[HN Gopher] History as Weather
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History as Weather
Author : yimby
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-06-08 06:23 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (metaphorhacker.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (metaphorhacker.net)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| It is a completely different domain, but I think that notion of
| Computational Irreducibility of Stephen Wolfram is useful to
| reason about complexity.
|
| Even with perfect knowledge of the laws and initial conditions,
| it is not always possible to produce a reliable model.
|
| Simple cellular automaton like Conway's Life or Langton's Ant
| appears chaotic.
|
| Not even talking about simple mechanical apparatus like the
| double pendulum.
| metaphorhacker wrote:
| Absolutely, you can think of a complex weather system or
| history as computationally irreducible - Wolfram is afterall
| just reconceptualising complexity with it. You have to walk
| through all the steps as they happened to be able to find out
| the outcome.
|
| And the big models are really just trying to find pockets of
| computational reducibility. But the pockets really only stay at
| a certain level of magnification. If you zoom in or out too far
| computational irreducibility swoops in with a vengeance.
| nestorD wrote:
| Interestingly, one of the fathers of weather forecasting wanted
| to predict the likelyhood of war using similar mathematical
| tools: https://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/cloudy-with-a-chance-
| of...
| woopwoop wrote:
| > The reason we don't think of history as science but we think of
| meteorology as science even though both build models based on
| observation, known regularities and constants, is because the
| sort of reliable predictions a historian can make are of no use
| to anybody, while any kind of even moderately accurate weather
| prediction is extremely useful to everybody.
|
| No. This is false. One does not need to produce anything useful
| to be doing science. You just need a high information, correct,
| falsifiable, and non-obvious prediction.
|
| Meteorology produces these in abundance. For example, suppose you
| take the two most dominant forces in the vertical and horizontal
| directions and assumed they are in precise balance. In the
| vertical direction, these are the pressure gradient force and
| gravity. Them being in balance implies that there is no vertical
| wind. In the horizontal direction, these are the pressure
| gradient force and the coriolis force. Since the horizontal
| coriolis force is orthogonal and proportional to velocity, this
| implies that wind speed in the horizontal direction will be
| orthogonal and proportional to the pressure gradient. With a
| little algebra, one can derive the constant of proportionality,
| which depends on the latitude. If you look at a 500mb chart in
| the mid-latitudes (see e.g.
| https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/500mb), where the assumptions
| of this argument hold closely, you will see that this holds with
| high precision, although not perfectly of course.
|
| This is called the geostrophic model. It is useless for
| predicting the weather, since it is static. However, a person who
| produces this model clearly knows something about how the
| atmosphere works that the average person, who can say "the
| weather in an hour is probably going to be about the same,"
| doesn't. They can make high information predictions (e.g. they
| can draw what the wind barbs on a 500mb chart will look like
| given only the lines of constant height [note that on a 500mb
| chart, you can think of lines of constant height in the same way
| you would be able to think about lines of constant pressure on a
| chart taken at a given height]), which can be verified over and
| over again until you get bored silly.
|
| I have never seen any evidence that historians have this sort of
| model at their disposal. That is, a precise, non-trivial, high
| information, falsifiable model. I would be convinced that
| scientific history existed if they could produce any such model.
| They needn't be useful, just precise, falsifiable, and non-
| obvious.
| metaphorhacker wrote:
| You're cheating with the non-obvious bit. That's not at all
| what makes something science. Also the falsifiablility
| criterion is far too strict for much of biology and many
| others. Many if not most of the facts of botany or zoology are
| observational and only non-obvious in the sense that nobody
| bothered to look. Much of taxonomy is not very falsifiable and
| can only be said to be correct with respect to its own
| assumptions.
|
| If you were a Martian scientist studying human culture by
| observation, noting things like people congregating in certain
| places and marking pieces of paper results in changes in who
| goes to a building far away would be nothing but trivial. But
| we already know all of that, so it feels and actually is
| useless as knowledge.
|
| Also, there are very useful models in history when it comes to
| use of energy and resources - like Ian Morris's - that very
| much add something non-obvious, falsifiable and are probably
| correct. Just not very predictive on any scale under 500 years
| or so - but then again neither is natural selection.
| woopwoop wrote:
| Non-obvious is necessary to avoid appending "and also the sun
| rises in the east and sets in the west every day" to every
| prediction to get it to satisfy the other three. That a fact
| is observational does not make it non-scientific. I have no
| problem calling a description of a human cell science.
|
| I'd also add that you absolutely do not need 500 years to
| verify natural selection, see e.g. this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
| wrnr wrote:
| > To Narcissus, everything is a mirror; in everything and
| everyone, he sees himself. No field is riper for narcissism than
| history, since the dead past cannot even laugh at the present's
| appropriations of a human reality it could not even start to
| comprehend.
|
| That is by Curtis Yarvin, the alternative historian of
| alternative histories
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I guess I am not really versed in this world, but I can't help
| but think that these people should read more Marx! At least for
| some precedent in this kind of thinking.
|
| Like whatever you think about capitalism/communism and all that,
| Marx first and foremost gave _the_ idea of a science to human
| history itself, divorced from any given political ideology, and
| truly extending across the lines of individuals, institutions,
| and nations.
|
| Maybe I am missing the point, but its not like Marx runs counter
| to any of this necessarily. It's just when I read something like
| "maybe we should consider history itself as science, with
| forecasts and underlying assumptions," I just think about the
| century-worth of literature in Marxist thought that is doing just
| that!
| metaphorhacker wrote:
| Engels famously compared Marx to Darwin in his eulogy. But
| Marx's problem was that he tried to predict too much into the
| future and was shown to be wrong in almost all of it - most
| notably the only communist revolutions happening only in
| agrarian states.
|
| Darwin (and Wallace) only provided a model of natural selection
| that predicts pretty much nothing about the outcome, only about
| the process that will be involved and the general shape of the
| outcome.
|
| So Darwin is now (rightly) seen as a great scientist and Marx
| (rightly) isn't seen as a great historian. But the general
| shape of the Marxian model is still useful to many people. Even
| if it's not very predictive in any useful way.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is a good thoughtful article, and interesting enough that I
| will be reading more of the author's blog posts. But I think
| they're slightly misunderstanding some of the material they
| discuss.
|
| _Diamond's stated intention is to do away with the racial
| superiority explanation of the difference in the current power
| arrangements. And he explains a part of it. But he is not careful
| enough to explore the boundaries of his model. And when applied
| at the right level, his model does what it sets out to do. But
| when applied at other levels of magnification, it does exactly
| the opposite. It provides a way of justifying real bad human
| behavior as inevitable.
|
| This is perhaps most starkly exemplified in his description of
| the Rwandan genocide in his other book 'Collapse'. There he
| recasts it in terms of simple competition for resources. He may
| be right. But as recent Timothy Synder's book on the holocaust
| argues, that same was true for the Nazi genocide (in the idea of
| lebensraum). But those were not causes. This involved people like
| us shooting other people like us. Up close and personal. And
| other people telling them to do it and benefiting from it in many
| ways._
|
| I wholly agree with the author that people have moral
| responsibility for their behavior. You can find examples from the
| Spanish conquest of America, say, where contemporary figures were
| saying 'this is bad actually, we ought not to be sponsoring or
| endorsing this at all.'
|
| But what I think has been overlooked is that having the right
| technology (such as guns) or natural advantages (immunity to some
| pathogens) often provides such a huge asymmetric advantage that a
| small number of actors can achieve strategic dominance in a short
| time frame, and set off a cascade of events that allows them to
| lock in those gains permanently (or at least over centuries,
| which is the same thing from an individual perspective). This can
| happen even if the small group are outside the moral mainstream
| and acting in a way that would get them condemned in their
| originating context.
|
| Now, it's quite true that people who are activated by resource
| mobilization are not motivated by moral causes but by plain self-
| interest. Indeed, very often they construct an alternative moral
| myth in which they assert that they Had No Other Choice and so
| did horrible things out of necessity. These myths are often
| untruthful and may not even be believed by the proponents
| (although they will happily employ people who _do_ believe them
| as instruments), but once people have adopted a necessity
| argument they 're signaling the termination of their
| susceptibility to moral reasoning.
|
| Thus, while it's good to point out that Great Figures in History
| were often amoral or immoral assholes, it's facile to think that
| pointing out moral problems is sufficient to prevent future
| abuses. Where large asymmetries of information and/or force
| exist, _someone_ will try to exploit them sooner rather than
| later, and if hey do so successfully the resulting strategic
| gains can often be rapidly compounded. In such contexts,
| protesting the immorality isn 't effective once the exploitation
| is underway; you have to either outwit or outfight them. It's not
| the moral hand-wringers are _wrong_ ; it's that they are
| powerless.
|
| This is the core problem with nonviolence as a
| political/social/moral theory: it only works to the extent that
| everyone feels constrained by it. Deploying nonviolence against
| someone with a demonstrated willingness and confidence to use
| violence is self-defeating (they literally don't care what
| everyone else thinks), and advocating it is irresponsible
| (because once it's clear that it's not going to work, it's just
| going to lead to people getting hurt and probably improving the
| strategic position of the violent antagonist who benefits by
| injuring or killing their opponents while incurring no painful
| costs of their own).
|
| In sum, nonviolent moral suasion is a Good Thing and should be
| the default approach, but if you try it and discover that it's
| not working then you should change your tactics or you'll get
| crushed. Retrospective vindication is absolutely not guarantee
| against the same thing happening in future, because sooner or
| later a new technology will come along that give rise to great
| asymmetries, and the larger the asymmetries it yields the more
| likely it is that some bad actor will exploit them.
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