that sort of thing. Then using your historical expertise (and/or betting market odds or other sources) you come up with probabilities for those tipping points going one way or another. And then you chain them together including adjustment like if this election had gone differently, the odds on this crisis might be different, that sort of thing.
And at the end, you get out a sort of timeline possibility space with more-similar and more-different possible outcomes. Of course, the more counterfactual a possibility, the less confident you can be. And the world is fundamentally chaotic in the technical sense, so this is never exactly a precise science even without those error terms ganging up on you. But even a little bit of rigor could really illuminate what sorts of changes have the most human impact. I want to read (and fidget with!) this sort of analysis!
(Though they probably wouldn't call it psychohistory, in part because that name refers to a different thing, and in part because contemporary naming would probably call it something like "computational-" or "analytical-" rather than "phsycho-", and might even consider it sociology or economics?)
It doesn't even have to be incredibly thorough to be super useful & interesting. You think back over the last year or decade or century and decide on your area of interest, then try to pick out what seem like major tipping points like elections, assassinations or near-misses, major crises… that sort of thing. Then using your historical expertise (and/or betting market odds or other sources) you come up with probabilities for those tipping points going one way or another. And then you chain them together including adjustment like if this election had gone differently, the odds on this crisis might be different, that sort of thing.
And at the end, you get out a sort of timeline possibility space with more-similar and more-different possible outcomes. Of course, the more counterfactual a possibility, the less confident you can be. And the world is fundamentally chaotic in the technical sense, so this is never exactly a precise science even without those error terms ganging up on you. But even a little bit of rigor could really illuminate what sorts of changes have the most human impact. I want to read (and fidget with!) this sort of analysis!