There is no psychohistory, and there never will be (2018) | Hacker News Reader

There is no psychohistory, and there never will be (2018)

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4 pointsisomorph13 comments

My interpretation of psychohistory is simple: it's science fiction about what science fiction itself would look like if it turned into a real science.

It has all the things science fiction does (attempts to predict the future, large scale social dynamics scenarios, etc), plus a hint of what science used to look like in the public perception at that time.

It's kind of provocative. That line of thinking implies science fiction authors need to be more science and less fantasy (exactly what Asimov himself did by starting to more textbooks and less characters).

Of course it will never exist.

As I say above, Asimov appears to have been partly influenced by Marxism, which has long claimed it can predict the future tendencies of history by scientific means. (The reality has proven to be different, but one or two things are right e.g. ownership falling into fewer and fewer hands.)

I understand some regimes have weird ideas, totally true.

Marx however never tried to make exact scientific predictions in the lines of psychohistory. He made behavioral philosophical predictions (so did Adam Smith and many others, and all sorts of people of various political alignments still do).

It's a nitpick. I definitely don't want to discuss semantics related to "isms".

Did Asimov flirted with communist ideas? I definitely think he portrayed similar ideas in Foundation, but I cannot say he endorsed them. Take the idea of individuals being able to shape the history (as opposed to the state being the vehicle for change). That is definitely not communist thinking.

I think Asimov encountered such ideas (pretty much inevitable on any university campus), but he never took them that seriously. And Marx himself lived long enough to point out he himself was not a Marxist! Marx and Engels themselves were influenced by Hegel. Marxists don't pretend to tell you what today's lottery results will be, but they will continually tell you what they think is about to happen on the macroscale and how to get there. (Plato's Philosopher Kings were also, like Seldon, there as an elite to influence the direction of society without much public involvement.)

Governments and global businesses certainly do try and use futurologists and influence the direction of future society through techniques such as "psychological nudging" and control of information etc. The most obvious is climate modelling, where they try and project what climate change will do and how to deal with it. The roll out of AI in the early 2020s reeks of a planned PR operation, although the results have not always been what was expected. The design of the Covid lockdowns was the result of strategic planning from tabletop wargaming exercises for various pandemic scenarios, also producing mixed results.

I don't understand your point, can you be more clear?

I am trying to trace where Asimov got the basic idea from. I think Marxism is the most likely source, because he admitted to reading up about it.

But we do see power structures actively trying to anticipate the future and navigate it... with limited input from the general public.

Quick question: are you familiar with sci-fi themes from that era?

To some extent. Science fiction from the mid 20th century — especially the less trashy variety without bug eyed monsters — was pretty optimistic about what science could do. In the late sixties and seventies, writers were more cynical about it.

So, you do understand that the great majority of science fiction at that time was trying to predict the future, right?

Their Asimov was probably Verne, which already was trying to predict the future before them.

Around Verne's time (and a little later too), it was the 1889 Paris Exibition, the invention of the airplane, telegraph, lightbulb. Those were worldwide phenomena.

Asimov (and others of his time) probably read all of that. He then saw the "new science": computers, space, the atom, and wrote about those.

I also believe the great recession contributed to a certain degree of awareness not to be too optimistic.

It seems very obvious for me to trace the pedigree of this futurism to those references, it's all over his writing. Foundation reminisces about a lot of those ideas.

Also, it seems very obvious that politicians and regimes of all kinds used the public excitement with science as a populist move, not the other way around. Those ideas never came from them.

In the broadest sense, yes, but not necessarily claiming scientific methods to make those projections. We can often guess from current trends. Some science fiction isn't aiming to be predictive, but more in the direction of escapism or what if?

You are right about politics and science. One uses the other. Politicians tend to use emotional rather than logical arguments to persuade people.

Something is not clicking here.

If Asimov wanted to give a good impression about exact predictive science, he made some terrible mistakes:

- In his story, Hari Seldom predictions failed a lot. They had to be amended, fixed and tweaked several times by other characters.

- The predictions sound powerful, but also implied an unavoidable series of crisis. Not the best story to push your propaganda.

- The Mule is overall more powerful than Seldom, and actually achieves a stabilization of Empire's ruins. Not what you write if you want to make sure your idea is the only path forward.

These make me believe he was more interested in portraying those ideas with healthy doses of skepticism, not pushing them willy-nilly.

Psychohistory results partly from Isaac Asimov's brief flirtation with Marxism... Because Marxists have long had the notion that they can predict future tendencies in scientific terms, even though they keep having to retcon the results when things go differently than expected.

Now instead of the Foundation series' Hari Seldon, we have the WEF's Yuval Noah Harari, who is set up as some kind of scientific oracle for our past and future.

This post is sort of ignorant. Bro needs to learn NetMF style ultrarapid eigendecomposition)matrix factorization algorithms, read The Nature of Order, and touch grass.

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