
Are There Laws of History? - benbreen
https://aeon.co/essays/if-history-was-more-like-science-would-it-predict-the-future
======
mannykannot
"In February 2010, Peter Turchin, an ecologist from the University of
Connecticut, predicted that 2020 would see a sharp increase in political
volatility for Western democracies."

I get the impression that the author of the article believes that this has
come to pass, though she does not say so explicitly. We are now in the middle
of May, and from my perspective, nothing of the sort has happened - in fact,
the political institutions of the Western democracies seem to be functioning
about as well as they were before, despite the major disruptions caused by
Covid-19.

By "as well as before", I mean that they are functioning, not particularly
efficiently, but at least so far with no scocietal collapse, and while there
is more volatility than necessary, the level does not seem to have changed
markedly from the norms of the preceding decade (i.e. since the prdiction was
made.)

So we are still waiting to see if Turchin's prediction will come to pass.
Furthermore, for his model to be in any way validated by such an outcome, it
would have to happen for the reasons he proposed, and not, say, as a
consequence of Covid-19, which he did _not_ predict.

~~~
WalterBright
Such predictions are not falsifiable, because its proponents use confirmation
bias to prove them true.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Just as their opponents use their own confirmation bias to "prove" them wrong.

Politics in the UK and US and is clearly far more polarised and far more
extremist in tone - especially on the right - than was the case ten years ago.

The Brexit nationalist nonsense in the UK was almost unthinkable in 2010. It
was literally considered fringe lunacy. A senior politician on the right
literally called the people in favour of it "swivel-eyed loons."

Now it's mainstream policy, with huge popular support - balanced against a
slightly larger segment of the population who still consider it self-harming
folly.

That's your instability right there. You can Google any number of people on
both sides saying that they cannot remember a time when the country was this
polarised, and an utter absence of anyone saying the opposite.

This is not normal. If you want to claim it is, prove it.

~~~
JackFr
In the U.K. I’d point to the General Strike of 1926 as a time when people were
more polarized and I might add substantially prone to more political violence.
Yes, it was nearly a century ago, but we’re often subject to recent bias wheN
we think the current time is special.

In the U.S. when someone points out that we've never been more polarized, it’s
always easy to point out that a couple million men took up arms against each
other during the civil war. But more recently between 1965 and 1968 there were
riots in a dozen U.S. cities including N.Y., Chicago, L.A., Detroit, Newark ,
Baltimore and Washington which required use of the National Guard or army to
restore order. We see nothing like that today.

~~~
mistermann
And for good reason:

[https://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1965...](https://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1965.html)

[https://learninglab.si.edu/collections/martin-luther-king-
jr...](https://learninglab.si.edu/collections/martin-luther-king-jr-the-later-
years-1965-1968/uyGek3MpmmPtXC6J)

> We see nothing like that today.

True, but knowing why that is the case is hard to do. Are modern day Americans
more supportive of military adventures in far away lands that kill thousands
of innocent people, or is it that we hardly see anything about it on the news,
especially images of dead bodies?

Similarly, are Americans now satisfied with the level of equality and justice
currently enjoyed by the African American community, or are they occupied by
other distractions?

Riots in the streets seem to have been largely replaced by arguments in
internet forums, particularly Reddit, where you will find not only large
amounts of "unrest", but also a significant amount of mental illness - people
who have completely lost touch with reality.

------
urbleflan
Taleb has some good comments about this, which is that just as you can make a
prediction and have it come true by pure chance, we can view evidence from
history and fit a pattern to it (even though that pattern occurred only by
chance). Personally I think the best way to view history is as a series of
poorly controlled experiments. As with scientific experiments, the evidence
may be suggestive of some pattern, but we should embrace an attitude of
skepticism and openness to counterexamples. The patterns we see may tend
towards "laws," but we should assume some level of imperfect resolution and
control and therefore associate a confidence percentage with our inferences.

~~~
friendlybus
You can line any reasoning up against chance. Theres a chance that the sun
will rise tomorrow. Measuring a prediction against chance says nothing for the
validity of the knowledge or structures you used to build that prediction.

People have to build paths through life that span years and decades, one does
not need chance or randomness to know those plans might fail.

------
motohagiography
Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt noted that the very idea of
history being a dynamic process of "progress," is itself an idea with an
explicit logic - an idea-ology - where once you have accepted it, all
political reason operates within the iterated logic of that idea.

So it's not history that has laws, but rather the implicit logic flowing from
only tacitly held notions forms what someone would interpret as a "law."

What is history useful for? Locating essential human experiences, but like
statistics, the drunk uses a lamp post for support not illumination.

~~~
friendlybus
Many postmodern philosophers and french intellectuals have said the same
thing. We can choose to step outside the shadow of history, nearly with
trivial effort. But for what purpose.

------
jkingsbery
> What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations
> have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are
> plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if,
> in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms.

(From the linked page
[https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a](https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a)).

Multiple problems here. My understanding (as a pretty-well-read-for-an-amateur
in the subject) is that this claim is overstated. Most historians today seem
to agree that

\- Rome had long since stopped being the capital city of the Empire. It wasn't
even the most important city in Italy in the Late Empire. \- Romans at the
time wouldn't have known about a "fall." It had been a long time since
Italians ruled the empire. The empire simply passed from rule by Romanized-
non-Italians to foreign conquerors. \- The Roman empire didn't fall, it moved;
it persisted in the East until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Emperor
in Constantinople would have called himself 'Roman' for those 1000 years, and
the term 'Byzantine' is a later invention. \- There were lots of contributing
factors to the fall of the Western Empire that worked together. Some of these
were external (migrations of the German tribes, invasions), some of these were
internal (cultural divergence between East and West). There is some debate
about the relative importance of these different factors.

The question can't be answered not just because the answer itself is
complicated, it's because the meaning to the question is ambiguous in a way
that the questions answered by thermodynamics are not. For related, more
specific questions, we actually do have consensus on the answer.

It's also cherry-picking one example. There are lots of cases of historians
coming to a better understanding of an event over time, and concluding earlier
explanations of the event are incorrect.

While I can see why it would be good to have a "science of history," we've
proven largely unable to do this in much simpler areas. Analytics applied to
the game of baseball, a game where we have complete information about
everything that happens today, including where people are standing on the
field and the ball's spin rate, has only recently gotten to the point where
there's a quantitative science around it. Human history is a lot more complex
than baseball.

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
> Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall."

The sack of Rome in 410 came as a giant shock to the Roman world, and led to
debate among Romans about the cause of the crisis of the Empire. Augustine's
"City of God" was written to defend Christianity from the accusation that it
was the cause of Rome's decline. The Western Roman Empire did not disappear
overnight after the sack of Rome, but that was clearly a sign that the Empire
was badly weakened. By the late 5th Century, the Western Roman Empire had been
completely taken over and divided up by rather barbarous Germans, and it would
have been obvious to any Roman that the Empire was extinct in the West.

The idea of a "transformation" of the Roman Empire in the West, as opposed to
a collapse, really isn't tenable, in my opinion.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God)

~~~
jkingsbery
It's a good point, the sack of Rome would have been a big moment.

My point is that marking the end of the Roman Empire with the fall of Romulus
Augustlus is an artificial crutch used by historians - from what I've read,
most historians agree to this point. While Rome had been overrun by Germans by
the end of the 5th century, de facto it had been ruled by Germans for a long
while before then (even if none were called "king" or "emperor."). And even
after the Germans controlled it, up through the reign of Justinian there was
an off-again-on-again relationship in which the Eastern emperor played a role
in who controlled Italy. Your "typical" Roman (whether that's a Roman on the
street or a Roman in the Senate) would have seen a slow decay, but wouldn't
have looked at any one particular event and said "Well, I guess that means the
Roman Empire is done, let's move on to the Middle Ages!"

This all speaks to how the question of "How did Rome fall?" is underspecified,
because how you answer the question depends on what you mean by the question.

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
I completely agree that marking the end of the Roman Empire with the fall of
Romulus Augustulus in 476 is not very meaningful. But there was a definite
collapse of Roman civilization in the West, with a highly urbanized society
with a sophisticated economy and an elaborate tax system funding public goods
(infrastructure, the legal system, security) and a fair level of literacy
being replaced by a largely de-urbanized, almost completely illiterate, and in
many places de-monetized society. The collapse didn't happen instantly or at
the same time everywhere, but it did take place roughly during the 5th
Century, and would have been noticed by people who lived at the time. They
might not have known right away that things would be different forever, but
there were definite events along the way - the sack of Rome in 410, the
failure of Majorian's attempts to reconquer critical territories of the
Western Empire, and others.

I mostly feel that there's been a trend in historiography to over-emphasize
_continuity_ , with the theory of the "transformation of the Roman Empire." It
looks much less like a "transformation" of the Empire from one state into
another, and much more like a civilizational collapse. I agree that why this
collapse occurred is difficult to answer, but I find the argument that it
didn't occur unconvincing.

------
has2k1
"One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities
and to spawn new obligations." Sapiens, By Yuval Noah Harari

This quote stood out for me when I read Sapiens.

~~~
urbleflan
It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same
sentence.

~~~
monkeydreams
> It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the
> same sentence.

Not really. Tendency denotes a general inclination, such as objects tending to
move toward the centre of mass. Tectonic plates tend to shift slowly. In both
cases these are very solid and reliable predictions which are almost certainly
true in a vast majority of cases.

I would not agree with the statement vis-a-vis luxury items and necessity (fur
coats, diamond rings, harems, are not demanded by all), but there is a
tendency for certain classes of items to be considered "essential" over time.

------
jdm2212
My dad is a historian, and it's always pretty entertaining to run the current
faddy "big idea" in popular history past him.

There's always two parts to his response:

1\. $bigIdea is not a result of serious historical research; it's a reflection
of laypeople projecting their preferred narratives onto history

2\. literally dozens of counterexamples that he can cite on the spot from
across different continents and historical eras

My takeaway: laws of history are the stuff of cranks and oversimplified
history popularizations.

~~~
plemer
What would you make of “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant? To me, all
models are wrong but some, like his, are useful.

~~~
jdm2212
If you're just interested in having some understanding of _the past_ , books
like that are great.

If you want to predict the future, your analysis should be about 98% detailed
study of the present, and 2% history. Much as you would consult mostly this
week's weather forecast when deciding to go for a picnic, but maybe adjust
slightly based on historical error rates in weather forecasting.

The real usefulness of history research in prediction/policymaking often seems
to be in debunking popular myths that shape/bias how we analyze the future and
present. The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result
of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down,
like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. In
hindsight those are both obviously false, but at the time a lot of people
believed them. Historians help identify and make us cognizant of those
narratives.

~~~
aabeshou
> The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a
> popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down,
> like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards.

can you please elaborate on this? it sounds like you're proposing the
offensively wrong notion that the Iraq War was noble and well-founded, truly
aimed at restoring democracy to Iraq, but went wrong because the Iraqi people
are simply allergic to democracy

~~~
jcranmer
Not the OP, but:

I think that Bush was sincere in his belief that bringing democracy to Iraq
was a (if not the) primary goal of the Iraq War, and that doing so would be
beneficial to the Iraqis. And I could believe that he felt a "white man's
burden" and obligation that, because he could do so, he ought to do so.

[And to be clear: my belief is that the notion of "white man's burden" is
_incredibly_ racist and offensive, and I do not condone actions taken in such
a manner.]

While I wouldn't call it "allergic to democracy", I can also entertain
arguments that successful democratic regimes have preconditions for their
success that Iraq simply did not have. I can even entertain arguments that
democracy is not the best form of government, and it strikes me as mildly
offensive to presume that democracy is automatically better than whatever form
of government exists.

I think OP's point is that the Iraq War was undertaken in the [racist] belief
that they were bettering the Iraqis by bringing democracy to them, and the
failure is that, well, we were racist in the first place to believe that
"bringing democracy" to another people is "bettering" them.

~~~
aabeshou
> I think that Bush was sincere in his belief that bringing democracy to Iraq
> was a (if not the) primary goal of the Iraq War, and that doing so would be
> beneficial to the Iraqis.

I believe that Bush probably stroked himself thinking this way, as did
virtually the entire media and political class. However I don't think it was
anywhere close to a primary goal, as you say. More to the point: their actual
conduct in the war does not indicate in any way that this was a genuine goal
as opposed to a piece of propaganda.

> While I wouldn't call it "allergic to democracy", I can also entertain
> arguments that successful democratic regimes have preconditions for their
> success that Iraq simply did not have.

Any citations for this notion? But to restate a point I made in another
comment: the discussion of whether Iraq is ready for democracy is almost
offensively inappropriate and nonsequitur, because the U.S. military does not
aim to install democracy, it aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S.
military and business interests, regardless of the wishes of the local people
who are governed.

To put it another way, we have no way of knowing whether Iraq is "ready for
democracy" based on the Iraq War because the U.S. military did not act in a
way to actually try to install democracy.

~~~
jcranmer
> Any citations for this notion?

I don't recall if _Why Nations Fail_ specifically covered democracy, but at
the very least, you can definitely see why nations caught in the vicious
cycles it outlines might suffer more because of democracy.

> because the U.S. military does not aim to install democracy, it aims to
> install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests

No. The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the
enemy's military. That's the big thing of what went so horribly wrong in Iraq:
the US kept pushing military solution after military solution to fix very-non-
military problems and was confused as to why it didn't work.

~~~
aabeshou
> The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the
> enemy's military.

If you look at U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt, CIA, military) over
history, one consistent goal is to install regimes that are friendly to the
U.S. and to topple regimes which are not. Defeating the military of the
hostile regime can be part of that. But if that were it, then the U.S. would
just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

The U.S. generally sticks around and tries to install a replacement, often
undemocratically. On the occasion that they do implement democratic elections,
any winner that is not sufficiently friendly to U.S. interests is undermined
or even couped and a (usually right-wing) government is installed
undemocratically.

Occasionally the U.S. will even undermine the democratic government of a
country it hasn't even officially militarily engaged with, because the leader
is threatening U.S. business interests. The history of U.S. relations with
Latin America is _littered_ with this type of illegal covert warfare, most
recently in Bolivia with Evo Morales who was nationalizing natural resources
that U.S. business wanted access to.

~~~
hindsightbias
> But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been
> accomplished, and that's not what happens.

That is exactly what the US military planned with Iraq, Rumsfeld had outlawed
any talk of Phase IV (nation building). The generals wanted out of there as
quick as possible because they knew it would be a clusterf __k regardless of
Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney thinking State, USAid and the UN would just manage
Chalabi’s flowering democracy.

Of course, that fantasy lasted as long as it to blow up the UN HQ in Baghdad.

------
hodgesrm
As a thought exercise let's stipulate it's possible to model political
economies over time and run experiments on them. This would be a pre-condition
for identifying "laws" and demonstrating their effects. Such a model would be
more complex and require more inputs than weather modeling.

We can't reliably forecast weather for more than a few days. It's implausible
that you can do anything even close for human history.

It's possible to draw robust conclusions about human behavior. But you have to
use other approaches and frame the problem differently from "discovering laws
of history."

------
49531
Isn't dialectical materialism an attempt at finding laws of history? I've
always understood it as a sort of evolutionary biology for social science.
This article mentions Marx, but only as a guy who had an idea of a communist
society?

Right after mentioning Marx the author states: > The idea that such progress
was inevitable was sharply derailed by the genocides and totalitarianism of
the mid-20th century...

Dialectical materialism (while not infallible) is not derailed by genocides
and totalitarianism but rather predicts such events, as well as things like
imperialism, colonialism, and recessions / depressions cycles.

I, personally, think it can easily become reductive to push everything into
dialectical materialism, and many people have added onto Marx's analysis. But
if you're going to try and nail down some laws around history I think it might
be a good idea to read about thinkers in the past who have already tried to
answer the question.

~~~
jcranmer
If I recall Marx's thesis correctly, my recollection is that he thought that
capitalism would spontaneously lead to the proletariat revolution. And 150
years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred
in the most backward, feudal states among the great powers, and in the context
of a multi-factional civil war in a state that was losing to foreign powers.

It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your ideology if you're promoting a
scientific view of the world that makes predictions that failed to come to
pass.

~~~
danharaj
Marx was specifically drawing from proletariat uprisings that were happening
around him. To name one particularly famous one, The Paris Commune. Marx was
trying to explain the tumultuous political situation of 1800's Europe. You
also have to keep in mind that he wrote from a context that still had a living
memory of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist social and economic relations.

> And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions
> occurred in the most backward

They don't commonly teach about the leftwing revolt in Germany in 1918 which
was crushed when the ruling government instructed the Freikorps to smash it
and murder its leaders. It's also hardly mentioned that FDR's policies in
America were an urgent response to multiple general strikes that spontaneously
erupted all over the country.

It is certainly not the history of proletarian unrest in the West that
discredits Marx's historical materialism, we just have a common understanding
of a very sanitized and biased version of labor history.

The internal forces of capitalism that Marx identified as the source of these
class conflicts have certainly evolved over generations of spectacular
technological and social change, but they're still there and still very
relevant. Our capitalist present, in the broader context of history, is still
very young in comparison to other socioeconomic orders.

~~~
jcranmer
Perhaps I should have added the qualifier "successful."

What actually happened was that laissez-faire capitalism (which was the
dominant form of capitalism in the 19th century) ended up yielding to
essentially social democracy, whereby the state becomes a check on capitalist
control of the working classes and provides guarantees and surety to the
working classes. I'd argue that the modern social democratic variant of
capitalism would be foreign enough from the laissez-faire capitalism of Marx's
era that he wouldn't consider it capitalism.

~~~
danharaj
What are these differences between social democratic capitalism and laissez-
faire capitalism that are so fundamental that Marx would not recognize the
former as capitalism? We still have class relations defined by how we
participate in economic relations. If anything, the extensive financialization
of modern capitalism really exaggerates just how subordinate _all_ of us are,
proletariat and bourgeoisie alike, to the logic of concentrated capital which
seeks to increase in its concentration.

And is it really fair to call the capitalism of Marx's time "laissez-faire"
when the government coordinated very closely and heavy-handedly with the
bourgeoisie to develop capitalism further (for example, land reform,
imperialism)? I will take the position that laissez-faire is an ideological
definition of capitalism that never described actually existing capitalism and
could never for long. After all, all those prole revolts of Marx's time that
were squashed were squashed by the state on behalf of the bourgeoisie. If they
did not have a state to rely on, they would invent one. And if a state emerged
that would oppose them, they would seek to destroy and replace it. So it goes.

But it would be impossible for me to defend such a position in the confines of
a thread because I would have to scour the entire history of capitalism and
show how involved the state was in creating and preserving a world suited for
bourgeois hegemony. It would easily be thousands of pages and I would just be
recapitulating dozens of scholarly works.

------
wespad
Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more
historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would
read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why
they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university
they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of
interpretation.

~~~
magicsmoke
I've found that the stories different societies tell about their own history
that are far more interesting than the objective facts of what happened,
because those stories reflect quite a bit about what those societies think
about themselves and their place in the world.

------
tim333
The application of science to history that seems to work is to notice patterns
that repeat over and over. So if you were studying cats you might notice that
they tend to meow, chase mice and get in catfights. Likewise with humans they
tend to form political coalitions, try to gain power, have wars with
neighbouring countries and the like. If you read the history of Europe it's
pretty much ruler of A gained power over B or was overthrown etc. repeated
about 3000 times. As to exactly what happens when you can't tell really. Some
of the patterns of behaviour long predate humans - birds build nests, defend
their property and go out to work getting food for the offspring, chimps
conduct war like activities against their neighbours and so on. It's mostly
rooted in evolution.

Another thing you can predict is long running technical advances along the
lines of Moore's law which will probably have notable effects during our
lifetimes - more powerful computers, cheaper solar and the like.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Thinking about the meaning of life, I can only really say this about it: We
take up space on the surface of a planet.

Perhaps all of the war and misery is really just due to having too little
space to share amongst too many people. I'm sure Malthus would agree.

~~~
shadowprofile77
What an absurd conclusion. We have been having wars and misery for pretty much
all of our history as a civilization (plenty more misery before that and
proto-wars on a terrible scale on a population basis) Our population has for
most of that long time been very small, much smaller than it is now.

In fact, in the last 70 or so years since WWII, our wars have become less
absolutely violent, less deadly and less widespread than ever, while absolute
misery among humans has also declined immensely, despite there being more than
ever before of us during the same time.Malthus himself was also shown to be
badly wrong, so yes, maybe he would agree with you.

~~~
watwut
I think that ISIS behavior was almost there compared to the Nazi. They even
had genocide of their own. Rwandan genocide was in 1994, long after WWII. Mao
Zedong ruled between 1958 to 1962 and his Great Leap Forward policy killed
more people then Hitler or Stalin.

The difference is that non of these happened in Europe and United States.

~~~
renewiltord
Also Mao wasn't trying to kill people with the Great Leap Forward.

It's sort of like how everyone gives the British a free pass for the millions
of Indians they starved during the second world war.

Incompetence is bad but malice is worse.

~~~
watwut
It was not random incompetence. Human life or suffering had little value, own
vision had a lot of value.

~~~
renewiltord
For the Bengal Famine or the Great Leap Forward?

------
jshevek
> _Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future
> wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right?_

Opening quote is an equivocation fallacy. Most scientists agree with
historians that the issues historians investigate are too complex to be
treated the way we treat motion or thermodynamics, with the tools we have at
this time.

------
evdev
It's cargo-culting physics to assert that there are a set of "high level" laws
in some area without having in hand the reductionist mechanics.

This cart-before-the-horse is so pervasive in social sciences, and developing
sciences like neuroscience, that it's understandable one would ask why history
can't get in on the action.

The glib invocation of phlogiston theory is telling. The _essence_ of
phlogiston theory is not wrong!

~~~
gnulinux
I strongly disagree with this view. I sympathize with you that it's probably
true that scientists are inclined to cargo-cult their science after physics.
But the endeavor here is not wrong, so even if it's cargo-cult, it's good.

Science's primary objective is to find models. A model should do predictions,
and then scientist should collect data of interest, and make sure the data
isn't falsified by the model's predictions. Any scientist who cannot do
predictions, and verify that data doesn't contradict predictions, is no
scientist at all.

Once you have models, it's simply _too_ tempting to formalize them and build
mathematical theories for them. If nothing, for computational advantage, so
you can make computers make predictions, this way you can eliminate human
errors. So, it seems like any science will eventually build models that can
generate predictions from first principles.

It is one thing to claim the entire human history can be predicted from first
principles of a theory X. Clearly, we have no such X. Maybe we never will.
It's another, and totally reasonable thing, to build a theory X from first
principles that correctly predicts some data.

~~~
jdm2212
No one has ever built a historical model that predicts the future with any
accuracy. There are plenty of overfit models that "predict" the past, but none
hold up on new events.

Interesting book on the topic from the world's leading researcher, if you're
curious: [https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-
Predicti...](https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-
Prediction/dp/B0131HGPQQ/)

~~~
drdeca
Does Moore's law count as a historical model?

Perhaps it is too recent and limited in scope,

but it is about, like, some measurable things about society, which is based on
past observations, and it has been somewhat predictive? (though, perhaps it
being somewhat predictive has been in part due to it becoming somewhat
prescriptive?)

~~~
madhadron
Moore's law is more of an economic necessity. Circuits get cheaper to run,
cheaper to make, and faster the more you shrink them, so you just keep
shrinking them. This was observed by Carver Mead way back in the middle of the
20th century.

Moore's law requires an average of 3% increase a month in the number of
transistors packed on a chip. With a few hundred thousand people working on
the problem, that's not crazy. Of course it's going to be spikey, but combined
over the lifetime of a chip project...

------
samirillian
A lot of this depends on the definition of "law." It also implicitly depends
on what we consider scientific. That is, history may or may not ever be a
mathematical science, but it could be a science or field that just does other
things than other sciences.

The problem of coming up with laws of history is that we have to decide what
kind of science takes history as its object in the first place; what kind of
laws would be commensurate with that framing?

Is "history repeats itself" the kind of thing that we would call a law if
proven adequate to the science? What about "might makes right"? Is "genealogy"
an adequate scientific field or methodology, in its own way, on its own terms?
What about dialectical materialism?

I don't think polling existing history departments or historians will
necessarily get you there either.

------
082349872349872
law of history: telling people who sit at the bottleneck of a trade network
that it's their culture that made them rich will always get you invited to
dinner.

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tetris11
This has a real Asimov-like feel

~~~
mark-r
Just the title had me thinking of the Foundation series.

~~~
soylentcola
I've been noticing similar concepts in modern sci-fi/tech thrillers lately.
Devs and the most recent season of Westworld come to mind.

It got me thinking about how certain "threats" or big changes can affect our
fiction and be reflected in our scary stories. In Asimov's time, psychohistory
was pitched as some amazing tool that could be used to improve (or at least
prevent the total destruction of) human civilization.

Now it's all about modern/fictionalized computing power being used to model
humanity's actions, but not necessarily for positive ends. Even if some of the
characters think they're working for the best, it's pitched as a something
unnatural to revolt against.

I guess the obvious read would be that Asimov didn't have any real world
examples to draw upon so it was easier to extrapolate the day's advances in
math and computing into something more powerful and empowering. Today we look
at the potential abuses of powerful algorithms and behavioral modeling and
imagine something similar but much more powerful and dangerous.

------
allemagne
What seems clear is that we're not ready to declare a set of "laws of
history". We're not even close. I think this can be parsed pretty easily by
reading between the lines of basically every historian's response to grand
unified theories of history like this, and the author of this piece clearly
recognizes "cliodynamics" as hubris, despite all our seemingly impressive
advancements in data analysis.

I don't know if the scope of asserting this is fully appreciated. One of the
most influential ideologies in history is based on the idea that certain laws
of history were essentially cracked in the mid-1800s.

Ctrl+F "Marx", 1 throwaway mention. "Hegel" 0 mentions.

------
totemandtoken
I'm not sure I buy the idea of cliodynamics as useful for making predictions
about the future, but I do like the idea of at least some researchers talking
about history with data and through a data-driven lens. I don't get why
there's such controversy over the idea of a data-driven understanding of
history

~~~
testing312
Because it is ridiculously easy to overfit your models, and the combined human
behaviour producing 'history' is so complex and ever-changing that it cannot
be simulated.

Also, if such a law were proposed, a widespread (dis)belief in that law could
undo it.

~~~
totemandtoken
Oh, I don't believe in a law of history or anything like that. I'm just saying
the coupling the practice of history with data analysis is some cases could be
fruitful - kind of like anthropological history, but with a bit wider focus

------
csours
If "those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it", are 'those
who do not understand what is going on right now simply doomed?'

------
nahuel0x
The article mentions Kondratiev long waves, this idea was very debated in
marxists circles in the twenties. Here is a very interesting criticism, by
Trotsky:

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.ht...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm)

Some more:

[https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-
kondratiev...](https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-
kondratiev141100.htm)

------
yters
That those who believe there are laws are sure to be wrong?

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skybrian
Here is a "law" of history that I think is pretty well justified: you will
occasionally be surprised by important, unpredictable events. Get used to
uncertainty and distrust confident predictions.

------
dacracot
First law of history... The victors get to write it.

~~~
dredmorbius
"History is Written by the Losers"

[https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-
writt...](https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-written-by-
losers.html)

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monadic2
Marx would like a word....

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Stanish
Whether you are an adherent or not, the absence of any mention of historical
materialism[0] in this essay is like discussing the world's largest ravines
without mentioning the grand canyon. The only mention of Marx is towards a
cartoonish representation of his vision of the future, a practice he pretty
much refused to do. You hate to see it.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism)

------
remexre
reminds me of the communists in Hail Caesar

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Koshkin
I would love to see a history book that would describe the past in more
generalized terms (i.e. without necessarily mentioning particular dates,
names, events, places or artifacts, while still with just enough detail) so as
to emphasize the natural, as it were, progression of the development of the
civilization. History is far from being random as it might seem to some.

~~~
dredmorbius
David Christan, _Big History_ :

[https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about](https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History)

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-
history/oclc/940282526](https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-
history/oclc/940282526)

Vaclav Smil's _Energy and World History_ accomplishes a similar end:

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-
history/oclc/...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-
history/oclc/925213966)

His later _Energy and Civilization_ largely updates this, though shifting the
historical focus somewhat.

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-
his...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-
history/oclc/1029804020)

------
dntbnmpls
The only law of history is that it is told from the perspective of those in
charge. That's it. History is perspective, narrative, interpretation and
propaganda. What other laws can you derive from a subjective and arbitrary
field? History has always changed with the times as different people in charge
manufacture history to suit their needs.

There is nothing in history that is even universally agreed upon - civil war,
ww1, ww2, vietnam war, etc. Heck even factual items like the date of the
beginning of ww2 is in dispute.

