Peter Turchin: Why Empires Rise & Fall (The Nietzsche Podcast #66)
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- Опубліковано 25 кві 2023
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Peter Turchin has continued the work of Ibn Khaldun, by elaborating upon Khaldun's hypotheses and testing them against the wealth of historical data that we now possess. By means of a structural demographic analysis of historical empires, Turchin has worked for years to generate mathematical models in order to explain the trends that seem to recur in every complex society. Now, with the data of 10,000 years of human activity on the group level, it may be possible to finally move beyond the preliminary, pseudo-scientific steps of the discipline of history, and proceed into a truly mathematized phase. This is the discipline that Turchin calls "Cliodynamics", after the Muse of history of Ancient Greece. His intention to leave behind the anthropological and archaeological studies that characterized history in the past, and bring mathematics into the field so that we can begin to make predictions. The reason why many have been so resistant to this development is our belief in free will, and the unpredictability of human action. Turchin thinks that this is a mistake, because while individual decisions are often unpredictable at the individual, granular level, at the level of entire populations or demographics, human beings become rather predictable. Quite in line with the cyclical view of history postulated by Plato, Thucydides, or Nietzsche, Turchin brings the math to demonstrate the truth of their ideas: that, in the realm of human history, all returns eternally. For our sources today, we're primarily using Turchin's books: War and Peace and War, Ultrasociety, and a brief dip at the end into the overall idea of Ages of Discord, as well as some references to Secular Cycles by Turchin and Nefedov. We'll also include a number of quotes from Roman historians Livy, Plutarch and others, as we examine the period of the Roman Republic, the chaos of the Late Republic and the transition to the Principate, as explained by Turchin's structural-demographic theory. This should be fun, given that we've already considered these events somewhat through the eyes of Machiavelli. Now, we can approach the subject with more rigor. In my view, Turchin is following in the traditions of these thinkers, but developing their work further. Episode art is Thomas Cole's now famous "Destruction" piece of his cycle, "The Course of Empire".
#nietzsche #philosophy #philosophypodcast #peterturchin #cliodynamics #historyofphilosophy #history #ancienthistory #ancientrome
“Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact.” You’d like Oswald Spengler who’s main influence were Nietzsche and Goethe.
Spengler said the West would revert to its previous civilization, pre-1054 Orthodox Christianity, by 1100, as quoted in Archimandrite Justin Popovich 's the Orthodox Church and Ecumenism. This builds on top of these mathematical models, it doesn't contradict it.
Just to give you an example, British expats who voted for Brexit:
Turkeys who voted for an early Christmas: Bregreters in Spain, wishing they'd voted Remain not Leave. Obviously failed to read part 13 of the Anonymous Prophecy of Mount Athos of 1053 "England for the Saxons only" and St. Arsenios of Moscow and Mount Athos's 1910 Prophecy which includes "Britain will lose her Empire and all her colonies and come to almost complete ruin but be saved by praying enthroned women".
War brings hatred, hatred long term economic cost , long term economic cost environmental destruction , environmental destruction, disaster. Anyone can come up with these general short term generalised maxims
@@adrianwhyatt1425 Spengler thought the West would go into Caesarism and a new religion.
Until greed can be replaced with reason war will sadly plague this world. We seriously need to replace how leadership is selected. This overwhelming mountain of corruption we must climb and root will be humanities greatest challenge
...or more sadly and more likely we will be erased by a great calamity
Interesting and informative. Turchin's Elite Class might better be termed, the Parasitic Class
Turchin sounds like one of the parasites to me, so does the presenter, they sound as evil and stupid as Marx
You must belong to the Unsuccessful, Envious Class.
Lolol
Spengler approached collapse esoterically as well, likening the rise and fall of High Culture to the lifecycle of plants and other organisms, that all follows a seasonal trend, bound by thermodynamics, entropy, etc.
Spengler was a genius. I remembered him listening to this audio.
This episode is just wow, really blew my mind. Keep up with the great work!
Dr. Turchin cataloged +400 civilizations, 182 of them had enough Data to surmise,(guess at) how civilizations collapse, which is driven by wealth disparity, too few msga rich, and too many poor people. 85-90% of the time ending in violence! French revolution, Russian revolution, ect.😮
'These ideas express one of the oldest dreams of mankind - the dream of prophecy, the idea that we can know what the future has in store for us, and that we can profit from such knowledge by adjusting our policy to it.'
- Karl Popper
Here we are with yet another war at Russia's western border, Popper will be right when we're all gone.
Screw karl popper, to hell with that 👃
I've watched many videos on these. I find them interesting because it can help me get an idea of the future and a look into our past. In some ways though I hope they don't become too mainstream. If they became something we focus our policies around then the exceptions to the rules would become more common and slip through the cracks. In the end meaning the very thing we tried to prevent came at us in ways we could never expect. It's like trying to avoid freezing to death by going into warmer and warmer climates. All it does is achieve the same result, your death, if it goes too far.
Dr. Turchin cataloged +400 civilizations, 182 of them had enough Data to surmise,(guess at) how civilizations collapse, which is driven by wealth disparity, too few msga rich, and too many poor people. 85-90% of the time ending in violence! French revolution, Russian revolution, ect.😮
Been waitin for this, Metalhead Zarathustra 🤘
Brilliant. Love your grasp of classical thought and life
The 3 beats of humanity; war, peace, and revolution. The endless waltz.
What an excellent summary of Peter Turchin's ideas and ideas of your own.
Just found this series, quite underrated for how in depth this is. Big fan of the idea that all models are wrong but some are useful saying, and Turchin posits some interesting ideas.
Last year I really enjoyed your work on Nietzsche as well as the videos you did on Faust.... and now I stumble across your material in another context.
It is interesting to hear your erudite reasons for believing that free will is an illusion. I learn a lot thanks to you, but I also read a Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner in my youth so have been inoculated against such a belief. Instead free will is an aquired ability, it starts as a weak factor in our lives and in many remains a weak almost insignificant factor, but not in all.
History can be predicted ...... reminds me of the "science" of finance which was purportedly invented to make astrology look good.
Mathematics is a language for quantities, qualities however are something completely different. This for me is one of the beauties of reading and understanding Nietzsche.
Hubris has played it's hand in the fate of every Empire.
Surely if mathematics could be applied to developments of societies it would be chaotic and fractal, since identical start points can never be identified, and the systems never settle to regularity.
Yup, entire project is bullshit. Plus, intentions are malevolent and anti human. Total pseudo science of the Marxian variety
Great discussion 😮 thanks man for your efforts
Other than your chronic application of the viral self-confimational 'right' (which is largely an unconscious way of communicating one is of the educated variety) I'm a big fan of the concise, uncontrived way you communicate. Even your voice is soothing. Quite pleased to find this channel in my feed. Easy subscribe.
The way the cycles stay true makes this hard to deny among the most crazy minds n we are awash in those right now, which makes reality and it's description that much more true a note of sound
Thank u so much this put me right to sleep! It is not boring but it takes consentration to listen to an calming. I love it! I will listen again when i am awake as well. ❤
I'm back this morning!!
Turchin is great. He also practically speaking moves into the territory of conflict theory in sociology. But does so using a more limited number of categories, which with a future historian might engender some constructive criticism, but so far I think are logically constrained. I like cliodynamics. It’s on the right track. I just don’t like that Turchin sees the non-mathematical aspects of history as pseudoscientific, or that class conflict makes little waves in the tides of history (I don’t think this is conclusive, so call me a holdout). You can still Bayesianize reasoning in history regardless of the historical method used. This has been done successfully in archeology, in the work of Richard Carrier on Jesus historicity, and in the work of Aviezer Tucker on WWI. None used real statistics for broad overarching arguments where they would not realistically apply (namely, outside demographics). Even without Turchin’s intervention, historians already have a consensus on what to count as good study in demographic history. Turchin just happens to be one of the best exemplars so far. Others happen to be followers of Braudel. Anyway. Just starting the episode. Read the description, and thought I’d chime in. His works are great and everyone should read Turchin.
It's not that the unquantifiable aspects of history are psuedo-science but quite plainly they are not science. And they don't have to be.
Carrier is a nutjob
Dr. Turchin cataloged +400 civilizations, 182 of them had enough Data to surmise,(guess at) how civilizations collapse, which is driven by wealth disparity, too few msga rich, and too many poor people. 85-90% of the time ending in violence! French revolution, Russian revolution, ect.😮
44:34 entropy always increases, and order decreases, over all. But sometimes the opposite occurs on very local scale.
Great. Thank you for this
Epic art
Thomas Cole: The Course of Empire: Destruction
The Course of Empire: Destruction, allegorical oil painting created in 1836 by American painter Thomas Cole that was part of his series The Course of Empire.
I initially thought this whole field was ridiculous but some of the mechanisms & arguments are quite elegant and simple. But you must include a sociological lens to understand it, which is rare for most other fields to even consider, especially biologist or traditionally, even historians.
Considering the historic nature of exploitation that all the big Empires appear to rely on, the current effort to eliminate the two major players involved in the BRICS Group, appear to be motivation for the conflict in Ukraine?
The prospect of a Trade Group that represents a majority of resources available on the Planet, appear to be a threat to the ability to exploit.
We do need to acknowledge that Empires exist by exploiting weaker nations.
The G-7 appears to represent the former Empires who openly exploited the Planet for their own profits.
The ability to exploit is what seems to be fought over in Ukraine?
Hitler learned a harsh lesson late in His life.
The Leaders of the G-7 appear to overlook that lesson?
I love the ambitions of cliodynamics. Given it's ambitious reach, I wonder if Turchin or other have gathered data and analysed data from Eastern societies (china, india, Japan,...) To see how cliodynamics models fare in describing their trends and how it projects into a future where globalization have done the job to unite these 2 halfs of the human societies.
Having lived in Japan they are extremely racist. My take from my travels is that everyone thinks they are superior, till they get kicked in the nuts.
Total pseudo intellectuals, worse than Hegel, idiocy made to sound clever to the shallow listener, malevolent anti human intention, standard rubbish
He has. He includes data from ancient China
(apologies if you cover any of this later in the podcast; im only about an hour in and wanted to get my thoughts down fresh. Ill edit if my opinions change listening to the remainder)
Turchins ideas seem interesting, and I find myself agreeing with many of the points you articulated as being from him. For example, the idea that war and cooperation are not opposed, but intimately linked is true in deeply profound ways, and the actual process of the cycle, his material analysis so to speak, did strike a chord with me.
Now im no luddite - if someone's run off and created the long sought after psychohistory then ill be the first to embrace it, and human behaviour can certainly be modelled numerically (finance is proof enough of that). Yet at the same time as I found myself agreeing with the points you presented, I also felt deep conflict. Turchin's ideas feel deeply like of this time, like a modern american looking around the world and trying to fit every article into his lunchbox. I couldnt shake the feeling that i was walking through somebody else's fantasy universe, a daydream they typed up for personal edification.
The most telling thing to me, is that this analysis only focuses on whatever the local and temporal hegemon is. Spain is the dominant power, and then its not, and it leaves the scope of this analysis. Yet Spain continues to persist. The roman example strikes me as being particularly ill fitted. The roman kingdom, pan-italian republican rome, imperial rome, byzantium, and Byzantium post 1204 are all such different entities its difficult to even compare them as the same entity. And what about entities such as the papal states, who exercised more power in some ways that high imperial rome? I grant that the trick of splitting up each periodization is clever; i dont feel this move wqs sufficiently well justified.
For me, problem with mathematical analysis of this type ends up being exactly what you started the podcast with. The greeks had a muse of history precisely because history is a literature. It's an inquiry into the past and the causes which proceed from what has come before. Mathematics strips away the causal connections between events, but the literary structure of the stories previous historians told remains. Now, no longer a story, the genre structure is reified and ceases to be a consciously held notion to reflect on, but a mathematical truth to calculated.
Maybe someday HistGPT will be able to automatically interpret the events of the past based on mathematically determined deep learning; i think its still too early in the 21st century to say something like this is impossible. For now though, I say the art of history remains firmly human. Sing on, O Muse...
00:00 📜 Peter Turchin explores the idea of secular cycles in history, where societies go through stable integrative phases followed by unstable disintegrative phases, each lasting about a century or longer.
02:40 🔄 The cyclical pattern of war and peace, stability and chaos, prosperity and dissolution, has been observed throughout history by thinkers like Thucydides, Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Ibn Khaldun, and George Putnam.
03:35 🧪 Peter Turchin introduces "Clio Dynamics," a scientific approach to history that aims to use mathematics to make historical predictions and test them against observable results.
08:30 🤔 Turchin challenges the belief that human history is too unpredictable due to free will, advocating for the use of mathematical models to understand historical trends.
11:06 🌐 Turchin suggests that individual willpower is weak in shaping history compared to collective group dynamics, emphasizing the importance of studying patterns and laws that affect entire populations.
12:41 🌍 Turchin argues that cooperation and competition are not opposites but coexist in human societies, with individuals cooperating within their group while competing with other groups.
17:26 🔄 Secular cycles involve two phases: an integrative phase of stability and prosperity followed by a disintegrative phase characterized by internal strife and external threats.
20:00 📆 Turchin's secular cycle theory can be applied to historical empires, such as Great Britain, Persia, the Mamluk Empire, and Rome, demonstrating the pattern of rise, peak, decline, and transformation.
22:07 🏛 Empires can go through cycles of integration and disintegration, with factors like the role of the emperor evolving over time.
23:41 🌐 The key drivers of these trends are the supply of labor and the production of elites, which are measurable factors.
26:28 💼 Oversupply of labor leads to falling wages, benefiting the elites and causing economic inequality.
29:21 📈 Growing elite competition and factionalism can result in societal instability and even civil war.
32:44 🔄 Asabia, or social cohesion, plays a crucial role in these cycles, with abundance and luxury leading to competition and societal disintegration.
36:09 💰 The Matthew principle amplifies wealth inequality, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, contributing to societal unrest.
42:04 🔄 Asabia's influence can lead to reversals in trends, moving from integrative to disintegrative phases in empire cycles.
44:08 🔄 The decline of asabia occurs over extended periods and takes several disintegrative phases to weaken a great imperial nation to the point of collapse.
44:48 📈 Societies experience cyclical patterns known as secular cycles, moving between integrative and disintegrative phases.
46:12 🌍 The pruning of the elite through civil unrest and internal wars is crucial for ending the disintegrative phase of a secular cycle.
47:05 💰 Economic distress among the elites and lack of effective government contribute to internal wars during disintegrative phases.
48:25 🔴 Extended periods of conflict tend to moderate politics and reduce susceptibility to radical ideologies among the population.
49:37 🔄 Secular cycles continue as prosperity and a waning inoculated population eventually lead to another disintegrative phase.
50:48 🌦 External factors like climate change can influence secular cycles, causing population declines and increased social instability.
51:45 ⚔ Empires often emerge and decline on meta-ethnic frontiers, where different civilizations meet and create friction.
55:00 🌟 Asabia (group cohesion) is generated on the frontiers during empire formation and declines in the imperial center during decline.
57:44 🧬 Multi-level selection operates on both the individual and group levels, promoting cooperation among unrelated individuals in a society.
01:05:36 🤝 Societies that promote Cooperative behaviors tend to outcompete those with more selfish attributes in the long run.
01:07:02 🤝 Cooperation and altruism towards non-related human beings can be explained by inherited cultural traits that promote cooperation at the group level.
01:09:48 🌐 Cultural traits play a significant role in human societies, shaping behavior and cooperation at the group level, often above genetic predispositions.
01:10:55 🌟 Christianity, as an example, can be seen as a set of cultural traits that fostered cooperation and bound groups of people together, allowing it to endure over time.
01:13:29 🏛 War acted as a selection pressure, driving the formation of larger and more complex social structures and cultural traits to maintain social cohesion, leading to the birth of modern societies.
01:16:55 🌐 Meta-ethnic frontiers, where cultures clash, are often the birthplaces of empires as groups compete and cooperate based on differing belief systems and moral codes.
01:22:39 🇷🇴 Early Roman society valued cultural traits like bravery, self-sacrifice, honesty, perseverance, familial devotion, and self-control, contributing to social cohesion and order.
01:25:59 💰 In the early Roman Republic, economic inequality was remarkably low, with the richest 1% being only 10 to 20 times wealthier than the average citizen.
01:28:03 🚫 Luxuries and ostentatious displays of wealth were uncommon in the early Roman Republic, and moral standards promoted frugality and modesty.
01:10:13 🌎 The birth of modern society, according to Turchin, can be attributed to war, which acted as a selection pressure, driving groups to form larger and more complex social structures.
01:16:12 🏰 Incipient empires often emerge from meta-ethnic frontiers, where different groups with varying beliefs and moral codes clash, leading to the formation of states.
01:21:57 🔗 Roman society's cohesiveness was maintained through a moral code set by religion, emphasizing virtues such as bravery, self-sacrifice, and familial devotion.
01:28:30 🏛 Ancient Rome's upper classes were modest in their appearance, emphasizing a lack of stark differences with the common people, contributing to Rome's success during its early imperial phase.
01:29:12 🛡 High "asabia" or social cohesion played a crucial role in Rome's success, allowing it to withstand losses and persevere in warfare against major geopolitical opponents.
01:30:08 💪 The Romans' strong social bonds and religiones (religious practices) bound the people together, enabling them to overcome challenges and continue fighting even after devastating defeats.
01:30:48 💰 The continuous pruning of the population through disasters and wars prevented labor oversupply and the overproduction of elites in Rome.
01:31:56 🌍 Rome's late Republic marked a period of civil unrest, civil wars, increasing inequality, and a collapse of internal cohesion, caused by factors such as population growth, land redistribution issues, and the rise of slave labor.
01:34:31 🤝 Slavery in Rome eroded common social bonds, and the propertyless proletarians despised slaves as competitors for work, further exacerbating social divisions.
01:36:08 🪙 The Roman elites' greed, looting of public lands and coffers, and neglect of commoners led to a series of conflicts, including civil wars and slave revolts.
01:40:28 ⚔ Julius Caesar's rise to power and subsequent assassination marked a phase in the late Republic, indicating the instability and lack of consensus within Roman society.
01:45:13 🔄 Peter Turchin's Clio Dynamics focuses on material factors and demographics as drivers of history, rather than free will or moralistic views of history, providing insights into the rise and fall of civilizations.
"Civilizations begin stoic, and die epicurean"
~~Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Book II, The Life of Greece
I would say: Civilizations begin masculine, and die feminine.
Just learned about Durant
when too many outsiders are admitted into an empire it falls
On an individual level, it reminds me of The Good Earth.
It is not that history or humans cannot be categorized or have laws discovered about them, but when they find it, as an intelligent economic agent they will seek to avoid / take profit with that rule, wich in the long run changes human relations and the equations derived. At minimun they would have to be rediscovered.
People do not need to be afraid of the previsibility of a complex system, especially with feedback loops.
It’s like markets, they are complex adaptive systems. Humans/culture will constantly react and adapt to new information and based on how others are behaving. It’s why humility is important, you can be correct one day but not another, being proven a certified silly head despite being initially correct. Nice observation and articulate way of putting it (despite the anime PFP).
@@dogetaxes8893 thanks. But now I think biology might be slow enought to make rules that last a little longer. Nature is good with variability, perhaps is that rule society is based. Diversity might be our strenght after all. Or if a rule is discovered it should not be spoken to benefity just who know.
Are you familiar with John David Ebert? He's got a UA-cam channel with hundreds of videos, as we'll as several dozen books, centered around philosophy, religion and history and art. He's got an encyclopedic knowledge and is a big fan of Spengler, as well as Nietzsche. He's a bit neurotic but i'd love to see a discussion/interview between the two of you.
I’ll check him out
John David Ebert is criminally “underrated “
He’s got some great insights and ideas🎉
Is Peter Turchin our Hari Seldon?
The questions and the seasoning of time are also great contributers to the determining of empires and their longevity, when it's time to move on sometimes their greatness allows a Rome to surface most of the time. Not. Just a thought. 👍
Empires rise because of great men and women ,and fall because of fools .
We are not bugs, we can invent higher productivity and we have done so because we all have minds and incentives to survive and improve. I am trying to understand this though.
Insightful and useful
I think the main difference from now and then are concentrated empires. Now corporations look to be the new strongholds and countries of the modern day, vs the past when people had to work more or less towards a government, a single empire.
So I wonder if Turchin’s theories could still be applied to today with such dense globalization and interconnectedness of everything.
Could Turchin’s thoughts be akin to the ideas of “The fourth turning” ?
I definitely feel they have synergy
I listened to this on spotify and here are my thoughts:
While there is a decadent decline in the course of an empire, I've come to realize that what kills it is not the decadence itself that kills it. Conservatives dismiss the constant civil wars and internal power struggles that went on as would-be emperors tried to take the Imperial throne through force until it was weakened so much that it was impossible to maintain and the Western Empire was taken over, and the Byzantines limped along for almost a millennium. It seems that "decadence" is a very broad brush that ranges from civil strife, incompetence, stifling despotism, military exhaustion, and bloated bureaucracies that prevent any work getting done rather than simple hedonistic pleasure-seeking among the masses (they usually exist among people who are very well-off and are far removed from the struggle of daily existence). The French aristocracy is a prime example of a decadent elite that got overthrown, but Nietzsche's remedy for the revolution with Napoleon not only backfired, it entrenched democratic sentiments.
The only time that it didn't backfire is when the Bolshevik revolution played out exactly like the French, but a Napoleon (Stalin) gained power within its ranks rather than a Robespierre (Trotsky) and ideological inflexibility led to the Soviet Union's downfall.
Trotsky was a nasty piece of work, another pseudo intellectual bankster funded fake left traitor against every planet on earth. Evil man.
At first i was very sceptical but he seems to be onto something.....
So we find that inequality not only brings us inflation, but war as well
10:50 I would very much like to know how he translates aspects of History, such as Cultural facets, into Discrete pieces of information. If the information cannot be made Discrete, than a Computer cannot Process it.
Governments are commissioned and dismissed by the owners of assets for the last 15,000 years of Indo-Euro culture. All the relevant words are about cows and cattle raids.
Having finished this, I still find the question of mathematizing history and formulating predictive general laws that are useful to be left hanging. Where is the predictive law in Turchins theory of history? A general law is applicable to all times, all peoples, and should not be left up to so much interpretation. Far too much subjective and contextual interpretation is required here: definition of empire, when empires begin and end, what consitutes elites, what consititutes classes, and so on. Turchin posits his theory ahead of indicative facts: claiming that history can be and ought to be mathematized in order to evolve beyond mere data gathering and into a predictive science. Still waiting to see any evidence this is possible, and any objective facts that support his contentions. According to this presentation, Turchin appears to be engaging in a sophisticated interpretation of history according to his own subjective bias, in that history according to Turchin is primarily a class based struggle (Marxism). Nothing new here.
So many parallels! Only this time we have a global industrial civilization. I suppose some areas of the globe will fair better than others, but when it really starts to crumble its going to be nightmarish for most people 💀
Thirty minutes in and riveted. Great video.
This just sounds like the state of the world today 😑
I'm very much interested in the topic, but I'm sorry, I could only listen to a few seconds here and there because everywhere I jumped around. I heard smacking sounds (dry mouth saliva) and the "s" sounds were hissing super badly. People don't appreciate just how important good audio is. I hope it improves so I can come back and enjoy the content.
I believe all empires contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Those seeds are planted at their very birth by the instilling of an idea that rocks the world to its foundations and begets their apotheosis to great nationhood.
But even the noblest, purest ideals become stale and then irrelevant with time, as do systems of power incapable of molding themselves to new, more present realities. What thus initially enabled an empire to grow and expand will in time inevitably become what limits and suffocates it.
110 is coming soon. Which country will it be this time?
2 misunderstandings. 1. Statistics show the more comfortable a modern society is, less births, lower population. Western world sees this. Less religion more comfort less babies. 2. Fiat economies don't use taxes to spend. Spending doesn't wait for tax returns and doesn't need to. Inflation is caused mostly by real resource restrictions. Those 2 misunderstandings create problems when attentive to predict modern empires like US.
Real resources are intrinsically restricted. Inflation comes from groups receiving more income than they need to meet their needs and spending that money on real and limited assets. The other cause is monopolies or price setting collusion by the same.
@Ryan-Fkrepublicnz there is no intrinsic value in a fiat monetary system. It's all based on what the govt is willing to pay. Oil doesn't go up until a govt or cartel creates the restriction, and the govt or corp decides to pass the increases on to consumers. This is why govt subsidies can hide resource problems for a while. The govt allows billionaires to exist. So that's why billionaires corrupt govt agencies that create money creation and distribution.
*freeloaders are punished" ...😂😂😂
I'm not sure I agree with the proposed speed of corruption
Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon and Peter Turchin are one and the same. 🤪
Anyone connected to Cathy Money Fitts and her Sunburn Report, I can't think well of.
Interesting statement.. why do you say that?
@@drosales43 She is quite the money grubber peddling a paid newsletter subscription. She said "understand that you have been harvested financially" then she does that same thing to suckers.
@@charlessavoie2367 oh I see so you find no value in her research, content, and financial insights and don't believe it warrants people paying for it.
Sounds like studying pine beetles
ancient Rome probably was THAT dangerous for wasabia to be brectian
Good. You lost it in analysis on Dawkins, he perfectly allows for altruism and group benefit under the functional selection point of an individual's genes.
He ignores that the social technologies of Islam and Christianity are beneficial. Belief systems provide common likeness to communities that don't share direct kinship. The belief system can encourage idiocracies, but the benefit of group unity and its subsystems for pairing networks are greater in importance.
Atheists are ignorant of the benefit of belief systems.
Issac Asminof sci-fi book series foundation
Isaac Asimov :)
Whatifalthist brought me here.
My cats and chickens proved you wrong. They showed the young are the only thing that matters
Where's Hari Seldon when you need 'im?
fearmongering and hyperboles all over
Sounds like Psychohistory to me. Read some Foundation by Asimov.
○A-şa-biy-yah
Empires are based on power and greed and the people suffer the consequences
I have read Dawkins and used to like him but he is really not a serious thinker to be devoted this much time on this topic.
His social and cultural views are quite laughable for someone with his fame.
It is outside his field. His cultural and social views carry just as much weight as yours and mine.
@@PloskkkyNo, his cultural and social views are ridiculous.
Pride is the essence of human nature; no one can escape it unless he or she accepts God's remedy. Pride is like a virus that only God can counter.
Excellent .
However it is the responsibility of every human being to rid himself of pride .
Which "god"? Let me guess, YOUR chosen fantasy drilled into YOUR head since birth and the one you drill into YOUR kids daily
I think there is a glaring problem with this, that being both individualistic and collectivist societies have had equal success throw history. Meaning there is value in both by the fact of evolution. I think he's colored by the time of an excuse of individualism.
After the collapse of the Western empire the Eastern Roman empire lasted another 1000 years. I just cannot see there the cycles of dissolution and regeneration that Turchin predicts. Every now and again there was a short civil war when the succession was not clear, sometimes they make territorial gains sometimes they didn't but the basic social & government system remained the same. It was a story overall of slow gradual decline over 1000 years, with periods of expansion when they happen to have a good emperor. Doesn't seem to fit this grand theory!
He actually goes into great detail about Eastern Rome and their history fits perfectly with his math. Like with the West, the East had centuries-long trends of integration and disintegration.
Peter is trying to invent psycho-history?
36 minutes in, zero math LOL hmm
'Rome continues as christian system' It should be noted, Rome continued as a roman catholic empire, totally different from Christianity.
Well Flavius Josephus created the myth of the Christ for Titus Flavius, so the Romans have first dibs.
Oh no, don't pull back the curtain! The Bible is FACT. 😢
sometimes its a little cringe to hear you talk with that same tone no matter what is being said.. like there is almost total detachement between your feelings and your intellect. Some people might praise it, but i feel its overdone somehow. also, the word 'right?' that you sometimes put behind a sentence sounds weirdly manipulating. because its so minimal and the tone never changes.. call me weird. i love your content, but unfortunately have a hard time listening because it feels insincere at times. as if there is an unresolved trauma in the way, that is translated in semi-detachment and arrogance, or a better word is maybe pedant. ignore me
You are weird 😊
Now we know
ok u werd
Was Nietzsche a bastard yes or no ?
It seems very interesting but the narrator though he has a nice voice is sending me to sleep lol
Salty bro, take a science course. This is embarrassing.
Nah Turchin is based
Well I didn't listen to the whole thing. I got as far as when you were discussing the definition of elites, and you started talking about how, in the US, you could use the ivy league universities, and maybe add in some other factors. But that definition would not be applicable to other countries at other times, and so give you no way to make apple to apple comparisons, which would be a fundamental requirement of a quantitative science.
I previously asked you about Popper in a Q and A, and it was clear you were not familiar with his epistemology and philosophy of science, which was the cutting edge as of the middle of last century. I don't think much progress has been made since then. Others do. But it's an absolute minimum if you want to be making the case for what is or isn't science.
It’s all explained in Turchin’s work, I have a limited amount of time in an episode. Or rather, I can’t go into every digression. The point of the episode isn’t to take a side in the debate of whether Turchin’s work ought to be considered science. It is to give you his perspective in a compelling way so that if you find it interesting you can do the further reading.
The question iirc was about Popperian metaphysics, which is about philosophy of science, which would probably not be taught in a science course.
@@untimelyreflections
"It’s all explained in Turchin’s work" -
Salty Bro, I love you but I kinda hate this answer. In general I hate it when you try and tell someone you disagree with them and they say "well that's because you aren't well read enough and I don't have to explain myself or why the soviet union wasn't real communism until you've read all three versions of Das Capital in the original German."
So only by reading everything Turchin has ever read can I possibly know the answer?
It seems to me that if there was a strong answer to this objection (the problem of an inconsistent definition of elites across cases, rendering any experiment irreproducible, and data from different sets as incomparable) you should, as a supportive exponent of his theory, be able to repeat a version of it here that makes sense to the uninitiated. If you can't, the conclusion I will draw is not that I should read more of Turchin's work but that I almost definitely shouldn't.
"The point of the episode isn’t to take a side in the debate of whether Turchin’s work ought to be considered science."
Well it seems to me you did take a side, arguing for the scientific viability of his theory, and that history should progress into a science. I would have liked a comparison with Marx (whose scientificity or otherwise popper directly addresses, by the way) who proposed his own work as a science of history. I don't know if this came later in the episode, This was a turn it off moment.
"It is to give you his perspective in a compelling way so that if you find it interesting you can do the further reading. " - I don't find it very interesting, so thanks, you provided a useful "taste test". But as a subscriber and regular listener of the podcast, I thought I would tell you this episode was to me much less impressive than your regular output because of this weakness, which I perceived, in your understanding of contemporary debates within scientific epistemology, which are important given the centrality of knowledge claims to a lot of Nietzsche's (and therefore your) work.
"The question iirc was about Popperian metaphysics, which is about philosophy of science, which would probably not be taught in a science course." it was epistemology, and it should be. I have only studied philosophy of science, not science itself, but I've attended some conferences that were mostly scientists, and just a few of us philosophy weirdos on the fringes, being weird. There was a philosophy of science section, which was run by someone who was convinced Popper's work and the concept of falsifiability was bad and useless and that we had to surrender to the nuances of each individual science, with no overarching, set of rules, and that we just have to surrender to the fact that each area is a distinct realm of expert knowledge, and that no one can criticise string theory, for example, until after they are validated by years working with the most elite minds in the string theory realm. Kinda like you're "it's all explained in Turchin's work" comment, but on steroids.
Personally (and probably along the lines of your recent guest Professor Steven Hicks) - I think that road leads to hell, closing off the space for crosspollination and new ideas. I think it also represents an epistemic failure which is common among small s subjectivists such as yourself (forgive me if that is an unfair characterisation) that any kind of claim to objective knowledge is irredeemably suspect. I suggest you consider what we could call the non-coincidence of intersubjectivity. This is something I hope you'll be responsive too, because I've heard you previously make the distinction between the Nietchean subjectivist position and solipsism.
I also hope you'll forgive me for quoting my own work, but I a few months ago wrote about this using the example of a conference (not the science one, a different one) held in San Francisco:
"A colleague and I got into a conversation with a professor about the fundamental nature of truth. I gave the example of the famous [golden gate] bridge, which was, I contended, a big red bridge. We could all see it, I suggested, and should be able to reasonably agree upon its existence. But, the professor countered, we had no objective knowledge of the bridge, only subjective experiences of perception of the bridge.
Yes, I wanted to respond, but in your subjective experience, my colleague’s, and mine, the bridge is a bridge, the bridge is red, and the bridge is big. Three out of three, three times. What’s that?, I wanted to ask, a coincidence?" You can read the rest of the article (significantly shorter than turchin's complete works) here if you like: democracy-technologies.org/opinion/only-research-transparency-can-defeat-disinformation/
Pretty tangential, but it may interest you as a researcher and content producer.
I look forward to your next episode:🐍🦅
> In general I hate it when you try and tell someone you disagree with them and they say "well that's because you aren't well read enough and I don't have to explain myself or why the soviet union wasn't real communism until you've read all three versions of Das Capital in the original German."
I have to say, this is not what I was saying in that response at all. It's actually far simpler: I'm simply saying that Turchin argues a convincing case in the book, and I'm not going to defend him here because I'd have to go pull out the book and basically parrot someone else's arguments. The point of the episode is not to convince you that Turchin is correct, it is to present his arguments as faithfully as possible, as steelmanned as I can do. If you then disagree with *Turchin* based on the content of my video, then all I can say is that his book is very math heavy and he advances the arguments for why he thinks his position is scientific, the time/effort commitment of writing an essay with citations in a comment response is just not worth it. It's not, "you aren't well read enough". That's a projection that you're bringing to the table. You began the conversation by saying my video was "embarrassing", for the reason that *I* am not well read enough in science. Fair enough, but all I can say is to go investigate it yourself if you're interested.
> So only by reading everything Turchin has ever read can I possibly know the answer?
Nah, Ages of Discord is probably enough for you to determine whether you think he's legit or not.
> Well it seems to me you did take a side, arguing for the scientific viability of his theory, and that history should progress into a science.
No, I articulated that this is Turchin's position. I actually don't agree with him on that point at all.
> But as a subscriber and regular listener of the podcast, I thought I would tell you this episode was to me much less impressive than your regular output because of this weakness, which I perceived, in your understanding of contemporary debates within scientific epistemology, which are important given the centrality of knowledge claims to a lot of Nietzsche's (and therefore your) work.
again, fair enough, but in terms of the analytics it's actually one of the most popular episodes I've ever done.
> Pretty tangential, but it may interest you as a researcher and content producer.
I'll check it out!
Interesting, and I'm only halfway in, but so far the only (implied) idea of Turchin's I wholly agree with is that the capitalist 'economic' system, as such, is a total failure.
Certainly seems Turchin's hypotheses are based more on projection from modern (last 300-500 years), rather than being any long-term predictive model or presciption. Perhaps he should revisit his hypotheses using real, rather than classical, economic theory .
Which is an admittedly difficult, if not impossible goal, since such a theory has not yet, and may never be, written.
The problems with both are nearly the same, and can be summarized roughly in one word --- chaos.
Also, I'm not sure Dawkins would agree with either of your interpretation of his 'selfish gene' concept.
Capitalism is certainly incompatible with surviving the climate crisis...
@@FkSeditiousChristofascists capitalism isn't, as opposed to what?
Psychohistory!
So we live in the worst possible period of the current cycle. And it’s only going to get worse. Yippee! 🫠