It has been a while since I have mentioned Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment, but it is a great book that everyone should read. It addresses why social scientists fail to make certain kinds of predictions, why most of us are no better than educated lay-people at predicting individual events rather than explaining aggregate patterns (that's really what social science is about anyway), and the different approaches that lead to better predictions. Predicting 9/11? Nope. We didn't do that. We fail at a lot of that kind of stuff. We suck.
From a different side of the bookstore entirely, another of my favorite books is about to be turned into a tv series. Isaac Asimov's Foundation. I am nervous about this, since tv adaptations, and movie adaptations of great works have a spotty record, but for now, I'll reserve judgment. Anyway, for those who haven't read it, read the first three books. They're classics for a reason. They are about a galactic civilization far in the future that is collapsing. A mathematician named Hari Seldon devises a system called "psychohistory," which allows him to predict the future, and set things on a path to avoid the worst of a coming dark age as the galactic empire collapses. Psychohistory allows Seldon to make pretty good predictions about how specific individuals will behave, but get away from one person, and that doesn't work. Mostly, it works by explaining big trends in history. He can't predict minor events. Just the big stuff. Big trends, because while minor deviations occur, they tend to revert to course. Random errors cancel out, and history is basically set by socioeconomic forces rather than weird, one-off events, so even if weird, one-off events occur, things revert over time to their normal course.
This is a model of history that is perhaps different from, for example, Charles Stross's model in The Merchant Princes series, although that takes place over a shorter time span than Foundation (only a couple of centuries separate the primary timeline from the "New Britain" timeline, although the Clan's timeline broke off thousands of years earlier). Still, enough of Seldon's course corrections play out over a comparable time span that the timeline differences in Stross's series matter. Asimov's model and Stross's model are different, and I bring up The Merchant Princes series because there is an event in a timeline close to our own in which a nuke goes off in Washington D.C., and the result is that the timeline diverges so much that it goes from looking like that timeline was our own to something so radically different as to be a completely alternate history.
And yet, when we look at politics today, 9/11 is a date that I can nearly miss, even after just mentioning it in a recent post. In this country, several thousand people died. We are unused to that on any one day, and 9/11, 2001 was terrifying. Even for a mathematician like me, because we didn't know what came next. The big death tolls were from what the US did in response, though, and let's be blunt about that. Justified or not, it's the truth, and even McCain admitted that the Iraq War was a mistake before he died.
Here, though, I can ask: how would politics be different today without 9/11? Obviously, we can't re-run American politics to know, but I can do some silly speculation. Example: Clinton's support of the Iraq invasion gave Obama the opening to beat her in the 2008 Democratic contest. No Iraq War, no Obama. No Obama, do we get Trump? He was a creature of birtherism, after all...
Then again, I have argued on plenty of occasions that Trump is the natural conclusion of trends that began in the GOP with Gingrich, who predated 9/11. If so, that kind of reasoning falls apart. We are back to Asimov versus Stross.
9/11 is kind of out of the picture. Terrorism is not a primary political issue at the moment, the economy is booming, and the basic undercurrents of racial tensions in American politics have been there for, well, centuries. Have the basic underlying forces reverted to whatever they would have been without 9/11, as Hari Seldon would have said?
The basic observation that racial tensions have returned to their central place in American politics, supplanting terrorism, kind of sounds psychohistory-y to me.
Not that I can do Seldon's math. If I could, maybe I'd find some out-of-the-way corner, call it Terminus, and hide there for a while. And if you tell me that some damned robot taught me the math, I'd tell you to stop it with the retconning.*
*Don't read the prequels. For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, don't read the prequels. I hate that damned robot!
