@mrkoconnell

What you say about the purpose of psychohistory is true - the denouement of the future with and without the involvement of psychohistorical ideas, are and will be different. We cannot isolate and learn about what we seek to control. To control, one has to instigate a system to an end and be aware of the outcome of this instigation. That seems to be the essence of psychohistory. It is a systems approach to creating a system which can influence human systems interconnected at all levels.

I differ from you when it comes to the domain based approaches, and prefer a black box approach. In this approach, all systems with defineable inputs and outputs can be made in the form of system abstractions, and results can be derived for systems in this way, given inputs. Advances made in neural networks make it possible for us to adopt this black box approach, and have a set of input variables which result in a series of outputs which are in no way firmly and atemporally dependent on the input, since neural networks are able to learn.

Cheers,
Fulcrum