@dentarthurdent @dwnerdfrommars
Azimov’s Psychohistory is kind of the final word on determinism within sociology and economics.
He also explored it in a short story set in the C20th: a sociological experiment designed to make a small unimportant organisation grow (and then collapse when it can’t grow anymore) accidentally becomes a populist political party. Disaster rather than hilarity ensues.
Within the original Foundation Trilogy he specifies three limiting factors.
It doesn’t work with powerful parapsychological forces, in his terms a mutant who can manipulate emotions. I am reminded of tropes condemning irrational ‘emotional’ responses when actually people don’t want to do what the commentator says.
The population itself should be unaware of psychohistory (no second guessing)… this seems to be an unsatisfactory plea to free will. Well the original trilogy was quite bleak if not fascistic.
Aliens have their own psychohistorical rules. The implication from the last Foundation/Robot book is this will also apply to novel hominid species and/or robot based societies.
Otherwise, in terms of physics pure and not very simple, I don’t get the butterfly effect at all. Yeah double pendulums do weird things but at what point does deterministic chaos become RNK (‘reckon nobody knows’ from The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams)?
WW1… essentially the end game of the Balkan Wars writ large by Prussian militarism. AJP Taylor did regard it all as a ridiculous series of accidents. The single determining factor of the strategic situation on the western front is that railways could deliver reinforcements before the enemy could make significant advances. The result ‘effects’ our view of the cause… an emotional response if ever there was.
winston 2 weeks, 3 days ago.
