from Hacker News

A Quantitative Prediction for Political Violence in the 2020s

by metasean on 1/30/17, 11:02 PM with 1 comments

• by metasean on 1/30/17, 11:02 PM

  Asimov introduced the concept of "psychohistory" in his Foundations series [1]. Psychohistory "combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people" [1]

  Almost a decade ago I heard about a researcher who took up the gauntlet of developing psychohistory. His name is Peter Turchin. Because there was an established academic field already named psychohistory [2], he named his field of study "Cliodynamics" [3].

  When I first heard about Dr. Turchin, he had recently made a prediction that we were likely to see political violence in the 2020s [4, 5].

  In this current blog entry he talks about factors that are likely to influence whether there is or is not political violence in the next few years.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory [3]: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/ [4]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-pred...! [5]: http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf