
History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future - oska
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-future
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angry_cactus
Surprised the article doesn't mention Isaac Asimov's _Foundation_ in which
psychohistorians try to predict the future with mathematics, similar to
Turchin's idea.

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nikbackm
Hm, trying to predict the weather is probably much easier.

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ganzuul
This is such a complex issue... On the most abstract level thermodynamic laws
are defined in a closed space and those don't exist in nature. We would not
have much history at all unless we existed in a space without divergence,
tending to extremes instead of equilibrium.

History isn't an accurate account of what has happened. There is a lot of ego
involved and later an ego-nation complex. History is basically an account of
biases and extremes instead of a model of human behavior.

Perhapse we can make global laws to tend to equilibrium, designed with the
fanciful use of AI and psychology/biology. Currently laws tend to extremes,
motivated by profit.

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badrabbit
There is history and there are patterns derived from. Biased and incorrect
history will likely be an outlier or it will form a weaker pattern.

E.g.: communists win over the hearts of university students and rural folk.
Then instability, coup/revolution and a controllable communist satellite is
created. Is that true? Is any of it propaganda/fabrication? Which pattern is
most common and can it be used to analyze Russia and China geopolitics against
Ukraine ,US and UK?

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paganel
Communists most definetely did not win the hearts of the rural folk in my
country before coming to power with the Soviets’ help after WW2 (I live in
Eastern Europe). The communists had relative success among the urban working
classes and among some of the students/young folk (that was correct).

But even among students, they mostly managed to attract what were perceived
back then as “non-native enough” students, that is the Jewish students mostly
(because the Jewish were let’s say more than ostracized back then and the
communists were one of the few organizations who received them with no
questions asked), but still, the great majority of the student class was still
right-wing and nationalistic.

All this to say that it is impossible to draw up generalizations (which most
of them are made up based on Hollywood movies anyway).

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badrabbit
I know a few cases where the rural class analogy is correct,including China.
Any guerilla force will use that approach if the military is siding with the
current government [1] , so the patter is only partially accurate,we can
analyze when it is accurate and apply that lesson in the present. So,it has
nothing to do with communist ideology, does that mean we can apply that to
neo-nazis and other terror groups (al-qaeda is in there). This sort of
analysis allows us to ask why patterns exist,the patterns are a starting
point,not the conclusion.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_guerrilla_movements](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_guerrilla_movements)

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paganel
The Nazis were not a terror group, they were a fully functional European
government whose leader had even been democratically elected, that’s why makes
them (and the idea of a Nazi State) an order of magnitude more dangerous
compared to a terror group like Isis or AQ.

Back to the subject, choosing a pattern for seemingly subjective reasons (why
should we prioritize the Chinese example you gave compared to the Eastern
European one?) and then saying that everything else “that doesn’t fit” should
only make us “adjust” the pattern and not ditch it completely (or the idea of
using a pattern in the first place) is pure historicism. More generally, there
are no patterns in history, there’s no “logic”, there’s no “historical spirit”
(or whatever fancy term Hegel used for this), there are just things that
happen for some reasons of which we haven’t got the slightest idea generally
speaking (200 years on since the French Revolution and there still isn’t a
consensus about why it happened, and we’re talking about one of the best known
historic “events”).

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badrabbit
The Nazis are not a terror group so they did not use guerilla warfare. Alqaeda
was a terror group which did use guerilla warfare. NeoNazis are terror groups
unlike actual Nazis so the historical pattern tells us they are more likely to
use Guerilla warfare and focus on uni students and rural population
(initially) if they escalate to a full blown campaign to affect change via
terror. So the pattern is very useful there.

You don't chose a pattern for subjective reasons, you choose a pattern in
relation to an observation you are making about current events. You look for
patterns between what you see now and similar contexts in the past so that you
can form a hypothesis and then a theory after appling critical thinking to it.

There most certainly are many many patterns in history, that's the whole point
of the academic study if history. You learn from historical patterns and see
if you can learn from the past. For example you can look at the Gin Craze in
1700's england and the prohibition era US and see what laws and measures to
control the drug of alcohol failed or succeeded and why. You can then draw
parallels with modern day drug war and legalization efforts so that policy
makers will make an informed decison instead of just winging it. Attempts to
implement a heavy tax and implicitly ban gin made things worse with improper
distilation poisoning people,as did US prohibition era controls and I can also
theorize the fentanyl and heroin controls of today is a historical pattern
repeating itself. The Gin craze died when laws were implemented to allow only
higher end establishments to trade Gin, making it affordable and good quality
but not as cheap as it was before. Some countries like portugal have legalized
most drugs allowing addicts to pay for it and use it so long as a trained
medical professional administers it -- they report success and drop overdoses
and poisonings.

Your refusal to accept and learn from historical patterns is not new. People
naturally think they are special and as you can see with my substance control
example, the US refuses to accept history and as a result thousands continue
to die of drug abuse overdose.

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chkaloon
The traditional historian arguments against this really show the lack of rigor
inherent in the social sciences, or alternatively, a self-interest bias of
some sort. Complaining that “humans can’t be reduced to numbers” completely
misses how probabilistic analysis works. Anyone with basic statistical
knowledge wouldn’t dismiss this out of hand unless someone’s ox is getting
gored. I agree that it is a complex system with many variables involved, but
humans aren’t magical. Their social systems likely follow patterns like any
other complex system.

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hos234
Niall Ferguson has written an entire book on how Network Science/Graph theory
concepts can be applied to historical events - The Square and the Tower. So
it's not all bad. More like people are just waking up to possibilities.

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aaron695
Not much difference between historians and fiction writers.

Both tell a story of the world that's interesting, often insightful and
totally made up.

Post newspapers you might be able to find data, removing all the BS like what
we know exists in today's newspapers.... but it'd be hard.

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JoeAltmaier
We have just one history. There's a real danger of over-training or over-
fitting the data.

