Back in 2004-2005 (in a time I look back fondly on, because I was an OK kid) I was basically a naive techno-optimist about computers and software and AI, but I got seriously worried about Peak Oil.
All the muggles had a “policy level” understanding that the consumer energy economy (and everything in general) would be basically fine, but everyone I could find whose “gears level” understanding of fossil fuel economics was predicting some kind of doom. The futures markets basically said “in 2005, 2009, and 2019 OPEC will politically control the price of oil, and it will be ~$39 per barrel” but that didn’t make any object level sense when you dug into the details.
I went kind of crazy, trying to reconcile these things, and read a lot of object level quantitative anthropology trying to figure out whether I was crazy or everyone else was.
What ended up happening is that the economic/technological solution arrived late (but more or less “before serious collapse”, like failures of supply chains or the dissolution of traditional constitutions) and also Obama was elected in the midst of a relatively mild “financial collapse” that included oil prices spiking to over $120 per barrel (plus food riots in poor countries).
Since Obama was tribally blue (and the obvious corrective policies were tribally red) and elected with a mandate to solve “the Great Recession” he could get energy extraction reform in a way a red politician could never get away with.
Blue establishment activists objecting to backroom deals like this would be disloyal (only “outsider” ideological leftists, like those involved in the Dakota/Bakken/Standing Rock protests could pragmatically object), and red establishment activist networks were happy to unshackle the frackers and toss a regulatory bone to shale oil. By 2010 things were much less scary, and by 2013 the trajectory of US oil production had totally and dramatically deviated from the predictions inherent to the Hubbert’s Peak model of historical oil production.
I consider the 2004-2013 period to have been very personally educational from a “theory of history” perspective :-)
My pet name for the hypothetical field (coined by Michael Flynn in the late 1980′s) is “cliology” (named after Clio the Muse of History), and one of many barriers to creating a sociologically viable community of cliology researchers (I’m tempted to call it the “Fundamental Hypothesis of Cliology” as a joke?) is that most major insights in this field are inherently useful for guiding investment and are thus hoarded within the investing class as “one-off trade secrets”.
The memetic incentives for serious public knowledge production in this domain would be extremely tricky to set up, and are unlikely to happen except via “great man” or “great circle” interventions. The Fundamental Hypothesis of Cliology suggests that Elon Musk could maybe do it, or a new “thing like the Vienna Circle” might be able to do it, but that’s more or less what it would take. Also, even after the initial “boost” from this effort, public research would stall and/or devolve the moment any critical subset of people died, or got day jobs, or got head hunted by a hedge firm, or whatever. The memetic incentive patterns would probably continue to hold for each incremental addition to the field, more or less forever?
So in 2250 (assuming technology keeps advancing and yet there are still autonomous mortal human-shaped minds with their hands on the reins of history) they might very well think that the causality of our period of history was quite retrospectively straightforward… but they will be treating insights that help uniquely predict 2280 (or whatever their window of prediction is) as trade secrets.
You correctly describe these incentives. Assuming both incentives and distribution of information are such, the obvious next research step becomes clear.
A key problem is conveying the reality of such trade secrets and the value of finding them to those without practical or scholarly experience in the area. Only having found such information can one then try to aim to achieve particular outcomes, trying to do so without appropriate knowledge results in wasted or misdirected efforts.
Back in 2004-2005 (in a time I look back fondly on, because I was an OK kid) I was basically a naive techno-optimist about computers and software and AI, but I got seriously worried about Peak Oil.
All the muggles had a “policy level” understanding that the consumer energy economy (and everything in general) would be basically fine, but everyone I could find whose “gears level” understanding of fossil fuel economics was predicting some kind of doom. The futures markets basically said “in 2005, 2009, and 2019 OPEC will politically control the price of oil, and it will be ~$39 per barrel” but that didn’t make any object level sense when you dug into the details.
I went kind of crazy, trying to reconcile these things, and read a lot of object level quantitative anthropology trying to figure out whether I was crazy or everyone else was.
What ended up happening is that the economic/technological solution arrived late (but more or less “before serious collapse”, like failures of supply chains or the dissolution of traditional constitutions) and also Obama was elected in the midst of a relatively mild “financial collapse” that included oil prices spiking to over $120 per barrel (plus food riots in poor countries).
Since Obama was tribally blue (and the obvious corrective policies were tribally red) and elected with a mandate to solve “the Great Recession” he could get energy extraction reform in a way a red politician could never get away with.
Blue establishment activists objecting to backroom deals like this would be disloyal (only “outsider” ideological leftists, like those involved in the Dakota/Bakken/Standing Rock protests could pragmatically object), and red establishment activist networks were happy to unshackle the frackers and toss a regulatory bone to shale oil. By 2010 things were much less scary, and by 2013 the trajectory of US oil production had totally and dramatically deviated from the predictions inherent to the Hubbert’s Peak model of historical oil production.
I consider the 2004-2013 period to have been very personally educational from a “theory of history” perspective :-)
My pet name for the hypothetical field (coined by Michael Flynn in the late 1980′s) is “cliology” (named after Clio the Muse of History), and one of many barriers to creating a sociologically viable community of cliology researchers (I’m tempted to call it the “Fundamental Hypothesis of Cliology” as a joke?) is that most major insights in this field are inherently useful for guiding investment and are thus hoarded within the investing class as “one-off trade secrets”.
The memetic incentives for serious public knowledge production in this domain would be extremely tricky to set up, and are unlikely to happen except via “great man” or “great circle” interventions. The Fundamental Hypothesis of Cliology suggests that Elon Musk could maybe do it, or a new “thing like the Vienna Circle” might be able to do it, but that’s more or less what it would take. Also, even after the initial “boost” from this effort, public research would stall and/or devolve the moment any critical subset of people died, or got day jobs, or got head hunted by a hedge firm, or whatever. The memetic incentive patterns would probably continue to hold for each incremental addition to the field, more or less forever?
So in 2250 (assuming technology keeps advancing and yet there are still autonomous mortal human-shaped minds with their hands on the reins of history) they might very well think that the causality of our period of history was quite retrospectively straightforward… but they will be treating insights that help uniquely predict 2280 (or whatever their window of prediction is) as trade secrets.
You correctly describe these incentives. Assuming both incentives and distribution of information are such, the obvious next research step becomes clear.
A key problem is conveying the reality of such trade secrets and the value of finding them to those without practical or scholarly experience in the area. Only having found such information can one then try to aim to achieve particular outcomes, trying to do so without appropriate knowledge results in wasted or misdirected efforts.