Psychohistory 2.0

  3. How do you describe a person? We need to be able to calculate an agent's behaviour from a limited set of quantifiable parameters. So how do you define a character's personality? It's the fact that we are different, that creates the problems we have in society, but it also creates positive dynamic forces and makes life interesting. This is what the field of psychology is all about, and I must say I think they have failed to accomplish the fundamental task of figuring out how we differ from each other and how much. A popular but rather meaningless pursuit, is to divide people into types. That's a too simplistic approach. Let me try to identify the many different layers of our personality that affects how we live. First we have physiological needs – for food, sleep, warmth – and they are basically the same for everyone, so they are not good measurements to define an individual. At the next level we have psychological needs, which differ a little more from person ...

2. Where to start? Where to even start such an ambitious project? The task is daunting, but we can at least begin to think about it and share ideas on how it could be possible. It might take ten or it might take fifty years before we will get useful results, but the longer we're not even contemplating it, the longer we're postponing it. It seems natural to start small and simplified, and then increase the size and complexity step by step. The calibration of new elements and parameters will have to be automated in a machine learning way. First steps Program a simulated character with a limited amount of time to sleep, work, eat and enjoy leasure time. Spending time at work reduces the time it can spend on hobbies, but gives it the money to do more fun stuff and eat more delicious food. Too little sleep decreases the value of the time it's awake. If we translate everything it does and consumes into a common unit of value (a utility function), optimization of its quality ...

  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...