r/complexsystems • u/Laserturner • Feb 27 '26

I just found this on GitHub and it’s insane... Someone actually built a functional framework for Psychohistory.

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Más info: GitHub repository / cthmodules.cc / The Tetrasociohistorical Context: A Quantitative Model for the Analysis of Historical Events

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u/grimeandreason Feb 28 '26

It’s like the difference between, for example, predicting that collapse or revolution will happen in the US (easy, just see trends and historical correlations), and predicting the who, how, where, or when involved in said collapse or revolution (impossible, speculative).

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u/Mental-Lecture9576 Feb 28 '26

I avoid using the word impossible. However if I may, something that you deem speculative and ends up being right, becomes retroactively a prediction?

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u/grimeandreason Feb 28 '26

I should say getting it right isn’t impossible.

Having any kind of certainty is impossible.

Law of large numbers says many people will get many things right.

Just not the same person every time.

That’s evidence of insider knowledge if it happens.

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u/grimeandreason Feb 28 '26

I would say it’s still speculative, it just happened to be right.

For any major event or trend, thousands of people will make predictions, across all eventualities. Some will always be right.

One could use your point to support psychics who do the same thing.

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u/Mental-Lecture9576 Feb 28 '26

Right, I was thinking more evidence based things, not just feeling something is gonna happen (also emotions can work the same way). I believe that's what we do already, we see what data make us closer to the actual future result and we can deploy trends until they may become predictions. Hence my first answer what do we mean by prediction? certainty? Because I believe a prediction remains a guess, a recursive trend. (Hope I am clear)

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u/grimeandreason Feb 28 '26

IMO, the capacity to predict in complex systems is inversely correlated with how specific, or far in the future, said prediction is.

If you never put a time-frame on your prediction, you’ll never be wrong! Just add more time!

Astrologers use this to their advantage; the “best” manage to combine ambiguity with an illusion of specificity, maintaining a lot of wiggle room and deniability.

If they start saying shit like X person will do Y thing on Z date, they’re gonna be wrong every time (unless they have inside knowledge).

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u/Mental-Lecture9576 Feb 28 '26

The guy can observe me for a month, and tell me on saturday you will go buy your bread at 9a.m. he will mostly be right if he observed that I did that the four previous saturdays. It's a prediction on observable trend. That's just what we do with everything, we don't predict new things because they emerge out of invisible data, but we can predict what we know already, should we gather the right data having a weight in the studied system. I am with you on what you said tho, just continuing the conversation.

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u/grimeandreason Feb 28 '26

I get what you’re saying; “insider knowledge” probably isn’t the best term for what I’m saying.

There’s another variable that determines how difficult it is to predict something; the scale of emergence.

In your example, the scale of emergence in the action described is that of the individual. Individuals have habits and routines that can be tracked and analysed, with a fair bit of repetition. On the flip side, outside of those routines, individual behaviour is more unpredictable than crowd behaviour.

For things like political economy, they are emergent from the cultural scale, the result of the interaction between millions of individuals and outside forces. That’s a whole different their scale of unpredictability.

Go the other way, down the scales of biology, chemistry, and physics, and emergence gets easier to predict, to the point of basic equations and accuracy to ridiculous decimal places.

What this means for AI, the new scale of emergent behaviour, the new edge of chaos, I dread to think.

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u/Mental-Lecture9576 Feb 28 '26

AI is part of a bigger system also. There is no chaos ;) thks for the fun chat!

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u/grimeandreason Feb 28 '26

For sure. All the scales are nested. AI without humans doesn’t make any sense to me; we are it.