A fascinating article in the Guardian’s Life section today – let down, unfortunately, by an over-emphasis on current events at the end – about the renowned Trantorian mathematician Hari Seldon’s predictive science of Psychohistory ecologist Peter Turchin’s, of the University of Conneticut, mathematical model of history – detailed in his book Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, updated as War & Peace & War out this September. The article includes a great quote from the profoundly anti-deterministic historian Niall Ferguson –
“We do not really study [historical] causes, but what people at the time thought were the causes. And our aim in retrieving their thoughts is not so much to explain how things happened as to understand how they seemed to have happened.”
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