Hi there,

I've just signed up to this board and as this site seems to be fairly new I thought I'd start off a discussion.

Psychohistory - a method of predicting the future mathematically. This statement may sound quite way out, but the key to this predictive science is that the sample population for which predictions are valid has to be very large. I'm not really sure of the region around which figures for a population should be based, but that I guess is what a discussion board is for.

Human nature is to go against the norm, and it is would therefore seem to be extremely difficult to derive a formula for mapping out the life of a certain individual. It may seem a lot easier to map out trends in reactions of people to stimuli. Say we have a thousand people, I would say generally that for certain stimuli which would produce fear or repulsion more than 95% of that sample population would react in a certain way. If you increase the sample population, it will consequently be much easier to predict very general trends of the future.

Today, there are a wide range of economic and social model that can vaguely map the vagaries of society. The job of an analyst predicting stocks and shares uses this brand of models. Psychohistory's aim is to incorporate social, historical and economic models into actual equations which will roughly predict the "future".

I think this will do for an initial post and I hope I have raised some points of discussion.

Regards,
Greg

Even now there are certainly mathematical models used to predict human behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. Marketing research, for example, uses very sophisticated methods of estimating demand for new products, and upons the results, the frim makes decisions on production etc. Also, intelligence agencies e.g. CIA use sophisticated models which correlate thousands of factors into predicting where unrest may break out in the world. With the increasing power of supercomputers, it is possibel for these models to become more and more sophisticated and powerful.

AS to the intelligence agencies having models with thousands of variables to predict where unrest is likely to occur I would presume not. Based on my experiences there is very little useful along the lines that one might wish.
The Club of Rome had a model described in a book Mankind at the Turning Point that was far and above anything available within government & its forecast horizon was puny by comparison with that of Seldon's efforts.
There are very short term models (2-3 years) that have been developed but they are actually based on surveying key individuals in specific areas.