Strong Asimov's Foundation (novel) series "psychohistory" vibes. 😂 You can make fairly accurate predictions, but only if they're a tightly kept secret, otherwise they affect the outcome in wildly unpredictable ways. Modern polling has tragically so polluted the pool that it's unusable.
Disappointingly, the class titled Introduction to Psychohistory didn't mention Hari Seldon even once.
It's not a bad vision. It does show that as people try to imagine the future in idle and speculative ways, they little know that there is someone reading who says "I will gain as much power as possible and make that happen". Like, Asimov's psychohistory--nonsense, but a religious doctrine for a few.
U ever read smth where the author has clearly confused 'dialectical materialism' and psychohistory from the foundation series
When people read the Foundation science fiction series they tend to focus a lot on the predictive powers of the psychohistory thing. I always found the science they had to discover what people were really saying in those long proclamations a bit more interesting.
Just a weird pachinko machine in my brain thing: This may have inspired Heinlein's fictional 'moral calculus', and even Asimov's Psychohistory: Both were very rationalist, math-focused people who didn't like how messy and subjective moral decisions were, and wanted a calculable answer.
I am a huge nerd over Asimov's Foundation series. So much so that going into college I started out as a classics major who wanted to invent "predictive linguistics" just like Hari Seldon invented psychohistory. Here's the thing: Asimov was smart, but Foundation is just a cool story! It's made up!!
An amount of irony so large it could have been predicted by psychohistory.
Sometimes the 'fiction' in a lot of science fiction is actually of the social science variety. Like in Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series, where psychohistory allows precise predictions about the future of human events hundreds of years ahead & secret cabals with magic powers can control them