How quickly does a society change?

There are many ways to measure change:
- propagation speed of fads or memes
- language migration
- acceptance time of new ideas or mores
- establishment of new technology or science

While everyone today thinks technology changes rapidly, major changes take a long time. Looking at the "industrial revolution", the time from basic tool-making to assembly lines was thousands of years.

Why has Marxism been widely believed?

Marxism as a testable theory has been repeatedly debunked, disproved, and dismissed. But many people still believe it.

A possible reason is that Marx told a simple and compelling story. Like many religious stories, Marx's story gives a purpose to humanity. The story frames a "big picture" view to those confused by the world's randomness.

Marx used Hegel's framework of linear progression to describe steps to a social utopia.

It's not useful to point out Marxism's failures or fallacies if the believers accept it on faith.

How will a new theory be developed that captures the faith of the average person? In a world of seven billion people, a movement of a small minority, say 10%, is still huge.

factors in change

Change in large system often starts gradually.

After a period where a factor influences the system but no change is observed, suddenly the effect becomes obvious. Why the sudden switch? If a change cannot be detected until it erupts, can the influence be detected?

These questions appear in complex systems of all types -- biological, human, financial, and others.

One possibility is that the normal spectrum of a system will show a difference in its statistical variance before there's a noticeable difference in the average.

Prologue

So far this blog has mused on predictions and historical info.

The direction and goal is to examine social predictions. Can a society's evolution be predicted? Could a child's life be predicted? What is unpredictable? Could a simple rule be enough or would any useful prediction system require many complex rules?

Trees and forest

When individual objects are grouped, new behaviors emerge, some good, some bad, many unexpected.

Who could foresee the behavior of an entire anthill by looking at one ant? Or traffic at an intersection by looking at a single car? Or the beauty of a lake by examining a molecule of water?

Trying to simplify the model by ignoring single objects helps to an extent, but, when the objects are complex (eg, cars, stock traders) the simple model misses critical details.

Similar to the use of Marxism for "explaining" how societies must change, Freudianism became dominant in the 20th century. For a few decades it was, anyway.

Freudianism was used to attack all established societies. Its proponents defined anything they didn't like as “repressed”. In the middle of the 1900s, academic writing was filled with Freudian references and concepts.

But when medical science provide psycho-therapeutic treatments, Freudiannism faded away.

And yet, it's the widespread willful belief of "scientific societies" that's interesting. Why do educated people eagerly accept such claims?

This blog will return to this theme again. Why thy pseudo-religious acceptance of socialism?

Is Philosophy dead?

Religions have condemned Science as crowding them out. A fair claim.

The same claim can be made by philosophers. Centuries before the rise of scientific empiricism, philosophers published their qualitative beliefs about all topics - natural events, astronomy, psychology, and social.

As the scientific method looked at natural events and discovered laws of physics that described events better than invoking a theological cause, science also has crowded out philosophers.