Wednesday, October 24, 2012

End Times (2023)

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24-2-21 Peter Turchin: End Times > .
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24-5-25 Why We Cannot [Easily] Stop Dictators - Versed > . 

Cliodynamics (from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of why things change with time) is the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.

Cliodynamics is a transdisciplinary area of research integrating cultural evolution, economic history/cliometrics, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes during the longue durée, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Cliodynamics treats history as science. Its practitioners develop theories that explain such dynamical processes as the rise and fall of empires, population booms and busts, spread and disappearance of religions. These theories are translated into mathematical models. Finally, model predictions are tested against data. Thus, building and analyzing massive databases of historical and archaeological information is one of the most important goals of cliodynamics.

Computer simulations show that warfare may have been the main driver behind the formation of empires, bureaucracies and religions.

Historians may be a bit leery about scientists making this sort of attempt, since history is driven by a complex set of of events, some of them seemingly one-time only. But Peter Turchin thinks otherwise. Through an approach he calls cliodynamics (named after Clio, the Greek muse of history), he wants to unravel the past by testing hypotheses against data.

For his latest work, he joined with Thomas Currie, a lecturer in cultural evolution at the University of Exeter. In the new study, they use a computer simulation to model the largest societies in the years between 1500 BCE and 1500 CE.

Their model uses a map of Africa and Eurasia split up into cells that are 100 kilometres on each side. The properties of each cell are its natural landscape, height above sea level and the possibility of agriculture (which was the main driving force behind societies). The borders are seeded with military technology, starting with the use of horses. That technology then spreads as societies fight it out virtually. What emerges is the probability that each [100 km x 100 km] cell of land could or could not be occupied by civilisations as time progresses.

“Remarkably, when the results from the simulation are compared with real data from the past, the model predicts the rise of empires with 65% accuracy,” Currie said. If military technology is removed as a factor, the model’s accuracy falls to a mere 16%. “It seems warfare created intense pressure that drove these societies.”"
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"“The model fails to predict the emergence of large empires in Central Asia. Something not in the current model is going on there.” [I suspect that the problem is one of scale -- flat terrain eliminates natural boundaries to movement (topographic defenses), and low population density facilitates militaristic expansion, meaning that the units of analysis (cells) for flat-low-population areas ought to be much larger than the 100 sq km arbitrarily assigned initially.]

"Why war evolved to be a man’s game – and why that’s only now changing"

End of History (1992)

22-3-22 Francis Fukuyama and John Gray on Russia and the End of History - IQ2 > .
Francis Fukuyama and The End of History - Great Books Prof > .
? political philosophy playlist search ?

The End of History and the Last Man
is a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." For the book, which is an expansion of his essay "The End of History?" (published in the summer of 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall), Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another.
  • History should be viewed as an evolutionary process.
  • Events still occur at the end of history.
  • Pessimism about humanity's future is warranted because of humanity's inability to control technology.
  • The end of history means liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. There can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system.
According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution, liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives.

The most basic (and prevalent) error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse "history" with "events". Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term, although it may suffer "temporary" setbacks (which may, of course, last for centuries).

Some argue that Fukuyama presents "American-style" democracy as the only "correct" political system and argues that all countries must inevitably follow this particular system of government. However, many Fukuyama scholars claim this is a misreading of his work. Fukuyama's argument is only that in the future there will be more and more governments that use the framework of parliamentary democracy and that contain markets of some sort. Indeed, Fukuyama has stated:
The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Evading Propaganda

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25-3-7 Sam Harris: Breaking the spell of propaganda | Think > .

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Fluke (2024)

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24-2-13 Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters | A&Co > .

In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything. In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different. Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents? Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Governmental Propaganda

> > Propaganda > >Wartime Propaganda
WW1 Propaganda & Millions Slaughtered | Last Voices of WW1 | Timeline > .


sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...