I'm supposed to be working on some tedious research; hence I am desperately seeking distractions, such as thinking about the following issue.

In Asimov's fictional Psychohistory, the social "engineers" (Second Foundation) maintained complete secrecy about their social science and operations because if their subjects (everyone else) knew what the Second Foundation was doing, it would make the social mathematics so complicated as to render it inoperable.

This raises two questions.

1) IS this concern true? I guess that public awareness of social engineering is a factor that can be accounted for. The exception is if there are groups that take advantage of transparency (in a game theory sense) to harm society (for their own gain).

2) IF this concern was true (an assumption I do not necessarily accept), does it nevertheless justify a lack of transparency, even if required to save humanity from 30,000 years of doom? What if we substitute the word "Technate" for Second Foundation? I expect that there should be a balancing test of interests, but I'm not sure what the test or standard should be.

Any thoughts?

Political science, economics and social science all have these problems.

In political science, a major part is the science about voter behaviour. The thing is, voters don't change behaviour because it is open knowledge that political scientists know that voters tend to cluster in the middle of the political spectrum, mostly because people A) aren't interested in that, aren't affected by it negatively.

When it comes to economics however, it has been an entirely other matter. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was very usual to keep inflation numbers high in order to keep unemployment down and give workers a sense of salary increases (which were fictious). One good side of that was that indebted housing wasn't so big a deal. Anyway, the unions could predict rising inflation and adjust their expectations after the rising prices, and thus inflation constantly increased (which on a long term lead to increasing unemployment). Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys claimed that it was because the workers could predict inflation, and therefore wanted to increase interest rates while calling for it openly, so the people could adjust their expectations and unemployment go down (or so they claim). Thence the 1980s, when fighting inflation with high interest rates became central. This did however lead to vastly increasing unemployment numbers as the Unions (of course) refused salary decreases.

Mark Ciotola, J.D. wrote:


I think the vast majority of people wont pay much attention to any prediction anyway. They tend to just get on with their own lives in their limited space.

voters don't change behaviour because it is open knowledge that political scientists know that voters tend to cluster in the middle of the political spectrum



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Fascinating.

A bot which is somewhat on topic.

Enrique Lescure wrote:

Not without some embarrassment, I have to admit that I found the bot's (or advertiser's) comment somewhat persuasive!

They tend to just get on with their own lives in their limited space.




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I will ban the bot now.