Cliodynamics and the Mathematicization of Human History

Sounds like climate modeling: tweak models to hindcast and pretend they are predictive.

In social systems, the inputs keep changing, so the dynamics keeps changing. History isn't very useful as a predictor.

If enough people make predictions, or discover correlations, some will be right. That happens in the stock market a lot. But can they do it again?

Actually, there wasn't a lot of mayhem. The press hypes what there is. It's been pretty peaceful here.

Or could be better. Worse gets more press.

Blame the Internet.

Lead is way down since we took it out of gasoline.

Don't be too sure about that. There is the one individual who started out researching the statistical likelihood volcanic eruptions based upon historical records and peripheral measurements. He then got interested in applying the same principles to predicting U.S. presidential election outcomes, and he's been consistently right for a few decades by now. He correctly predicted a Trump loss the second time, and a Trump win the first time.

Well, yeah, any attempt at persuasion has to sound like it's logical reasoning with respect to observations. That ought not to surprise anyone.

If there are enough people predicting the outcomes of presidential elections, some of them are always going to be right.

A few of those are going to be right more than once. It doesn't take much wisdom to wait until the get five standard deviations away from chance, but it can take quite a while.

Not really. Learn something for a change, from August 2020:

Yellow Kid Weil, I believe, mentioned a horse race scam: prepare a list of 256 names, and send eight letters predicting horse #1 wins the first race on Tuesday, and... eight letters predicting horse #8 wins. After horse #3 wins, you send letters to the eight suckers who got the first winner prediction, with predictions for the first race on the next Tuesday.

And when the third Tuesday comes around, a single letter goes to the guy who just saw two good predictions in a row, offering to sell him the third prognostication.

Sit through a YouTube video on the off-chance that Fred Bloggs has got something right for once?

Not a cost-effective investment. It would be nice if he could find less tedious ways of being mostly wrong.

We're still waiting on your letter to Pfizer CEO telling him he's totally wrong about his vaccine approach. That's when you can find time in between selecting wrong parts for an application circuit.

Fred Bloggs misunderstand stuff that gets posted here, as well as all the other stuff he reads. I've no idea what post of mine he read that he decided was criticism of the Pfizer approach to making a vaccine - which seems to end up generating the same (slightly modified ) version of the Covod-19 spike protein in our bodies as the Moderna, AZ and Johnson and Johnson vaccines do, albeit by different mechanisms.

Fred's capacity for misunderstanding stuff is pretty much universal. He's learned not to be too specific, because when he does I can nail him on it.

-- Bill Sloman, Sydney

Not quite, Sherlock. The AZ and Sputnik vaccines do not use mutationally stabilized spikes, which probably explains their inferior performance. The Janssen vaccine does use mutational stabilization, but apparently does not produce the same strong response as the mRNA vaccines to achieve the same level of effectiveness. Now that they're talking about the possible requirement for annual boosters, the adenovirus vaccines are going to need to change their approach because the residual immunity to the adenovirus will dampen the response to the vaccine even further. There will be no such effect with the mRNA vaccines.