Cliodynamics, Mathematics, Brainfarts and … psychohistory?

Let’s start with the brainfarts parts because that one is the easiert or the most difficult to understand and literally begs for explanation. I use LLMs - exclusively Grok - to test hairy big ideas or wide-ass guesses or anythign that builds up at the border of existing and solid knowledge. There are things you would not ask from a human teacher. For example, explaining that you have a hunch there is some level of connection between fluid dynamics (governed by the law of thermodynamics and Newton’s equations) and social system dynamics. There is something in you that seeks for this connection and even embarrassing the thought it is built on Asimov’s Foundation series and your still limited - at least compared to a professor who might teaches you any mathematics - knowledge allows these silly - even though there is no stupid question you still apply self-censorship becasue… whatever reasons - questions. You make a judgement and you might get the info you need way late or never, and the great ideas rather turn into a wasted opportunity than indeed a great idea.

For me this is the point when Grok comes into picture. I can ask any wide-ass question I get an answer with some useful information. No judgement, no face-loss risk, nothing like this just an answer that might involve some sychophancy, some hallucinations and highly probably an honest effort to make any connnections between the parts with a mostly useful hints. For me, who is by training a libraria, this is like going into a big public library and finding all the libararians experts in certain areas and asking questions freely and following up their suggestions. So, this is what I do with Grok. I type my wide-ass ideas and questions and get and answer.

There was a day when I was going after Continuum Mechanics and was asking questions about the mesh, how the infinitesimally small pieces are still not molecular level - that is Statistical Mechanics - and how the whole connected to aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, and linear algebra and all the pieces I could squeeze out from my memories about the readings of the last year. And when I just had a good picture and list of books to buy - these books arrived recently - I just made a comment about that all the stuff we are talking about here are in the frame of thermodynamics and Newton’s laws, but these things are not usable in social sciences and human communication becasue there are no governing equations there. And Grok spit out Peter Turchin’s name and his books.

I was like “What the hell? Is there someone who has the same question? So, my question is not stupid?”. So, I went after what is Cliodynamics and tried to match up its methods to what I know in engineering mathematics. Obviously, I bought a few books by Peter Turchin and I almost finished the War and Peace and War. Other books arrived written by him and eyeballed them and my imagination just went crazy. I asked Grok about agent-based modelling and how the individual’s decision can propagate up to levels and eventually make an impact on the system behaviour. And today I just realised I am thinking about the code that can simulate a system like this.

One of the problems with Asimov’s idea was that it couldn’t go down to the individual decisions level. Moreover, it says explicitly that psychohistory works only at global level and the people should not know about it. In the 1950’s there was no social media, there was no way to the individuals. The smallest scale of communication towards them was maybe newspapers and highly probably all the channels were one way communication. In today’s world, we have social media where individuals can be reached easily. I have been thinking about how it is possible to describe human communication by math or mass manipulation. This constant rumination resulted in that I understood the role of the governing equations, since when there is no any then there is no place to default back and there is no direction.

The other problem with Asimov’s idea is that it came too early. Dynamical systems and the mathematical chaos were nowhere that time. There were no complexity science or anything like that. There were no widely available high performance computers. Nothing. Just Asimov and his ideas.

What is in it for me? It’s freedom. Turned out that cliodynamics tries to bring over mathematical methods from engineering mathematics and test how these solutions work in an environment without governing equations. Moreover, the job is to find the governing equations, it feels like. What is the freedom in it for me? I have a plan to do a PhD in Aerospace Engineering focusing on the Hypersonics - Astrodynamics - GNC triangle which means a lot and very advanced engineering and applied mathematics. And cliodynamics provide another field where this knowledge can be applied or tried out. This requires me to study advanced analysis to have a deep understanding why method works and doesn’t work, so I can move back and forth with some level of comfort between fields. This is virtuosity within mathematics. For some reason this is what pulls me.

All content is property of Andras Csanyi. AI tools are not allowed to use this content.