james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2008-07-21 13:51:00
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Models for toy universes
Yes, I know I hit send before filling out the article. Let's see how many people comment on that before I am done editing.

Standard disclaimer: presenting something is not the same as advocating it. Case in point, this short article, which seems a bit long on earnest assertation and short on actual evidence. It's good enough for a quick future history, though you may want to take this site's ideas with a grain of salt.

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[info]martin_wisse
2008-07-21 07:07 pm UTC (link)
Kook-sense's tingling.

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-07-21 07:17 pm UTC (link)
The power of math compels you! The power of math compels you!

They do seem a little inconsistant about how many Glorious Expressions of Human Spirit one nation can support at a given time.

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-07-21 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Also, if peaks of prosperity are correlated with major wars, where's the big war in the 1960s? Surely the Cold War doesn't count?

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[info]shimgray
2008-07-21 07:50 pm UTC (link)
Vietnam? I can see it being mistaken for one from a certain point of view.

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(Anonymous)
2008-07-21 10:35 pm UTC (link)
Not that I'm advocating any of this, but I suspect there would have been a war between the US and the USSR by the 70's if it hadn't been for the whole "nuclear weapons will killus all!" thing.

Bruce

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[info]roseembolism
2008-07-21 11:25 pm UTC (link)
I occasionally like to play with the idea of generational wars happening about every 25 years or so. In which case, there really should have been a war around 1964 or so.

Of course the theory breaks down pretty rapidly, but it's nice to speculate that nukes broke out of a cycle of war.

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(Anonymous)
2008-07-22 02:33 am UTC (link)
Although it's a bit of a tricky moral calculus - whether avoiding a likely conventional war which might have killed tens of millions was worth a definite risk of an accidental nuclear war that might have killed billions.

Bruce

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-07-22 03:26 pm UTC (link)
I prefer my paired great wars/dead war widow model, because I should live long enough to test it. As soon as the last widow of the previous great war dies [1], WWIII should kick off, so considering May-December marriages, sometime in the 2040s or 2050s.

1: To the degree I think there's something behind this, it's not due to the magical aura of married people but what happens when enough time passes for people to forget what bad idea the last war between Great Powers was.

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[info]james_nicoll
2008-07-22 03:27 pm UTC (link)
I won't be too disappointed if there isn't a WWIII and a WWIV in the 2040 -2080 time frame, though.

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(Anonymous)
2008-07-21 07:24 pm UTC (link)
You can save time by reading these things only until they say "cycles" or "waves" in human affairs. Beyond that, read only for entertainment.

William Hyde

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[info]roseembolism
2008-07-21 11:26 pm UTC (link)
What, you wait that long? Personally, I got into that mode from James' "check this shit out" link.

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[info]aramael
2008-07-21 08:10 pm UTC (link)
You should read their forecasts. They have proved conclusively that if you go through history and pick an exploration every 56 years, you'll find that every 56 years an exploration happened.

This will change the world I tell you.

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[info]carloshasanax
2008-07-21 08:25 pm UTC (link)
Wow, that paper is like distilled Carlos bait.

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[info]nyrath
2008-07-22 05:12 pm UTC (link)
John Barnes uses models based on several out-of-synch cycles when he wants to fake up a future history for a proposed SF novel.

Go to http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ar.html
and scroll down to John Barnes

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[info]robertprior
2008-07-22 05:34 pm UTC (link)
Works quite nicely, when used with imagination. Of course, Barnes also says that, if you think you are actually predicting the future, you need to lie down somewhere quiet until it arrives :-)

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[info]carloshasanax
2008-07-22 06:43 pm UTC (link)
On the other hand, if you read the liner notes to his original world-building paper, you can see that Barnes is a complete cycle bug who does think that cycles have great historical importance. Sort of like his semiotics hobbyhorse, where he got the derivation of the word 'semiotics' wrong.

I gather Flynn was a cycle bug once as well, but he may have recanted. Flynn actually knows quite a bit about statistical process control.

The worst case of cyclomania in recent memory was David Hackett Fischer, an otherwise brilliant cultural historian. I guess it's part of the human willingness to see patterns in unrelated events.

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