A while ago after watching I, Robot I started reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov. I was utterly fascinated as he introduced the concept of psychohistory which is, quoth the author, “a science in which things could be predicted on a probabilistic or statistical basis.” Basically, large groups of people are treated with statistical models to predict how they will respond to certain economic and social stimuli. Unfortunately, after that the story became bogged down in sleep-inducing politics. But I still find the concept of psychohistory very interesting.

Psychohistory is really just like any other mathematical model. Identify the variables and the relationship between them. It’s finding that relationship that’s the hard part.

A recent Slashdot article brought to my attention work by Patricia L. Sullivan who claims she can predict the outcome of wars with 80% accuracy. Her study is limited in its scope, only relating to military conflicts between nations, but it’s the first example of any psychohistory-like endeavour that I’ve seen.

But do we really want to know the future? And would knowledge of the future influence our current decisions for better of worse? Here’s a quote from Asimov which I find ironic in that he says it’s impossible to predict how psychohistoric knowledge will be used.

“I think if we can somehow get across some of the problems that face us now, humanity has a glorious future, and that if we could use the tenets of psychohistory to guide ourselves we might avoid a great many troubles. But on the other hand, it might create troubles. It’s impossible to tell in advance.”

So our “prediction net gain” is zero. I guess we need another science for predicting the effects of predictions… Did anyone else just get a whiff of recursion in the air?