Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I'm a computer scientist, and though I was well-versed in the intricacies of Y2K, I was not qualified to comment on how or whether computer failures would result in societal collapse.

I don't mean to be trite, but I don't know that being a climate scientist particularly qualifies one more than another on sociological issues. I look to the climate scientist to say "here are the probably climate outcomes...", and to the sociologist to say "...and if that turns out to be true, we can expect society to turn on each other like rats/band together in a community-minded effort to live in harmony."

View on HN

"Trust experts" has changed in the new religious movement from "trust experts on stuff in their area of expertise" (which largely makes sense) to "trust politicians who have credentials in a narrow specialty who want to tell you how to live". It's just another manifestation of humanity's now unfulfilled needs for religion.

It's funny, this used to be common sense but now we're so far gone we can't talk about it anymore without being labeled heretics.

We have climate scientists to help us try and predict the future of the climate. For how humans respond in tough times, we have history.

"Paging Hari Seldon... Would Hari Seldon please come to the front desk."

I'd love to have whole history movements explained through geography. Not the event spikes, but the large scale movements setting the trend. I believe much of history is the result of geography. Examples:

* Why was Rome, Rome? Well, Rome had a population of 1M. Which was incredibly unique at the time. This made the city able to conquer land very far off. How was this city size possible? Because water travel is very cheap, and the fields of the Nile are water-accessible from Rome. That's how you feed Rome. That's right, the same geographical peculiarity explains both the pyramids and Rome's greatness. It was Rome, but it could have been any other city on the Mediterranean shore. So much so that when Emperor Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople, Rome's population fell well under 50k in a few decades. That must have been quite the depression.

* How did modern societal freedom came to be? Well, before, 70% of the population was dedicated to agriculture. Then the industrial revolution liberated the masses, which had time for other more complex activities, etc.

* Why did the industrial revolution occur in England? They had mines that were filling up with water, and had to resort to pumping it out with steam engines... powered right from the mines' coal. This enabled a tight local loop of optimizing theses engines; which could serve other purposes later on, triggering the global 150 year trend of harnessing fossil energies.

We live in a complex system of intertwined material contexts which all stem from mother nature. Why not start modelling it as such?

----

TL;DR: I don't know if there's such a thing as psycho-history, but there definitely is one named geographical determinism (which is under-studied, and under-taught IMHO)

Thomas Sowell has a whole trilogy on the economic angle of geography and group dynamics. He traveled the world to research the subject and came to these same conclusions through data. Geography shapes opportunity, attitudes, culture, education, and outcomes more than any other single factor.

- Race and Culture

- Migration and Cultures

- Conquest and Cultures

If ever there were developed the equivalent of psychohistory, it'd likely be a theory of economics. Asimov either chose to ignore or wasn't informed enough about chaos theory at the time he wrote Foundation. He wanted to write a future history that read like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and psychohistory was a device that got him there.

To be fair, Y2K would have been a major issue, but it was remediated before it became an issue. There may be a narrow window to do that with the dangerous revolution in systems that maintain a habitable climate for humanity, but the remedy is much more expensive than updating computer code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com