Peter Turchin has a blog post (http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-mad-prophet-of-conn... ) expressing his own views about the Atlantic article, explaining:
"I cringed in a number of places as I read his article. Yes, I propose a fairly ambitious program of testing theories about historical processes by translating them into explicit models and then testing model predictions with large datasets. But no, I don’t think of myself as a Hari Seldon. In fact, the fictional Hari Seldon had no appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and mathematical chaos (because Asimov wrote the stories before the discovery of chaos). And cliodynamics is not psychohistory."
Also from Peter, lest this become a predictable round of journalist bashing:
"Graeme is a very intelligent journalist and his explanations of cliodynamics and structural-demographic mechanisms that bring about state breakdown are quite good. The Atlantic went through a thorough fact-checking process (unusual in these times of online media with limited resources to check facts) and I have no argument with the factual foundations of the Graeme’s article."
I immediately thought of Hari Seldon when I read the opening sentences of the original article. And this quote from the blog post is so awesome
> But no, I don’t think of myself as a Hari Seldon...
And then goes on to explain why he's better. Love it!
Despite what Peter Turchin says in that quote, he is a lot like Hari Seldon: both of them model history scientifically, and both of them have a rough plan or roadmap for getting out of our current trouble. He says at the end of the above link:
> And my hope is that Cliodynamics will eventually pay its debt to History by showing that studying past societies is not just an academic endeavor — it can help us understand, among other things, our current Age of Discord, how we got into it, and what we can do to navigate the turbulent waters ahead.
Seldon was a magic prophet dressed up in scientist garb, rolling the chicken bones/making a Theory that his secret society of scientist/magicians carried out to save the roman empire/universe.
Foundation was popular not because it was actual science fiction, but because like much of sf, it flatters and states the prejudices the engineer class has-that politics leads to barbarism, that the mass of people need guidance from a rational class, and that science is magic and can solve and predict any problem.
Guys like this are doing the same, they are popular not because of SCIENCE but because they state the prejudices of the rational class. If he has a model, ask him how it applies to the town of Willimantic, CT, which is by Uconn, and watch him have zero to actually say about it
I don’t think he did? Psychohistory relies on gargantuan groups of people acting predictably, so you can’t predict a one-off random mutation of a single individual. That’s not a failure, it’s a limitation- and why whenever Seldon appeared, he prefaced his statements with a % chance that the plan was still succeeding- the remaining failure case included a catastrophic mule-like event.
Mule-like occurrences were always a possibility, which is why Seldon also created the Second Foundation to fix the bug and set the plan back on track- which of course they did. Things were a bit touch-and-go for a while there, but the possibility of failure is always a consequence of probabilistic modeling
Not a faliure, but a predictable weakness of the model that was well known and was brought up several times.
Psychohistory cannot model individual eccentricities, the mule was a huge divide-by-zero trap for the equations.
Seldon had the forsight to write an exception handler in the form of the Second Foundation.
