[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 4:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

snip

> Forecasting trouble spots is generically useful,

That's something which was discussed almost 5 years ago on this list.
I wrote a paper on the subject that is available here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296 and was picked up
by an journal here:
http://www.mankindquarterly.org/summer2006_henson.html

It was based on previous work here:
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html and extended on extropy
chat into an model of how genes for the psychological mechanisms
leading to wars under certain conditions were selected over genes to
starve in place.
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2009-July/052083.html

Other people, particularly military writers, have noticed the
correlation between economic stress and internal civil disruptions or
external wars.  The _Pentagon's New Map_ by Thomas P. M. Barnett is
just one that comes to hand off my bookshelves.  The studied
association between bad weather impacting harvest and subsequent wars
in China gives strong empirical support.

> and they like to tell anybody in government who wants to listen about their findings. In practice of course plenty of people who ought to listen have other priorities.

To a considerable extent they don't _want_ to hear about it. It has
this underlying theme that learning why other people make war may
explain why _you_ are making war. I make a case that people have an
evolved blindness to looking into their own mental workings. You start
understanding why the "Arab Spring" happened and you begin understand
why the US got into wars such as the one in Iraq.

As you might recall, I was lambasted from the bench by a federal judge
(Whyte) over talking about the human motivation for seeking status
(and applying it to myself). Of course the judge himself was a first
class example of how much humans seek status at great economic cost.

The human motivation of seeking status is more accepted today, but
back in the late '90s it was a hot button.

> Also, I have not seen any hints of methodology over there that looks much better than good futures study methods elsewhere: saying smart stuff about the future is *hard*.

If people really want to do this, they need good models of how humans
react in tribal scale numbers and larger.  That comes out of
evolutionary psychology and while it will give a kind of situational
awareness, it still isn't going to give detailed predictions.

Keith