social science research. HBE, game theory, cross-cultural economics all that sort of misapplication of math to culture stuff. The grants came from DARPA which I was never comfortable with.
I tried a while ago to learn game theory, but I can't understand heavy mathematics. I like to pretend I'm playing Hari Seldon :), but if I don't even know game theory, how can I expect to predict the actions of society? It seems to me like game theory is a dead end as far as the psychohistory concept is because game theory is based on two or more players (maybe the wrong word, I'm not an expert) with a clear-set objective. But a lot of society is unconscious. I try to imagine society as a set of players that interact with a system of all the other players interacting, and in turn are affected by the system. If that makes sense.
Sadly I agree with every part of what you said. Game theory is beautiful math based on extremely stupid axioms.
Since you're a social scientist, do you know of any other theories that could help explain society quantitatively...? Maybe some sort of game theory that predicts other objectives...or something? I dunno. In doing some research, I found http://dialectics.org/dialectics/Welcome.html which appears to sort of explain some aspects of society...but it looks like Marxist gibberish...though there could be a pearl in there.
every link on that that I clicked went to the apple page.
Strange. Well there's this: http://dialectics.org/dialectics/Applications.html, http://dialectics.org/dialectics/Primer.html, and http://dialectics.org/dialectics/Briefs.html, which all appear to explain their "psychohistorical dialectics". By apple page, you mean apple.com?
sorry I dropped the ball on this but I have a hard time thinking there is anything to Hegel or any kind of "scientific" history Marxism and the singularity included.
here is one for you history like evolution is a distributed solver for a min-max problem on system of non-linear differential equations with 100 billion dimensions <-not hyperbole but prolly an underestimation. this is the punchline like in evolution these solvers are really shit at solving min-max and constantly get stuck in local mins and maxs. even more so in history.