1. Why this blog? Isaac Asimov wrote in his Foundation series about ”psychohistory” – the science of accurately predicting the future with the help of history, sociology and mathematics. With this blog I want to start the philosphical ground work that is needed to do this in real life. Where psychohistory uses equations that describe large populations, I suggest an approach more akin to the finite element method, with individuals as the elements. Then the critical thing will be to realistically quantify people's different motivations, fears, limitations and so on. From that, the big picture will emerge by itself. It's easy to see how useful it would be to be able to make realistic simulations of groups of people or even whole societies. * We could study group dynamics, e.g. to select the best combination of colonists to go to Mars. * We could better understand key moments in our history by simulating them. * We could access the ”wisdom of the crowd” for different pro...
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