The interesting thing is that with all of the rules Asimov created, he also explored the flaws and loopholes in them in his later work. In the case of psychohistory that it can't predict exceptional individuals doing something new and disruptive, or technological breakthroughs or sufficiently alien forms of intelligence.
that's the beauty of it, he is not putting things not the pedestal or taking them for granted, it shows how they this systems too can fail and succumb our natural tendency.. on the real world...to screw up things.. 😅..
Phychohistory didn't predict anything though, it was all a lie to hide the activities of the second foundation. A secret order of telepaths shaping events behind the scenes.
But psychohistory was a giant lie in the first place. The second foundation used it as a cover for thier psychic manipulation of individuals to guide events. They were not predicting future events they were causing them to happen
Which kind of destroys any idea of detailed long term predictions because of these unforseen factors. Hence why we have to zoom out even more, and observe at a larger scale with larger trends. In histoical materialism, there is a notion that for a substantial change in the course of history (i.e. the revolution) there are two main factors: objective and subjective. 'Objective' being the material conditions that develop by its inherent and predictable laws, and 'subjective' being the human factor, which is the unpredictable part. Anyway, in the end, the only thing we can confidently say is "Life, eh... finds a way."
Man I've sure you've heard this before but damn it ill say it again. You should be way bigger based on the quality of your content alone. Keep trudging on and im sure you'll get the recognition you deserve. Just don't forget about those of us who knew it before it was cool😁
well, it's highly researched perhaps but the topic is too niche for the channel to be considerably popular. Speaking from 2 years later but it's kinda expectable...
I learned to think of things like Asimov’s “Psychohistory” as “Emergent Behavior,” wherein any sufficiently large system of interactions, examined on an appropriate scale, behaves like a single organism, or machine. A perfect example I can personally attest to as a hotel worker is that people who desire soap tend to chose to ask for soap within fifteen minutes of each other, at a random time without any direct communication between the people who want soap.
Could be interesting to know if there's a pattern to guests checking in (i.e. you can only check in after 12). Also, humans have dumb patterns like that in that they are more likely to begin doing a task at a time ending in 5 or 0 just because it feels more "right", and so it might simply be that, on average, going to the desk to ask for soap takes a constant-ish amount of time, and people are likely to only do it at a time ending in 5 or 0, and so they end up appearing at evenly-spaced times
@@kyay10 this - things in a hotel are not actually random - not even close. While you cannot literally predict the future (someone might run in an shit on your experiment of balls rolling and ruin the results, perhaps) , you can make some safe assumptions and the hotel industry is as big as it is beceause it can mostly count on these assumptions (including soap, because that has a cost when multiplied out across a chain or the entire industry). Also, the person we are replying to is almost certainly leaning on a healthy dose of selection bias.
Seldon (Asimov) stated that as a minimum, psychohistory needed a galaxy full of people to work. Robert Heinlein tended to write his stories within a related history. Campbell, editor of Analog magazine, was the first to get a copy of Heinlein's outline and published it calling it a "Future History". Example: Heinlein wrote a short novel titled "The Man who Sold the Moon"; everyone knows about Elon Musk now. It's odd, but seeing his stories as metaphors, they stand up. Near the end (of his story outline) there's a pandemic. Followed some years later by "the first human civilization". If anything like that is going to happen, yes, our current faux civilizations would have to go.
An other easy one, next time at the grocery, take a few minutes to check the check out lines. It's always waves, as if everyone suddenly dropped their shopping to check out NOW.
After 3 hours of starring at the screen I can safely say the butterfly in the thumbnail is not the purple emperor. Prediction: Oliver ran out of ideas so he is generating comment interaction to pick some obscure suggestion and make an entire video essay about it in 37 hours. Either that or he'll open with 'Does anyone remember Ashton Kutcher from the 2004 movie butterfly effect?' and role from there. In reality I've no idea what to predict, the only consistancy in the previous essays is that two of them are based on Immortal Engines.
After actually looking for the butterfly in the pic, it looks like a monarch but it's not that, so maybe something about monarchies or Pierre Joseph Michel Lorquin or maybe it's migration patterns or methamorphosis or something completely unrelated. Guess we will know in 36 hours.
Chiron Last -------• - Ether - Golden Web Vol 1-3 - House of EL - Occult Christmas (So so much more than the title confines the lands minds into believing prior to visual in reading like royalty…)¿7)(6😢😢 - 88 Keys
Fun little anecdote: While I do not know how much the future can be predicted, having worked in food retail, the behaviour of people could at least be retroactively linked in some cases. Customers wouldn't average out, wouldn't go out more during a particular day of the week or weather. We have spikes and holes, but very little middleground. They are definetly influenced by things since they can't just mutually agree on what to do, but deciphering and predict which elements causes it is very hard, or seemgly impossible without extensive research
And that's basically the idea of books, it's uncertain, who exactly or how exactly will lead to change, but trends are predictable. (I've not finished the video or books, in fact reading right now and comments are nice place for discussion) I don't know if this is straight up copying as another path is not known, but Foundation closely follows history of humanity on Earth. There was Roman Empire, then period of barbarism, centered on conservation of Rome's inheritance, which led to religious society. And religion was replaced by trade in ~17th century. Which is where I am in books (the mule). Knowing what happened irl and how the mule begins, I would assume that what follows is a push to create more democratic society, which ultimately fails and still leads to Empire.
one of the things I like is that by the fourth (?) book, it turns out that the entire Seldon Plan had failed entirely and it was the Second Foundation touching things up as it goes along. Psychohistory failed, it was too error prone for the Foundation to do what it was meant to do. good stuff
This is a major theme is all of Asimov's fiction: Setting up a structure that seems unassailable, then probing its weaknesses. In the Robot series, Asimov invented the Laws of Robotics, but every story was an exploration of how these Laws could be subverted or lead to unintended consequences. The Laws of Psychohistory are in a way the statistical average of moles of humans, which us why it can only exist in the distant future of a galactic civilization. Yet it can be undermined by the eventual existence of a nonhuman, just as much as an ideal gas is disrupted by an electromagnetically active vapor within it. Asimov again sets up a plausible premise and attacks it from all angles. This is the lesson that I took from Asimov: All premises must be questioned, and the consequences of rejecting or accepting every premise should be explored.
@@MGSchmahl "All premises must be questioned, and the consequences of rejecting or accepting every premise should be explored." That's definitely the foundation (heh) of all the best science fiction writing. Anything without it is just science flavored fantasy.
Hmm let me think. I would guess an essay introduced with the Butterfly effect and the predictability of things leading to a topic that is in some way connected to this thought, but mainly seems quite random and unconnected to the title and the butterfly in the thumbnail.
@@thomasmuller8118 I think your guess - a video about chaos theory that was intensely meta about its own predictability - was actually the closest prediction of anybody's, so well done.
@@OliverLugg hi could you please do a video on cv being a scam and all its negative effects and how "smart" and "educated" people fell for it in the name of the cult of science? Love and blessings!
As someone with a Master's in history and a few thoughts on the matter, one of the first conclusions I came to is that there are not "laws" of history because the dynamics and mechanisms upon which different epochs function can be so dramatically different that foundational assumptions upon which we moderns think all power or change hinges upon, can simply evaporate into something new. There are patterns and rhythms certainly, but nothing that can be broken down into mathematics so simply and suredly. At least in the long durea
It's a general truth that, on a long enough timescale, any predictive model will fail - either because the system it's predicting is chaotic enough to impose a clear horizon (as in weather forecasting) or because events outside the scope of the model become increasingly relevant - any attempt at climate prediction will fail if a significant asteroid impact happens.
I'm guessing you have not read Foundation, the mathematics were not based on history but rather sociology. one issue with the analysis here is timescale but in reverse- this fictional world is literally tens of thousands of years in the future, of uninterrupted scientific discovery (timescale- robot short stories approx a couple hundred years AP and in solar system, R Daneel Ovila novels approx 500+ years AP, Galactic Empire novels approx 1000+ years AP and Foundation series many millenia AP -- can we even conceive of notions of scientific mathematics that far into the future, again emphasizing that the development was uninterrupted from today's discoveries)
That's my issue. Psychohistory not only predicts how large populations will react to stimuli, but it also predicts how large populations will cause stimuli that other large populations will respond to, and even specifically what they are and when they will occur. Psychohistory is Classical Mechanics in a world that never went Quantum.
Jung said he felt ww1 and 2 in his patients dreams. I ve got schizo affectivity and I m uber anxious about everything but darn do I feel, that I might just doom the planet to Yeats' second coming with just one conversation. I can't watch the news or go out without seeing us sliding toward our collective doom. I never know if my silence, voicelessness is better than me trying to make noise. Intellectually, I know I m biased. It's hard watching covid, ukraine and the middle east right now while feeling I somehow failed an exam in some kind of simulation. No maths, just doom scrolling. Going out is even worse than doom scrolling.
As a fellow maths masters student myself, this is exactly the kind of video essay content I've been dying to find on this platform. It's not *about* maths itself, strictly speaking, but the argument is distinctly mathematical. It's also refreshing to hear jokes about maths that actually come from a place of understanding about what the subject is actually like after secondary school. Came for the category theory jokes, stayed for the essays.
"The Mule' was and still is a story that I still dwell on and remember 20+ years after reading it. Thank you for such a compelling video. Isaac's story helped me understand control systems and chaos theory when I finally came to understand them in university.
I just want to point out Cryptonomicon has a normal distribution as a plot point, as well as the Riemann Zeta Function, and many other such things. Good book. :)
I love how I was sitting there at the end, thinking "He's gonna get hit by the cannonball." while you ranted about breaking the format, fully confident in the fact that I had predicted the obvious joke... and yet when it happened I laughed anyway. And then, when I went back to watch it a second time while writing this comment... I laughed again. There's probably some kind of observation about the structure and predictably of humor here, but I'm not smart enough to figure that one out.
Perhaps it has something to do with the juxtaposition of such an obvious gag and the complexity of the videos topic, and the feeling of satisfaction from correctly predicting and remembering the set-up for the joke. The " Ooooh he's gonna do it! YAY!" or "Say the line Bart!" phenomenon.
Humor usually comes from unpredictability, but so does fear; humor is about safe, low dose surprise. But unpleasant vs pleasant for most minds is the opposite, about predictability. Novelty is like spice, it is desirable to most people only as an accent. I think you partially didn't expect yourself to be right, and partially found it ridiculous, and partially found satisfaction in the prediction coming true and feeling satisfied. That's my take anyways. Humor is weird.
I think up to a point, the whole concept could work IRL... but if too many people became trained to recognize the patterns, the whole system might break down from people trying to meddle with the predictions. Once people recognize a pattern, they inevitably attempt to use it for personal gain, and once that happens things break down because there's more than one person trying to do so.
I remember watching a video on AI and one of the things it talked about was AI being used for stock exchange stuff. It turns out (maybe obviously) that the AIs were really good at it, but the problem was their existence and "meddling" in the system changed it to something they weren't familiar with.
@@Pheonix1328isn't that the whole fintech field now? computers trading with computers, and minor bugs wiping out your entire portfolio in a few hours of very rapid trading?
I knew that in pickup games of rock paper scissors (aka games in which the people are new to each other and have no prior games to work on) unexperienced players are just a bit more likely to go for rock, so I figured you were working with the same statistics and would go for paper. So I when for scissors, and lost. I got too deep and played myself.
some thoughts on the subject from a non mathematician: -i did like the TV series addition of genetic dynasty with the clones and stuff. it is actually a more "sci fi " version of what was in the books, yet conveys the same spirit of inevitable decay of once successful system due to its very nature and social inertia - my own speculations on the telepathy (rather an exercise in far fetched thinking, but it's amusing) always were based on the fact, that human inventions either mimic a natural phenomenon or use its characteristics to advance in the necessary direction. if we look at different ways to scan and analyze brain waves as a proto machine mind reading, we can say, that "natural" telepathy for sure exists and is the ground for the advances in this field, that are trying to learn and replicate its very nature. just because plains aren't birds, we can't deny they are flying 🙃 -in the first books, where the development of psychohistory is still in progress Seldon and Yugo Amaryl often mention, that the predictions of their to be science is somewhat similar to intuition formed by politicians. i think, just as in case of Foundation, these intuitive guesses can't be a matter of public discussion by their very nature. just look at the mass migration of african war driven expats to europe and think of it as a way to refresh the stagnating genetic pool there. one can speculate, that such a thing can be a result of meticulous analysis in order to strengthen the obviously decaying society, but only on certain territories, because not all the countries "let them in" or were a goal enough for the settlers. other methods, that would be less disruptive to the every day citizen of the goal country could be applied, but would bring a slightly different effect. this is just an example of a recent occurrence which was mostly reported and talked about from the same point of view by both pro and contra parties. in case of enough time and energy, we should try to examine things like these even retrospectively to be able to lead a more or less comfortable life and generally understand the direction in which our society is pushed (drawn by inertia of the existing forces?). i think that is the main take away for an average reader, even if psychohistory is not developed, which i very much like to see happen out of sheer curiosity and fascination with the concept.
I was thinking of the "brick joke" around the fade to black right before the fall of the brick in the end.. Wtf? XD (this is the first video of this channel I've seen (I forgot about the cannonball too))(nvm, I apparently watched the 5d diplomacy video too)
Also, unrelated, I think "lul so random" is a vital part of humor. But it is also something that fits almost perfectly into chaos theory and is actually extremely predictable. Well, predictable mathematically and scientifically. They need to "feel random" to work. But "what we feel" on a short term, subconscious level is probably the easiest to predict part of how we think. Edit: So yeah, I think "lul so random" occurs the most when the author/creator of the joke was able to perfectly predict how the audience will be "predicting" your jokes, and to capitalize on the prediction and get a great payoff. So yeah, I think humor is all about "I predict you predict I predict you predict" loops. And being "humorous" is being good at feeling the flow of the loop, and capitalizing on it.
With Large Language Model AI's becoming ubiquitous, everyone should be aware of the predictive power of what is essentially just huge tables of numbers or 'weights'.
People don't understand there isn't a small man in the refrigerator that turns on the light. How are you going to expect them to understand language models are just spell check with extra steps?
"I predict you are going to sit right there for the next 50-ish minutes and join me as we ask 'Foundation: Are We Predictable?'" *Immediately closes tab*
Thanks for the great deal of information you've put together. I came via Foundation/ Asimov lore videos, and now I'm checking out your other work. Cheers.
It'll be about decoding and other forms of secret messages that have the be cracked (mainly other forms). The butterfly is linked the the famous cicada from that really tough series of challenges.
I remember Dan Crisan giving his professorial lecture at Imperial, he was our real analysis teacher, and it was all about his work trying to replicate psycho history. I'm glad you were aware of his work
Gotta mention the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is kind of trash in terms of modern historiography. By the standards of Asimov's time, let alone our own. Not only are grand narratives of decline are frowned upon in general, but Gibbon had a massive hate boner for the Byzantine Empire that made obvious holes in his perception insurmountable. To be honest the idea economics is the closest field to it only makes the idea sound worse. If economics is the closest comparison the concept seems almost engineered for humanities to hate it. Cliodynamics is even worse. Certain STEM people have a hard enough time staying in their own lane as is, the last thing they need to hear is that history can be mathematically predicted with current information. Of course things would be predictable with enough data and computing power.
Coming back to it again and this vid totally blew up. It had maybe 11k or less the last time I was here and less than 100 comments. Now it almost has 200k. Happy for Oliver's (and this video's) success.
As an additional perspective: Asimov himself later explained that he didn't really believe in something like psychohistory - that people were predictable in that manner. Rather psychohistory had come out of thought experiments he was fixated on during WW2. Nazi Germany's early string of rapid victories, before getting bogged down with Russia, obviously worried everyone. Asimov felt despair at fascism and empire once again trying to assert its grip on humanity. He considered that, over the course of time, no empire had lasted however. Fascism and authoritarianism always fell apart. Perhaps this was simply luck, and humanity had yet to invent the perfect empire. Or maybe there was something about the dynamics of people and civilization that prevented fascism from ever maintaining its grip for very long, in any one place and time. So in the stories Asimov asked "we like to hope that history bends towards enlightenment and freedom. What if someone could scientifically prove it was true? Could it inspire people to plan better and strive more confidently to insure humanity bettered itself?"
A bit of context behind the Foundation that may prove illuminating: There was, and still is, a concept called the Two Cultures, which came to prominence with an esssay of the same name in 1959. The essay essentially argued that academia, and culture more broadly, had become divided into the titular Two Cultures, with the the hard sciences on one and the humanities and soft sciences on the other. You can see a trace of this today in the perennial arguemtns about STEM vs Humanities degrees today. Essentially, a scientific philosopher named Karl Poppler, in trying to develop formalized rules for what did and did not 'count' as science, threw down the gauntlet by declaring that many of the soft sciences, most notably sociology, psychology, and economics, as fraudulent pseudosciences, making many people very, very angry. I feel that Foundations Psychohistory is a commentary on the same. Psychohistory is, in Asimov's opinion, what the soft sciences would look like if they were 'real' sciences. And since, as you say, even vaguely accurate predictions of human behavior are likely impossible, Poppler may have been right after all.
The hard vs. soft sciences thing basically exists to please the ego of hard sciencists, while they don't really have the problem to figuring out how to understand society or a similar topic themselfes, so a win win.
This is probably the first time I've seen a UA-cam video essay address the no free lunch hypothesis. You, sir, have won UA-cam for the foreseeable future.
This is so beautiful. I love foundation and this video gave such an amazing connection to our attempts to make a predictable world. And through this I discover so many new projects and their processes that I would have never come across. Thank you so much for this!
Weirdly enough, I *do* remember foundation. Mainly because someone on the internet decided to take inspiration from it and have their Fanfic “Karl Seldon” create “contra-Boolean algebra” and I’ve been dying to find someone more well versed in maths than me for help with this.
I doubt I'm well versed on maths enough to pull this off, but it's incredibly appealing to try. Mind you, I gave up on listing all possible balanced ternary logic operations after about 4 and all their permutations. So maybe I should resist the temptation.
@@matthewparker9276 I tried posting the link sometime earlier, but I guess UA-cam didn’t like that. The stuff in question is known as “foundation enclydopedia dialectica”. The primer is available as a pdf on their site.
My fine mathemagician, I love using chaos to subtly influence changes in synthesizer patches. Helps turn a rigid, repeating sequence into something that has a much more intersting and living feel.
Interesting and entertaining vid... I think I'm glad I never read the books, as I love the series. Agree it is a little cheesy in a few parts but overall I think it's brilliant.
I worked near some epidemiologists for some years. A major conclusion of epidemiology (the study of epidemics) is that most modern epidemics (e.g. heart disease, cancer) are most influenced by human behaviours. The connections are teased out by observations in large studies. The most reliable results require the largest studies. For example, smoking affects heart disease and lung cancer mortality and this relative mortality between smokers and non-smokers can be predicted quite accurately at the population level, yet predicting whether a smoking or non-smoking individual will actually die from lung cancer or heart disease is impossible. It is possible that individuals have free will but populations are often accurately predictable.
@@Moe_Posting_Chad Not at a strategic level. Persuading millions of smokers to quit saves a lot of lives which shows up in the mortality data. You just don't know which individuals will benefit beforehand. So it's still great for health strategy and advice at a population level to benefit the nation overall. If your personal philosophy is totally individualistic, then I see your point.
@@clivemitchell3229 "Persuading millions of smokers to quit saves a lot of lives which shows up in the mortality data." What about all of the Joggers, I mean EBT recipients? Their rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity easily outclass literally every other health concern by an order of magnitude. All they do is balloon up to 400 pounds and require enormous amounts of medical attention to keep them alive long enough for them to eat even more cheap seed oil laden food. You wanna talk about individualism? What about all these minority individuals that are all but force fed Twinkies until the medical infrastructure collapses under the combined weight of these pigs in human skin? You're the problem with intellectuals my man. You get educated into whatever obscure compartmentalized bullshit. And when you see the walking heart attacks that are given money by the government to essentially monopolize healthcare resources. You just ignore it because "I study only what I'm told and I don't care about the implications my work has for other fields. Just wanna drink beer and eat pizza. I R Scientist"
Thank you for your video. Have you ever watched Shaun? I like the way he doesn't have background music. As a person who finds it challenging to listen to information when there is background music, I love the fact that he doesn't use it. Your voice and your content seems conducive to eliminating it. Also, I feel stupid asking this, would you explain the guns, germs and steel comment? I couldn't tell if you (and/or others) thought it was bad? Or if historians think it's horrible? I don't know the reputation/situation enough to understand your comment. Thanks again!
Alright… while I read this as a teenager - the scariest bit about Foundation is how influential it is. Way too much “Long Term”ism in the world and its horrible consequences.
Just want to brag to everyone; I've read all the foundation books listed in the spoilers as well as a large majority of Asimov's "Robots" series. I LOVE Asimov. He was he first fiction author I fell in love with and my all time favorite.
Makes me think of the I CHING. Idk if it's an "oracle" but I don't find the idea that anything a person is going through, can't be categorized into 1 of 64, just general summarizations of this thing we call life. I do believe we're that basic. If I'm being honest, 64 bit life force? I was thinking more like 16 bit though. 🤣
General thought I've heard that I think is helpful when discussing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than us.
I find it odd that you didn’t mention material dialectics as a model of predicting history/sociology considering it’s one of the most historically common methods of doing so. Regardless of whether you agree with the figures using the philosophy, it certainly seems relevant to the topic at hand. I wonder if you wanted to avoid the controversy inherent to the topic. I still massively enjoyed the video, so thank you for your hard work here and throughout your channel! You’ve made the highest quality video essays I’ve encountered on the platform.
I actually feel like no Sci-Fi writer has actually cought up to Asimov yet. In the sense that good Sci-Fi explore sociology. Bad Sci-fi if it can be called like that end up as nothing but basic fantasy hero stories... i'm not going to say names but you all know what i'm talking about.
Two thoughts: 1. We run into something of a category problem don't we? Sure individual unpredictable data points all collected together can become a predictable data set... but if we're trying to predict specific details about that particular set, doesn't that set become its own individual unpredictable data point? 2. The more predictable a system becomes, the more susceptable it becomes to change via lolrandom. For example, stale patterns and for mulas in say fiction literature makes a lolrandom unique book more likely to take off just for sake of being different.
I remember Foundation being out of print when i was reading sf in the 90s but i liked Harlan Ellison’s screenplay of I, Robot which is now out of print.
I feel like you should have mentioned that there was a large, real-world movement based on the idea that you can predict the future of society using patterns in history, and it's called marxism.
Don't poke the animals in the cage. They are religious in nature and they refuse to accept criticism of their religious ideas that failed and victimized others. They have defined religion as "nothing we do because we are too smart for that." Don't expect them to be reasonable.
1. When you said "Mathematicians don't have sex appeal." I thought "Wait...am I a mathematician?". 2. When you said "I predict you will sit there and watch this for 50 minutes." it was really hard for me to not turn off your video...
I think you just hit the nail on the head. Autopilot is ever present. Any time we learn some new action, next time more and more of it will be done on auto pilot.. It's a way to preserve energy.. So, in short, what we do as individuals on autopilot, as a society we do even more so.. So you could predict the future behaviour of large groups of peoples, just based on enough peoples autopilot actions.. P.s. Once, due to some strange chemistry in my brain, due to all the medication I was on, or was withdrawing from, for a full day, I was basically unable to autopilot anything.. Results were astounding.. On one hand, I had perfect, present attention. I actually noticed, how I reacted in much more wise way on some rather usual "jokes and jabs" in the work place.. I avoided making few mistakes that were a given, if I functioned as normal. It got to a point, that by the end of the day, I noticed, just how abnormal, my whole day was. While my reactions were a tad bit slower, none of them were automatic and as a result, I still remember this otherwise completly normal work day except for the fact that I was abnormal, my autopilot was off the whole day and as a result, I did better in social settings, work and menaged to percieve the shocking difference and remember the day. This was about 5 years ago. Just as I was thinking how this perfect attention is almost a superpower and how cool it would be if I could do it everyday.. I realized it wasn't even 19h and I was dead tired.. Then I add 2 and 2.. and realize maybe biology gave us autopilot for a reason..
I had a misprint of foundation - a later book in the series; that essentially started over half way through.... it was so confusing for me - i read many chapters for a second time thinking it was some sort of miniscule change to it... then i realized the page numbers rolled back also... one of the most confusing reading experiences I ever had.
Did u save the book? A misprint might become worth some money in the future, if it isn't already worth more. Misprinted material tends to become more valuable over time. Especially for things like currency & money, old toys, and some books..
One random thought, but personally, my believe is that if technology chaos don't exists, and technology stops advancing, then we are pretty much guaranteed to be fucked. So yeah, not saying that societal collapse will or won't happen for us, but I do believe if technology stops advancing now it will collapse soon.
Remember the "iterations" of chaos-generated line patterns that served as chapters in Jurassic Park _(the novel)?_ That's always felt like the most elegant way to demonstrate chaos theory and thematically it fit so perfectly as the jumbly lines started to form what looked like a fractal hurricane _as_ the tropical storm in the story gets closer/bigger _AS_ the problems w/ the park compound... It's a _really_ clever book even if Crichton sometimes reads like YA _(no actual criticism though, he was my favorite author of all time to just read for pleasure)._
I am sad you didn't bring up the Phillips Curve. A HUGE problem in predicting people is that they will get a hold of your model then game it to their own benefit. That is the core reason people are so unpredictable, evolution has favored willful unpredictability in us.
Did you get your copy of Foundation at Barnes and Noble? I got that exact version of it too. (One interesting small change I’ve noticed: older editions of the book state that terminus was powered by ‘atomic’ energy, and in that newer edition of the book it is instead phrased as ‘nuclear’ energy. I’m sure this change occurred so the story wouldn’t just fall into public domain )
Copyright is death + 70 years for individual authors, so if Asimov's estate still owns the rights, that deadline is _very_ far away. Even the 90 years from publication given to corporations is quite a ways off.
Beyond the issue of the copyright not being at risk of near expiration, making a change like that in a publishing would not preserve the original copyright (from my extremely, limited understanding of copyright law). In current American copyright law, making a large suite of changes when publishing a work could theoretically allow for the creation of a *new* copyright of that particular edition of the text, but would not prevent older editions (or editions that are determined to be non-transformative from the original) from entering the public domain. It's similar to how copyright of music functions. Tchaikovsky's compositions are all in the public domain now but individual performances of his music can still be copyrighted, thus you cannot freely distribute a contemporary recording of his music without license.
The black box is actually not black its empty - the algorithm can also not tell you what it recognized, because it didn't. Or to put this another way, the machine stuff is not just a black box to us, it's a black box to machine algorithm itself. you should probably get some learning in wrt to this stuff - your making rather laymen errors about it.
As chaos theory said about the butterfly effect. There is a chance that we've met alien from far far way galaxies and the alien said "Hello There " standing right beside you now when I typing this insignificant shitpost
For me, it seems that predicability is something that can work very well within a scope. But the universe itself has such a vast scope that predicting all of it is impossible. So at times humans, and their history, is very predicable. At times very chaotic. (Though we should note that predictable and chaotic are not necessarily opposite. Therefore, chaos theory that looks for order in that chaos.) Now the interesting bit is really how to determine predicability. To find those factors, you need to do an accurate model. We can do some really accurate predictions about complex, chaotic aspects of our reality. Weather is very well predicted. But it has it limitations. Not only are the forecasts only accurate to a certain limit. But to do that modelling well due to it chaotic nature we need a lot of data points and a lot of powerful computers to do so. While other things are a lot more easy to predict and do not need a lot of data points or advanced modelling. Like the obit of the earth. We know how long a day will be and we figured that out even before we actually started to keep a record of time. (Though given enough time even the obits of our solar system is not actually guaranteed. Quite a lot of chaos in orbits. But there is also stabilizing factors) But could one try to determine was resource is needed to predict the scope of human history, or just fiction? That I have no answer for. Since the system itself feed in to itself, my guess that the you would need more and more resource to do so. Indeed, part of fiction is to be unpredicable to bring a sense of enjoyment. And similar, there are actors in history that wish for unpredictability. My guess is that at least future history will always out race our ability to do long term accurate predictions. Though, our past might oddly enough become more and more predicable as we can use more and more resources on that problem.
I think we are predictable, to a degree. There will be anomalities and those can completly wreck the prediction. But you can make pretty good models, but only with a huge amount of data and decent assumptions.
The real problem with the predicting the future using the data from now and the past is that it is not actually data - its assumptions that frequently turn out to be wrong or only correct enough to tell an accurate enough story. You can measure the speed of something with enough precision, but you cannot have a good picture of now or then with anywhere near the same accuracy, or with enough accuracy. You may think the current media climate and technology afforded to us (phones, social media, etc.) would make it better, but recent history shows it has made things worse (in terms of having an accurate view of things).
Yeah, you can predict that certain movies or series will be worse than we would like. I think everyone predicted just how bad the new Star Wars movies would be. The Wheel of Time adaptation, Game of Throne's final few seasons. After a certain amount of time even normal people can pick up patterns of extreme stupidity.
Maths... The science so great the can't decide if there is a zero or not! And don't get started on imaginary number's.... no seriously it could cause the universe to implode.
A man lost in the poetry of maths, as it is a language this is not surprising, although it is probably a uniquely human language based on the number of digits at the end of your arm & it is certainly not the language the universe is using. Mathematics mankind's greatest invention & greatest folly, while the language of the universe is just in front of you waiting to be discovered, countless bright minds go down the Rabbit Hole of finding new ways to count there monkey fingers. Fascinating and disturbing simultaneously.
I think most of the Asimov’s stories are rely on the deterministic view of the world. That’s obviously not how the world actually works, any process can’t be divided into equal parts, that’s just how a human brain is able to process the world by approximating it. And the indeterminism means that you can’t build a model that will product an events with 99.9%, just approaching to that level at simple systems, but that’s doesn’t actually matter. One of the intelligence definition is an ability to replicate the result by a different approach, so giving enough approximated information an intelligent species could potentially create a closed system using reverse engineering that is predictable enough.
i read the first book and i couldnt stand it, the whole idea of a guy that can accurately predict the extremely far future of a enormous system like a galactic empire is just something i couldnt buy into
Maybe it's because I have read a lot of modern stories before I read Foundation, but I spotted 'the mule' as soon as he appeared, which made the next 20 chapters or so a bit frustrating. 😆
Not a historian but graduated from undergrad in Anthropology, which always plays second fiddle to the sociologists in the political sphere 🙄 The issue I have with Cliodynamics does not only seem to be cherry-picking sources through history (really liked how you talked about the social sciences Heisenberg Theory btw, it was one of the most memorable self-humbling moments from a professor in our theory class when he made that comparison), but in addition it seems to revolve around a circular argument in which the only reason a prediction is flawed is because the model is not precise enough, which will completely entrap any conversation in the theoretics of it all. It also shouldn't be understated how flawed the Heisenberg theory is not only in prediction but in modeling. In essence, you might just see it if you believe it enough, including in the past. Narrative is such a powerful tool that it unfortunately (and perhaps fortunately depending on your perspective on certain topics) even influences the objectivism we strive for in the hard sciences. There's a reason why we still cling to the term "civilizations" as an implement for our historical readings even though the word itself is prone to immense flaws when put under real scrutiny, and there are not many anthropologists I know that would seriously consider using the term in any pursuit of objective description, even. As such, a lot of red flags shot up when you started Peter Turchins history moving from beetles to people, and this comes from someone who also almost went into entomology before getting into anthropology!
The best way to seize power is when there is a crisis. While maths can be used for modeling and predictions, the concept of a model or prediction that forcasts a great danger is a terrific way for bad actors to manufacture the belief in a crisis necessary for them to gain power. I think it is worth noting that the series Foundation beat out for best of all time, Lord of the Rings, was about giving away the idea of concentration of power. This is in exact contrast to the theme of Foundation... I think the reason foundation won is because the temptation and seduction of being "the man with the plan and the power to wield it" speaks louder to others than the idea of freedom and trust in the nature of humanity
The interesting thing is that with all of the rules Asimov created, he also explored the flaws and loopholes in them in his later work. In the case of psychohistory that it can't predict exceptional individuals doing something new and disruptive, or technological breakthroughs or sufficiently alien forms of intelligence.
that's the beauty of it, he is not putting things not the pedestal or taking them for granted, it shows how they this systems too can fail and succumb our natural tendency.. on the real world...to screw up things.. 😅..
Phychohistory didn't predict anything though, it was all a lie to hide the activities of the second foundation. A secret order of telepaths shaping events behind the scenes.
But psychohistory was a giant lie in the first place. The second foundation used it as a cover for thier psychic manipulation of individuals to guide events. They were not predicting future events they were causing them to happen
Why on earth do my comments keep getting deleted
Which kind of destroys any idea of detailed long term predictions because of these unforseen factors. Hence why we have to zoom out even more, and observe at a larger scale with larger trends.
In histoical materialism, there is a notion that for a substantial change in the course of history (i.e. the revolution) there are two main factors: objective and subjective. 'Objective' being the material conditions that develop by its inherent and predictable laws, and 'subjective' being the human factor, which is the unpredictable part.
Anyway, in the end, the only thing we can confidently say is "Life, eh... finds a way."
Man I've sure you've heard this before but damn it ill say it again. You should be way bigger based on the quality of your content alone. Keep trudging on and im sure you'll get the recognition you deserve. Just don't forget about those of us who knew it before it was cool😁
"Like a microscopic mosh pit" as a descriptor....love this guy's humor and overall style.
well, it's highly researched perhaps but the topic is too niche for the channel to be considerably popular.
Speaking from 2 years later but it's kinda expectable...
Well he's growing
A reminder to go touch grass
I shall respectfully refuse, for in the pursuit of knowledge and watching ridiculously long videos is all the grass I need.
@@Cthoanut 🤣🤣🤣
Respect, I see the appeal lol
Lol 😂😂 I like taking long walks while listening to these sorts if videos. Does that count?
@@jpjeon3143 🤷🏿
Maybe half a point lol
But to be able to touch grass we must first prove both that grass exists and that it is something in which a person can touch
I learned to think of things like Asimov’s “Psychohistory” as “Emergent Behavior,” wherein any sufficiently large system of interactions, examined on an appropriate scale, behaves like a single organism, or machine. A perfect example I can personally attest to as a hotel worker is that people who desire soap tend to chose to ask for soap within fifteen minutes of each other, at a random time without any direct communication between the people who want soap.
Could be interesting to know if there's a pattern to guests checking in (i.e. you can only check in after 12). Also, humans have dumb patterns like that in that they are more likely to begin doing a task at a time ending in 5 or 0 just because it feels more "right", and so it might simply be that, on average, going to the desk to ask for soap takes a constant-ish amount of time, and people are likely to only do it at a time ending in 5 or 0, and so they end up appearing at evenly-spaced times
@@kyay10 this - things in a hotel are not actually random - not even close. While you cannot literally predict the future (someone might run in an shit on your experiment of balls rolling and ruin the results, perhaps) , you can make some safe assumptions and the hotel industry is as big as it is beceause it can mostly count on these assumptions (including soap, because that has a cost when multiplied out across a chain or the entire industry).
Also, the person we are replying to is almost certainly leaning on a healthy dose of selection bias.
well, people tend to shower at the same time.
Seldon (Asimov) stated that as a minimum, psychohistory needed a galaxy full of people to work.
Robert Heinlein tended to write his stories within a related history. Campbell, editor of Analog magazine, was the first to get a copy of Heinlein's outline and published it calling it a "Future History". Example: Heinlein wrote a short novel titled "The Man who Sold the Moon"; everyone knows about Elon Musk now.
It's odd, but seeing his stories as metaphors, they stand up. Near the end (of his story outline) there's a pandemic. Followed some years later by "the first human civilization".
If anything like that is going to happen, yes, our current faux civilizations would have to go.
An other easy one, next time at the grocery, take a few minutes to check the check out lines.
It's always waves, as if everyone suddenly dropped their shopping to check out NOW.
After 3 hours of starring at the screen I can safely say the butterfly in the thumbnail is not the purple emperor. Prediction: Oliver ran out of ideas so he is generating comment interaction to pick some obscure suggestion and make an entire video essay about it in 37 hours. Either that or he'll open with 'Does anyone remember Ashton Kutcher from the 2004 movie butterfly effect?' and role from there. In reality I've no idea what to predict, the only consistancy in the previous essays is that two of them are based on Immortal Engines.
After actually looking for the butterfly in the pic, it looks like a monarch but it's not that, so maybe something about monarchies or Pierre Joseph Michel Lorquin or maybe it's migration patterns or methamorphosis or something completely unrelated. Guess we will know in 36 hours.
4:00.
Asimov.
A-sim-ov
52:38
Seshat
Se-Shat
Ses-Hat
Ses-CAP. CAP-it-ALL.
AWL LIES.
/----////-
Fyi
Y
37.
EL
TheEL.
Chiron Last
-------•
- Ether
- Golden Web Vol 1-3
- House of EL
- Occult Christmas
(So so much more than the title confines the lands minds into believing prior to visual in reading like royalty…)¿7)(6😢😢
- 88 Keys
#ChironLast
#DavidLapoint
#PrimerFields
I predict the butterfly is a diversion to make all the comments look stupid
Ya probably
You went splat
Fun little anecdote: While I do not know how much the future can be predicted, having worked in food retail, the behaviour of people could at least be retroactively linked in some cases.
Customers wouldn't average out, wouldn't go out more during a particular day of the week or weather. We have spikes and holes, but very little middleground. They are definetly influenced by things since they can't just mutually agree on what to do, but deciphering and predict which elements causes it is very hard, or seemgly impossible without extensive research
And that's basically the idea of books, it's uncertain, who exactly or how exactly will lead to change, but trends are predictable. (I've not finished the video or books, in fact reading right now and comments are nice place for discussion)
I don't know if this is straight up copying as another path is not known, but Foundation closely follows history of humanity on Earth. There was Roman Empire, then period of barbarism, centered on conservation of Rome's inheritance, which led to religious society. And religion was replaced by trade in ~17th century. Which is where I am in books (the mule).
Knowing what happened irl and how the mule begins, I would assume that what follows is a push to create more democratic society, which ultimately fails and still leads to Empire.
the weather and payday = shopping
one of the things I like is that by the fourth (?) book, it turns out that the entire Seldon Plan had failed entirely and it was the Second Foundation touching things up as it goes along. Psychohistory failed, it was too error prone for the Foundation to do what it was meant to do. good stuff
This is a major theme is all of Asimov's fiction: Setting up a structure that seems unassailable, then probing its weaknesses.
In the Robot series, Asimov invented the Laws of Robotics, but every story was an exploration of how these Laws could be subverted or lead to unintended consequences.
The Laws of Psychohistory are in a way the statistical average of moles of humans, which us why it can only exist in the distant future of a galactic civilization. Yet it can be undermined by the eventual existence of a nonhuman, just as much as an ideal gas is disrupted by an electromagnetically active vapor within it. Asimov again sets up a plausible premise and attacks it from all angles.
This is the lesson that I took from Asimov: All premises must be questioned, and the consequences of rejecting or accepting every premise should be explored.
@@MGSchmahl "All premises must be questioned, and the consequences of rejecting or accepting every premise should be explored." That's definitely the foundation (heh) of all the best science fiction writing. Anything without it is just science flavored fantasy.
Hmm let me think. I would guess an essay introduced with the Butterfly effect and the predictability of things leading to a topic that is in some way connected to this thought, but mainly seems quite random and unconnected to the title and the butterfly in the thumbnail.
That at some point meta comments on the unpredictability of the second part... and the predictability of the butterfly effect part
A book, uff that was hard to predict
@@thomasmuller8118 I think your guess - a video about chaos theory that was intensely meta about its own predictability - was actually the closest prediction of anybody's, so well done.
@@OliverLugg hi could you please do a video on cv being a scam and all its negative effects and how "smart" and "educated" people fell for it in the name of the cult of science?
Love and blessings!
As someone with a Master's in history and a few thoughts on the matter, one of the first conclusions I came to is that there are not "laws" of history because the dynamics and mechanisms upon which different epochs function can be so dramatically different that foundational assumptions upon which we moderns think all power or change hinges upon, can simply evaporate into something new.
There are patterns and rhythms certainly, but nothing that can be broken down into mathematics so simply and suredly. At least in the long durea
It's a general truth that, on a long enough timescale, any predictive model will fail - either because the system it's predicting is chaotic enough to impose a clear horizon (as in weather forecasting) or because events outside the scope of the model become increasingly relevant - any attempt at climate prediction will fail if a significant asteroid impact happens.
"It doesn't repeat but it rhymes.."
I'm guessing you have not read Foundation, the mathematics were not based on history but rather sociology.
one issue with the analysis here is timescale but in reverse- this fictional world is literally tens of thousands of years in the future, of uninterrupted scientific discovery (timescale- robot short stories approx a couple hundred years AP and in solar system, R Daneel Ovila novels approx 500+ years AP, Galactic Empire novels approx 1000+ years AP and Foundation series many millenia AP -- can we even conceive of notions of scientific mathematics that far into the future, again emphasizing that the development was uninterrupted from today's discoveries)
That's my issue. Psychohistory not only predicts how large populations will react to stimuli, but it also predicts how large populations will cause stimuli that other large populations will respond to, and even specifically what they are and when they will occur. Psychohistory is Classical Mechanics in a world that never went Quantum.
Jung said he felt ww1 and 2 in his patients dreams. I ve got schizo affectivity and I m uber anxious about everything but darn do I feel, that I might just doom the planet to Yeats' second coming with just one conversation. I can't watch the news or go out without seeing us sliding toward our collective doom. I never know if my silence, voicelessness is better than me trying to make noise. Intellectually, I know I m biased. It's hard watching covid, ukraine and the middle east right now while feeling I somehow failed an exam in some kind of simulation. No maths, just doom scrolling. Going out is even worse than doom scrolling.
As a fellow maths masters student myself, this is exactly the kind of video essay content I've been dying to find on this platform. It's not *about* maths itself, strictly speaking, but the argument is distinctly mathematical. It's also refreshing to hear jokes about maths that actually come from a place of understanding about what the subject is actually like after secondary school. Came for the category theory jokes, stayed for the essays.
The butterfly has hyperbolic wings, and therefore it is Hyperrouge
#Facts
I predict this video essay is going to be Good.
hey, I was right!
"The Mule' was and still is a story that I still dwell on and remember 20+ years after reading it. Thank you for such a compelling video. Isaac's story helped me understand control systems and chaos theory when I finally came to understand them in university.
Butterfly Effect?
I just want to point out Cryptonomicon has a normal distribution as a plot point, as well as the Riemann Zeta Function, and many other such things. Good book. :)
"Sorry babe i cant hang out tonight i just found a cool sci fi video essay concerning predictability of humanity's future"
I love how I was sitting there at the end, thinking "He's gonna get hit by the cannonball." while you ranted about breaking the format, fully confident in the fact that I had predicted the obvious joke... and yet when it happened I laughed anyway. And then, when I went back to watch it a second time while writing this comment... I laughed again. There's probably some kind of observation about the structure and predictably of humor here, but I'm not smart enough to figure that one out.
Perhaps it has something to do with the juxtaposition of such an obvious gag and the complexity of the videos topic, and the feeling of satisfaction from correctly predicting and remembering the set-up for the joke. The " Ooooh he's gonna do it! YAY!" or "Say the line Bart!" phenomenon.
Humor usually comes from unpredictability, but so does fear; humor is about safe, low dose surprise. But unpleasant vs pleasant for most minds is the opposite, about predictability. Novelty is like spice, it is desirable to most people only as an accent.
I think you partially didn't expect yourself to be right, and partially found it ridiculous, and partially found satisfaction in the prediction coming true and feeling satisfied.
That's my take anyways. Humor is weird.
I think up to a point, the whole concept could work IRL... but if too many people became trained to recognize the patterns, the whole system might break down from people trying to meddle with the predictions. Once people recognize a pattern, they inevitably attempt to use it for personal gain, and once that happens things break down because there's more than one person trying to do so.
I remember watching a video on AI and one of the things it talked about was AI being used for stock exchange stuff. It turns out (maybe obviously) that the AIs were really good at it, but the problem was their existence and "meddling" in the system changed it to something they weren't familiar with.
@@Pheonix1328isn't that the whole fintech field now? computers trading with computers, and minor bugs wiping out your entire portfolio in a few hours of very rapid trading?
Once -mostly neurotypical- people recognize a pattern*
Thats why asimov created a second foundation
I knew that in pickup games of rock paper scissors (aka games in which the people are new to each other and have no prior games to work on) unexperienced players are just a bit more likely to go for rock, so I figured you were working with the same statistics and would go for paper. So I when for scissors, and lost. I got too deep and played myself.
Are you Sicilian?
Inconceivable!
math + philosophy + humor is an interesting mix
surprised historical materialism didnt get even a passing mention
It doesn't have a mathematical formalism (yet?)
Was looking for a comment like this. Well you can't expect to much from idealistic thinkers
I'm guessing considering the title and the butterfly, this essay will be on the butterfly effect and chaos theory
Don't the crime prediction statistics often lead to overpolicing due to biases in the data?
No its wishful thinking because people don't like the conclusions objective observation get you.
some thoughts on the subject from a non mathematician:
-i did like the TV series addition of genetic dynasty with the clones and stuff. it is actually a more "sci fi " version of what was in the books, yet conveys the same spirit of inevitable decay of once successful system due to its very nature and social inertia
- my own speculations on the telepathy (rather an exercise in far fetched thinking, but it's amusing) always were based on the fact, that human inventions either mimic a natural phenomenon or use its characteristics to advance in the necessary direction. if we look at different ways to scan and analyze brain waves as a proto machine mind reading, we can say, that "natural" telepathy for sure exists and is the ground for the advances in this field, that are trying to learn and replicate its very nature. just because plains aren't birds, we can't deny they are flying 🙃
-in the first books, where the development of psychohistory is still in progress Seldon and Yugo Amaryl often mention, that the predictions of their to be science is somewhat similar to intuition formed by politicians. i think, just as in case of Foundation, these intuitive guesses can't be a matter of public discussion by their very nature. just look at the mass migration of african war driven expats to europe and think of it as a way to refresh the stagnating genetic pool there. one can speculate, that such a thing can be a result of meticulous analysis in order to strengthen the obviously decaying society, but only on certain territories, because not all the countries "let them in" or were a goal enough for the settlers. other methods, that would be less disruptive to the every day citizen of the goal country could be applied, but would bring a slightly different effect. this is just an example of a recent occurrence which was mostly reported and talked about from the same point of view by both pro and contra parties.
in case of enough time and energy, we should try to examine things like these even retrospectively to be able to lead a more or less comfortable life and generally understand the direction in which our society is pushed (drawn by inertia of the existing forces?). i think that is the main take away for an average reader, even if psychohistory is not developed, which i very much like to see happen out of sheer curiosity and fascination with the concept.
The *plot point* pun about a third of the way through, absolutely killed me
19:23
I was thinking of the "brick joke" around the fade to black right before the fall of the brick in the end.. Wtf? XD (this is the first video of this channel I've seen (I forgot about the cannonball too))(nvm, I apparently watched the 5d diplomacy video too)
Also, unrelated, I think "lul so random" is a vital part of humor. But it is also something that fits almost perfectly into chaos theory and is actually extremely predictable.
Well, predictable mathematically and scientifically. They need to "feel random" to work. But "what we feel" on a short term, subconscious level is probably the easiest to predict part of how we think.
Edit: So yeah, I think "lul so random" occurs the most when the author/creator of the joke was able to perfectly predict how the audience will be "predicting" your jokes, and to capitalize on the prediction and get a great payoff.
So yeah, I think humor is all about "I predict you predict I predict you predict" loops. And being "humorous" is being good at feeling the flow of the loop, and capitalizing on it.
Was definitely not expecting this, I'm even reading Foundation too.
With Large Language Model AI's becoming ubiquitous, everyone should be aware of the predictive power of what is essentially just huge tables of numbers or 'weights'.
People don't understand there isn't a small man in the refrigerator that turns on the light. How are you going to expect them to understand language models are just spell check with extra steps?
"I predict you are going to sit right there for the next 50-ish minutes and join me as we ask 'Foundation: Are We Predictable?'"
*Immediately closes tab*
Thanks for the great deal of information you've put together. I came via Foundation/ Asimov lore videos, and now I'm checking out your other work. Cheers.
It'll be about decoding and other forms of secret messages that have the be cracked (mainly other forms).
The butterfly is linked the the famous cicada from that really tough series of challenges.
My money's on this one
@@ericalexandervoolaid1354 this was my first guess too
I remember Dan Crisan giving his professorial lecture at Imperial, he was our real analysis teacher, and it was all about his work trying to replicate psycho history. I'm glad you were aware of his work
I predict; a video on prediction
:O
Gotta mention the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is kind of trash in terms of modern historiography. By the standards of Asimov's time, let alone our own. Not only are grand narratives of decline are frowned upon in general, but Gibbon had a massive hate boner for the Byzantine Empire that made obvious holes in his perception insurmountable. To be honest the idea economics is the closest field to it only makes the idea sound worse. If economics is the closest comparison the concept seems almost engineered for humanities to hate it. Cliodynamics is even worse. Certain STEM people have a hard enough time staying in their own lane as is, the last thing they need to hear is that history can be mathematically predicted with current information.
Of course things would be predictable with enough data and computing power.
Coming back to it again and this vid totally blew up. It had maybe 11k or less the last time I was here and less than 100 comments. Now it almost has 200k. Happy for Oliver's (and this video's) success.
As an additional perspective: Asimov himself later explained that he didn't really believe in something like psychohistory - that people were predictable in that manner. Rather psychohistory had come out of thought experiments he was fixated on during WW2. Nazi Germany's early string of rapid victories, before getting bogged down with Russia, obviously worried everyone. Asimov felt despair at fascism and empire once again trying to assert its grip on humanity.
He considered that, over the course of time, no empire had lasted however. Fascism and authoritarianism always fell apart. Perhaps this was simply luck, and humanity had yet to invent the perfect empire. Or maybe there was something about the dynamics of people and civilization that prevented fascism from ever maintaining its grip for very long, in any one place and time. So in the stories Asimov asked "we like to hope that history bends towards enlightenment and freedom. What if someone could scientifically prove it was true? Could it inspire people to plan better and strive more confidently to insure humanity bettered itself?"
5D chaos theory (with multiverse time travel)
I was going to say that
Damn I was pretty close
A bit of context behind the Foundation that may prove illuminating:
There was, and still is, a concept called the Two Cultures, which came to prominence with an esssay of the same name in 1959. The essay essentially argued that academia, and culture more broadly, had become divided into the titular Two Cultures, with the the hard sciences on one and the humanities and soft sciences on the other. You can see a trace of this today in the perennial arguemtns about STEM vs Humanities degrees today.
Essentially, a scientific philosopher named Karl Poppler, in trying to develop formalized rules for what did and did not 'count' as science, threw down the gauntlet by declaring that many of the soft sciences, most notably sociology, psychology, and economics, as fraudulent pseudosciences, making many people very, very angry.
I feel that Foundations Psychohistory is a commentary on the same. Psychohistory is, in Asimov's opinion, what the soft sciences would look like if they were 'real' sciences. And since, as you say, even vaguely accurate predictions of human behavior are likely impossible, Poppler may have been right after all.
The hard vs. soft sciences thing basically exists to please the ego of hard sciencists, while they don't really have the problem to figuring out how to understand society or a similar topic themselfes, so a win win.
This is probably the first time I've seen a UA-cam video essay address the no free lunch hypothesis. You, sir, have won UA-cam for the foreseeable future.
This is so beautiful. I love foundation and this video gave such an amazing connection to our attempts to make a predictable world. And through this I discover so many new projects and their processes that I would have never come across. Thank you so much for this!
Asimov himself in fact doubted that psychohistory is possible with the reasoning that even galactic empire isn't large enough system.
Weirdly enough, I *do* remember foundation. Mainly because someone on the internet decided to take inspiration from it and have their Fanfic “Karl Seldon” create “contra-Boolean algebra” and I’ve been dying to find someone more well versed in maths than me for help with this.
I doubt I'm well versed on maths enough to pull this off, but it's incredibly appealing to try.
Mind you, I gave up on listing all possible balanced ternary logic operations after about 4 and all their permutations. So maybe I should resist the temptation.
@@matthewparker9276 I tried posting the link sometime earlier, but I guess UA-cam didn’t like that. The stuff in question is known as “foundation enclydopedia dialectica”. The primer is available as a pdf on their site.
@@lava2istrue It seems down
@@matthewparker9276I’ll😊 pop😊😊😊😊😊o😊😊😊 😊😊😊o😊😊o😊one ooo
@@matthewparker9276o😊 o😊o😊😊😊ooo😊😊😊😊 o😊😊o😊😊😊oo😊
My gut says it's about a music album in some form. Or something with crossing timelines/alternate universes.
Maybe he's making his own album
i can only guess cicadia 3301 based on the mystery presented its all a bit meta innit
My fine mathemagician, I love using chaos to subtly influence changes in synthesizer patches. Helps turn a rigid, repeating sequence into something that has a much more intersting and living feel.
Interesting and entertaining vid...
I think I'm glad I never read the books, as I love the series.
Agree it is a little cheesy in a few parts but overall I think it's brilliant.
I worked near some epidemiologists for some years. A major conclusion of epidemiology (the study of epidemics) is that most modern epidemics (e.g. heart disease, cancer) are most influenced by human behaviours. The connections are teased out by observations in large studies. The most reliable results require the largest studies. For example, smoking affects heart disease and lung cancer mortality and this relative mortality between smokers and non-smokers can be predicted quite accurately at the population level, yet predicting whether a smoking or non-smoking individual will actually die from lung cancer or heart disease is impossible. It is possible that individuals have free will but populations are often accurately predictable.
Never take medical advice from an epidemiologist. They don’t care about you, just the population you inhabit.
So in other words your entire field of epistemology is worthless? *That's rough bro.*
@@Moe_Posting_Chad Not at a strategic level. Persuading millions of smokers to quit saves a lot of lives which shows up in the mortality data. You just don't know which individuals will benefit beforehand. So it's still great for health strategy and advice at a population level to benefit the nation overall. If your personal philosophy is totally individualistic, then I see your point.
@@clivemitchell3229 "Persuading millions of smokers to quit saves a lot of lives which shows up in the mortality data."
What about all of the Joggers, I mean EBT recipients? Their rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity easily outclass literally every other health concern by an order of magnitude. All they do is balloon up to 400 pounds and require enormous amounts of medical attention to keep them alive long enough for them to eat even more cheap seed oil laden food.
You wanna talk about individualism? What about all these minority individuals that are all but force fed Twinkies until the medical infrastructure collapses under the combined weight of these pigs in human skin?
You're the problem with intellectuals my man. You get educated into whatever obscure compartmentalized bullshit. And when you see the walking heart attacks that are given money by the government to essentially monopolize healthcare resources. You just ignore it because "I study only what I'm told and I don't care about the implications my work has for other fields. Just wanna drink beer and eat pizza. I R Scientist"
Im gonna guess the obvious and say butterfly effect
I am a huge fan of the Foundation series. I delight in their connection to Asimov’s Robot novels. I am super impressed by this video! Thanks!
Thank you for your video. Have you ever watched Shaun? I like the way he doesn't have background music. As a person who finds it challenging to listen to information when there is background music, I love the fact that he doesn't use it. Your voice and your content seems conducive to eliminating it. Also, I feel stupid asking this, would you explain the guns, germs and steel comment? I couldn't tell if you (and/or others) thought it was bad? Or if historians think it's horrible? I don't know the reputation/situation enough to understand your comment. Thanks again!
same on the guns, germs, & steel comment
A lot of these mathematicians seem to have forgotten that life is like a box of choclates. You never know what you're gonna get.
You'll get a 90% probably of a chocolate, and 3% chance of trashy cheap junk
@@adama7752 what about the last 7%?
@@thelordz33 somethings we'll never know
"Check mate Spielberg" that was a damn well placed joke!
new favorite video essay channel??? This goes straight into my "REALLY good videos" playlist
Alright… while I read this as a teenager - the scariest bit about Foundation is how influential it is.
Way too much “Long Term”ism in the world and its horrible consequences.
I know this isn't about jojo or persona, but a man can only hope.
Just want to brag to everyone; I've read all the foundation books listed in the spoilers as well as a large majority of Asimov's "Robots" series. I LOVE Asimov. He was he first fiction author I fell in love with and my all time favorite.
ok
@@trustytrest Impressed?
@@fesimco4339 It took a _year_ to do all that?
@@kkTeaz A year to do what?
@@fesimco4339 nothing dwai
Everything becomes about the Butterfly effect eventually, if you think about it...
Makes me think of the I CHING. Idk if it's an "oracle" but I don't find the idea that anything a person is going through, can't be categorized into 1 of 64, just general summarizations of this thing we call life. I do believe we're that basic. If I'm being honest, 64 bit life force? I was thinking more like 16 bit though. 🤣
Leviathan of course
General thought I've heard that I think is helpful when discussing A.I.:
Artificial Intelligence doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than us.
I find it odd that you didn’t mention material dialectics as a model of predicting history/sociology considering it’s one of the most historically common methods of doing so. Regardless of whether you agree with the figures using the philosophy, it certainly seems relevant to the topic at hand. I wonder if you wanted to avoid the controversy inherent to the topic. I still massively enjoyed the video, so thank you for your hard work here and throughout your channel! You’ve made the highest quality video essays I’ve encountered on the platform.
It's Marxist drivel. Belongs in the religion shelf.
Glad to find a comment like this
I actually feel like no Sci-Fi writer has actually cought up to Asimov yet. In the sense that good Sci-Fi explore sociology. Bad Sci-fi if it can be called like that end up as nothing but basic fantasy hero stories... i'm not going to say names but you all know what i'm talking about.
This video essay will be about predictions, I think.
Dang, you got it
Two thoughts:
1. We run into something of a category problem don't we? Sure individual unpredictable data points all collected together can become a predictable data set... but if we're trying to predict specific details about that particular set, doesn't that set become its own individual unpredictable data point?
2. The more predictable a system becomes, the more susceptable it becomes to change via lolrandom. For example, stale patterns and for mulas in say fiction literature makes a lolrandom unique book more likely to take off just for sake of being different.
i lost a rock paper scissors game to a year old prerecorded video wtf
I remember Foundation being out of print when i was reading sf in the 90s but i liked Harlan Ellison’s screenplay of I, Robot which is now out of print.
I feel like you should have mentioned that there was a large, real-world movement based on the idea that you can predict the future of society using patterns in history, and it's called marxism.
Don't poke the animals in the cage. They are religious in nature and they refuse to accept criticism of their religious ideas that failed and victimized others. They have defined religion as "nothing we do because we are too smart for that." Don't expect them to be reasonable.
1. When you said "Mathematicians don't have sex appeal." I thought "Wait...am I a mathematician?".
2. When you said "I predict you will sit there and watch this for 50 minutes." it was really hard for me to not turn off your video...
Another brilliant video! As someone who has always distanted myself from maths, everything was very well explained! Keep up the great content :)
I think you just hit the nail on the head. Autopilot is ever present. Any time we learn some new action, next time more and more of it will be done on auto pilot.. It's a way to preserve energy.. So, in short, what we do as individuals on autopilot, as a society we do even more so.. So you could predict the future behaviour of large groups of peoples, just based on enough peoples autopilot actions..
P.s. Once, due to some strange chemistry in my brain, due to all the medication I was on, or was withdrawing from, for a full day, I was basically unable to autopilot anything.. Results were astounding.. On one hand, I had perfect, present attention. I actually noticed, how I reacted in much more wise way on some rather usual "jokes and jabs" in the work place.. I avoided making few mistakes that were a given, if I functioned as normal. It got to a point, that by the end of the day, I noticed, just how abnormal, my whole day was. While my reactions were a tad bit slower, none of them were automatic and as a result, I still remember this otherwise completly normal work day except for the fact that I was abnormal, my autopilot was off the whole day and as a result, I did better in social settings, work and menaged to percieve the shocking difference and remember the day. This was about 5 years ago.
Just as I was thinking how this perfect attention is almost a superpower and how cool it would be if I could do it everyday.. I realized it wasn't even 19h and I was dead tired.. Then I add 2 and 2.. and realize maybe biology gave us autopilot for a reason..
I had a misprint of foundation - a later book in the series; that essentially started over half way through.... it was so confusing for me - i read many chapters for a second time thinking it was some sort of miniscule change to it... then i realized the page numbers rolled back also... one of the most confusing reading experiences I ever had.
Did u save the book? A misprint might become worth some money in the future, if it isn't already worth more.
Misprinted material tends to become more valuable over time. Especially for things like currency & money, old toys, and some books..
One random thought, but personally, my believe is that if technology chaos don't exists, and technology stops advancing, then we are pretty much guaranteed to be fucked.
So yeah, not saying that societal collapse will or won't happen for us, but I do believe if technology stops advancing now it will collapse soon.
Remember the "iterations" of chaos-generated line patterns that served as chapters in Jurassic Park _(the novel)?_ That's always felt like the most elegant way to demonstrate chaos theory and thematically it fit so perfectly as the jumbly lines started to form what looked like a fractal hurricane _as_ the tropical storm in the story gets closer/bigger _AS_ the problems w/ the park compound... It's a _really_ clever book even if Crichton sometimes reads like YA _(no actual criticism though, he was my favorite author of all time to just read for pleasure)._
I am sad you didn't bring up the Phillips Curve. A HUGE problem in predicting people is that they will get a hold of your model then game it to their own benefit. That is the core reason people are so unpredictable, evolution has favored willful unpredictability in us.
Did you get your copy of Foundation at Barnes and Noble? I got that exact version of it too.
(One interesting small change I’ve noticed: older editions of the book state that terminus was powered by ‘atomic’ energy, and in that newer edition of the book it is instead phrased as ‘nuclear’ energy. I’m sure this change occurred so the story wouldn’t just fall into public domain )
Copyright is death + 70 years for individual authors, so if Asimov's estate still owns the rights, that deadline is _very_ far away. Even the 90 years from publication given to corporations is quite a ways off.
Beyond the issue of the copyright not being at risk of near expiration, making a change like that in a publishing would not preserve the original copyright (from my extremely, limited understanding of copyright law). In current American copyright law, making a large suite of changes when publishing a work could theoretically allow for the creation of a *new* copyright of that particular edition of the text, but would not prevent older editions (or editions that are determined to be non-transformative from the original) from entering the public domain.
It's similar to how copyright of music functions. Tchaikovsky's compositions are all in the public domain now but individual performances of his music can still be copyrighted, thus you cannot freely distribute a contemporary recording of his music without license.
The black box is actually not black its empty - the algorithm can also not tell you what it recognized, because it didn't. Or to put this another way, the machine stuff is not just a black box to us, it's a black box to machine algorithm itself. you should probably get some learning in wrt to this stuff - your making rather laymen errors about it.
As chaos theory said about the butterfly effect. There is a chance that we've met alien from far far way galaxies and the alien said "Hello There " standing right beside you now
when I typing this insignificant shitpost
51:00 Yeah but how do you explain why my Pandora playlist of Eminem music would always throw in an Nickelback song from time to time 🤔
For me, it seems that predicability is something that can work very well within a scope. But the universe itself has such a vast scope that predicting all of it is impossible. So at times humans, and their history, is very predicable. At times very chaotic. (Though we should note that predictable and chaotic are not necessarily opposite. Therefore, chaos theory that looks for order in that chaos.)
Now the interesting bit is really how to determine predicability. To find those factors, you need to do an accurate model. We can do some really accurate predictions about complex, chaotic aspects of our reality. Weather is very well predicted. But it has it limitations. Not only are the forecasts only accurate to a certain limit. But to do that modelling well due to it chaotic nature we need a lot of data points and a lot of powerful computers to do so. While other things are a lot more easy to predict and do not need a lot of data points or advanced modelling. Like the obit of the earth. We know how long a day will be and we figured that out even before we actually started to keep a record of time. (Though given enough time even the obits of our solar system is not actually guaranteed. Quite a lot of chaos in orbits. But there is also stabilizing factors)
But could one try to determine was resource is needed to predict the scope of human history, or just fiction? That I have no answer for. Since the system itself feed in to itself, my guess that the you would need more and more resource to do so. Indeed, part of fiction is to be unpredicable to bring a sense of enjoyment. And similar, there are actors in history that wish for unpredictability. My guess is that at least future history will always out race our ability to do long term accurate predictions. Though, our past might oddly enough become more and more predicable as we can use more and more resources on that problem.
My grandfather actually illustrated the cover for an Asimov book I believe it's called Moon
I think we are predictable, to a degree. There will be anomalities and those can completly wreck the prediction. But you can make pretty good models, but only with a huge amount of data and decent assumptions.
The real problem with the predicting the future using the data from now and the past is that it is not actually data - its assumptions that frequently turn out to be wrong or only correct enough to tell an accurate enough story. You can measure the speed of something with enough precision, but you cannot have a good picture of now or then with anywhere near the same accuracy, or with enough accuracy. You may think the current media climate and technology afforded to us (phones, social media, etc.) would make it better, but recent history shows it has made things worse (in terms of having an accurate view of things).
Yeah, you can predict that certain movies or series will be worse than we would like. I think everyone predicted just how bad the new Star Wars movies would be. The Wheel of Time adaptation, Game of Throne's final few seasons.
After a certain amount of time even normal people can pick up patterns of extreme stupidity.
Mathematicians dont have sex appeal... Ouch!!! That felt personal lmao
Humans on the macro, are very predictable. Humans on the micro, can very much surprise you.
Maths... The science so great the can't decide if there is a zero or not! And don't get started on imaginary number's.... no seriously it could cause the universe to implode.
This is a good video, but I still believe in the clockwork universe (that everything can be predicted).
Are we predictable? I don't know, but how they adapted the books to the tv show was completely predictable.
A man lost in the poetry of maths, as it is a language this is not surprising, although it is probably a uniquely human language based on the number of digits at the end of your arm & it is certainly not the language the universe is using.
Mathematics mankind's greatest invention & greatest folly, while the language of the universe is just in front of you waiting to be discovered, countless bright minds go down the Rabbit Hole of finding new ways to count there monkey fingers.
Fascinating and disturbing simultaneously.
I think most of the Asimov’s stories are rely on the deterministic view of the world. That’s obviously not how the world actually works, any process can’t be divided into equal parts, that’s just how a human brain is able to process the world by approximating it. And the indeterminism means that you can’t build a model that will product an events with 99.9%, just approaching to that level at simple systems, but that’s doesn’t actually matter. One of the intelligence definition is an ability to replicate the result by a different approach, so giving enough approximated information an intelligent species could potentially create a closed system using reverse engineering that is predictable enough.
What do we learn from Jurassic Park? Never screw over the IT guy
i read the first book and i couldnt stand it, the whole idea of a guy that can accurately predict the extremely far future of a enormous system like a galactic empire is just something i couldnt buy into
Moore's law is interesting as it accurately predicted technology progress before it happened.
Maybe it's because I have read a lot of modern stories before I read Foundation, but I spotted 'the mule' as soon as he appeared, which made the next 20 chapters or so a bit frustrating. 😆
You spoiler The Last Question, I subscribe. That's how it works.
Not a historian but graduated from undergrad in Anthropology, which always plays second fiddle to the sociologists in the political sphere 🙄
The issue I have with Cliodynamics does not only seem to be cherry-picking sources through history (really liked how you talked about the social sciences Heisenberg Theory btw, it was one of the most memorable self-humbling moments from a professor in our theory class when he made that comparison), but in addition it seems to revolve around a circular argument in which the only reason a prediction is flawed is because the model is not precise enough, which will completely entrap any conversation in the theoretics of it all.
It also shouldn't be understated how flawed the Heisenberg theory is not only in prediction but in modeling. In essence, you might just see it if you believe it enough, including in the past. Narrative is such a powerful tool that it unfortunately (and perhaps fortunately depending on your perspective on certain topics) even influences the objectivism we strive for in the hard sciences. There's a reason why we still cling to the term "civilizations" as an implement for our historical readings even though the word itself is prone to immense flaws when put under real scrutiny, and there are not many anthropologists I know that would seriously consider using the term in any pursuit of objective description, even. As such, a lot of red flags shot up when you started Peter Turchins history moving from beetles to people, and this comes from someone who also almost went into entomology before getting into anthropology!
I won, my hand covered The Rocks sexy bald head (both of them).
The best way to seize power is when there is a crisis. While maths can be used for modeling and predictions, the concept of a model or prediction that forcasts a great danger is a terrific way for bad actors to manufacture the belief in a crisis necessary for them to gain power.
I think it is worth noting that the series Foundation beat out for best of all time, Lord of the Rings, was about giving away the idea of concentration of power. This is in exact contrast to the theme of Foundation... I think the reason foundation won is because the temptation and seduction of being "the man with the plan and the power to wield it" speaks louder to others than the idea of freedom and trust in the nature of humanity