On Predicting the future

When I was in high school I read a series of books by Isaac Asimov called the Foundation series. In these books Asimov did his classic thing, where he invents a Sci-Fi concept that sounds vaguely plausible to drive the plot. This technology was psychohistory, the ability to predict what large groups of people would do with data. Over the course of the story, another group within the foundation, the second foundation, refined the mathematical formulas so well they could run them for an individual person. This was a form of mind control.

As it turns out, I was not the only person to read this book.

Foundation’s Influence

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laurete in economics, wrote that foundation grounded his view on economics. Roger Myerson, another winner of the nobel prize in economics, this time for game theory, credits the book as well. Keith Reneie, the founder of the human self-actualization cult NXIVM, currently in prison for racketeering and sex-trafficking, was inspired by second foundation. If these people were correct, then one could predict behavior, up to the point of predicting the future. For the economists, that meant plugging the right variables into the computer, run the right algorithmn, and out pops the unemployment rate. Change the input variables, such as interest rate, and see if what happens to unemployment. For Raneire, it meant the ability to control people’s perceptions by changing their values.

So let me be clear.