Is Psychohistory possible? plausible?

[Romulan_spy]

I've been rereading Asimov's classic Foundation series. Reading "Forward the Foundation" now.

In the novels, psychohistory is a mathematical science that uses statistical analysis of a large population to make predictions about the future of civilization. In the novels, the creator of psychohistory, Hari Seldon, is able to use it to accurately predict the fall of the Galactic Empire and develop a plan for shortening the dark age to follow.

The two basic assumptions of psychohistory are:
1) It only works with large population sizes since it is based on statistical probabilities. The larger the population size, the more accurate the predictions. It cannot predict individual behavior since individuals are too chaotic and unpredictable.
2) The population must be unaware of psychohistory and its predictions. If they know in advance about it, they will change their behavior which will ruin your predictions.

I've always been fascinating with the concept of psychohistory. Is it plausible? Is it possible?

Psychohistory seems to be very similar to thermodynamics. We cannot predict the motion of a single molecule but we can describe the behavior of a large quantity of molecules as a whole, for example whether a gas will expand, contract, heat up or cool down. Likewise, an individual is like a single atom. We cannot predict the behavior of a single individual but we can determine rules that describe the behavior of a large group of individuals.

Obviously, I don't think that psychohistory as presented in the novels is possible. But I do think that with sufficiently advanced computers and enough data on a population, we would be able to make fairly accurate predictions on major demographic, economic, political, social trends. So, I don't think we could ever predict specific events but we could predict big changes like an economic collapse, a world war, major disease outbreak etc... Already today, experts make predictions like China overtaking the US as a global power. With more accurate data, I would assume that we would be able to improve our predictions.

In conclusion, I do think that something similar to psychohistory is plausible.

 

[Metryq]

See the on-going thread about a scientist planning to upload his brain to a computer.

I know you're talking about very large populations, but people—even large groups—are not gas molecules. Nor is the spectrum of their actions as simple as actuarial statistics. You mentioned predictions that China would become the top economic power. When were these predictions made—20 years ago? Or 200 years ago?

There are already trend analyzers for markets, politics, etc. but their analyses are probably less accurate than weather forecasting, which is not at all "accurate" beyond a handful of days.

You can "what if" the biggest, most bad-ass computer imaginable, but I believe "psychohistory" is on a par with "uploading a brain" to a computer—radically dissimilar entities.

 

[{ Emilia }]

No.

1) Projecting past statistics into the future is never exact.
2) Historical Contingency.

As an actual historian the idea makes my want to strangle an alien.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I imagine that psychohistory is made much more plausible by the context that it is actually applied in in the stories. The very large population exists in a closed system that constitutes an extremely stable and predictable background, one that is far more static than any that has ever existed in real-world history. To invoke and elaborate upon the analogy of the ideal gas law used in the original novel, the planets of the galaxy would be like the walls of the hypothetical container: relative to the time-frame of only a few hundred years on the scale of a whole galaxy, the planetary constituents and their resources would be both well-known and utterly static, except in a tiny minority of cases involving known migration patterns, which in a conservative empire would be primarily away from planets whose stars were rendering them uninhabitable. The possibility of the discovery of new resources, not already staked out, of any significance, would be practically nonexistent.