[morsecodist]

I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.

[username332211]

Nevermind the lack of data - what even would be the limits of knowledge in such a model? If it was widely believed that society will collapse at some point in the next 30 years, how would human behavior change in response? How would that affect the original prediction?

[falcor84]

If only someone would devise a Foundation to look into this

[sinuhe69]

A few points for clarification:

-It’s a probabilistic model, so it only predicts the odd of a collapse

- Their main contribution was the creation and curation of a super detailed historical database: the Seshat. It spans almost 10000 years of human history with more than 400 polities from 30 regions around the world, using over 1,500 variables. Based on this data, Turchin & al devised the mathematical model for the prediction.

- One key area is to find surrogate data when others are not available. For ex. body size could be used to describe the nutrition and economic situation of the population.

- In 2010, Nature asked experts and super-forecasters for their prediction of 2020. Only Turchin predicted the coming collapse of America.

[steveBK123]

Elite overproduction is an interesting topic and putting aside any suggestion that it's a precise mathematical predictor, it obviously creates societal problems.

That is - you've created a large class of intelligent achievers with nothing for them to do. Arguably that just naturally produces increasing societal upheaval. Whether that means revolution or just chaotic increasingly populist elections is a matter of degrees.

[matthewdgreen]

There is always something for a large class of intelligent achievers to do. The failure to put them to work is more of a societal failure than it is an indictment of the education system. (Maybe AI will change this, but only in the same way that it changes every part of our societal model.)

[wenc]

> There is always something for a large class of intelligent achievers to do. The failure to put them to work is more of a societal failure than it is an indictment of the education system.

This doesn’t quite resonate with me, because I’ve lived through it and seen it happen over and over again even in the most functional of societies.

Oversimplifying a bit, let’s call intelligent achievers elites. There is often a mismatch between elite supply and elite slots, and by definition elite slots are scarce — no matter how well your society is functioning.

Elite slots scale with the maturity and breadth of the economy. The U.S., with its size and diversity, has a much larger pool of elite slots than most countries. That’s one reason I moved here.

By contrast, in Canada (a country I love deeply), most Ph.D.s end up underemployed or they leave, because their skills simply aren’t needed at the level of specialization they were trained for. Some jobs only make sense when you have enough scale to support them — and without that scale, those elite positions just don’t exist.

Can intelligent achievers pivot to something else, like entrepreneurship? Sure, but in a smaller economy, the options are much more limited, even if they do a startup and invent new categories. They can also accept underemployment. There are inherent constraints in an economy due to natural factors like scale, geography, etc.

(My understanding is that Taiwan is in this situation -- highly educated people, limited industries that can employ them. Some move abroad, but many just curb their ambitions and try to get by with low pay and accept their lot in life, striving only for "little joys" they can afford like bubble tea and inexpensive street food)

[steveBK123]

AI seems poised to create more underemployment rather than fix the existing level of it…

[username332211]

Can you name some examples? Virtually every major revolution or civil war I can think of, would involve intelligent achievers who've made it. In fact, the core of the rebellion would be a class that's often vital for the exercise for political power, but won't be allowed access to that same power.

English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc.

Only the Russian revolution would involve people who were nobodies before it, but they took charge after the disaffected elites that came to power in February spend most of 1917 undermining each other.

[sinuhe69]

Even the Russian Revolution was lead by elites: - Kerensky was lawyer - Lvov was an aristocrat - Lenin, Trotsky were highly educated and known for intellectual brilliance

[oytis]

The core of Russian revolution were highly educated nerds who would cancel their friends over slight differences in understanding of obscure socioeconomic theories