So, reviewing this seriously seems like a pretty big todo, which has not yet been done. I don’t feel qualified to do it. But… this feels plausible enough to consider in at least a bit more depth, and if taken seriously it might have ramifications on how to think about current events.
I am interested in at least seeing a rough pass of how this post fares in the vote. I’d like to see a distillation of this post, plus Scott’s Ages of Discord post, plus the SSC subreddit’s response to Peter Turchin’s response. (Maybe this already happened in some SSC highlights post?)
I like Vanessa’s comment:
It might be difficult to tell the difference between a periodic pattern and a random walk. A random walk also produces periods of “bad” and periods of “good” s.t. after every bad period there is a good period (because what else can there be?) and vice versa. The durations of different “cycles” would also usually be of similar magnitude. And, a priori, a random walk seems more likely and require less explanation.
Tangentially, I think it would be really great if there were standard benchmarks on which quantitative theories of society/history/economics could compete by measuring to which extent they can compress the data. That would make it much easier to understand what is real and what is overfitting.
So, reviewing this seriously seems like a pretty big todo, which has not yet been done. I don’t feel qualified to do it. But… this feels plausible enough to consider in at least a bit more depth, and if taken seriously it might have ramifications on how to think about current events.
I am interested in at least seeing a rough pass of how this post fares in the vote. I’d like to see a distillation of this post, plus Scott’s Ages of Discord post, plus the SSC subreddit’s response to Peter Turchin’s response. (Maybe this already happened in some SSC highlights post?)
I like Vanessa’s comment: