explain it to me like i'm 5

I watch for her.

In the show it's magic. In the books it's advanced statistics and law of large numbers. The books pose the fascinating question of what would happen if the humanities were a science.

>>213087484 (OP)
i haven't seen the show but the book concept is like how you can confidently say that a cup of coffee will cool down in a room, even though if you looked the little molecules racing around inside the coffee you couldn't really say where any of them was going to be in a short while

>>213088899
(the name 'psycho' is confusing - it should be 'statistical history' but that probably sounded so achingly boring that he realized for a fictional book he had to zush it up)

Using mathematics, you can predict the future.

>>213087484 (OP)
It's like game theory except it actually works in real life.

>>213087484 (OP)
extremely large groups of people are so predictable that their collective behavior can be calculated precisely

I dont understand this mule , how can one individual be so powerful and consequential ?

how can Psychohistory predict him ?

why does one person in a galaxy matter ?

>>213089452
mind control powers

>>213089452
>how can Psychohistory predict him ?
It can't, which is the problem. Psychohistory only works so long as people don't know it exists and so long as their behavior isn't modified by mind control. The Mule is a complete wildcard that puts the plan in jeopardy. That's the books, anyway. In the show which doesn't care all that much about psychohistory, he's just a powerful dude who will destroy the galaxy.

>>213087484 (OP)
Psychohistory
Qu'est-ce que c'est
Fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa fa far better
Run run run run, run run run away, oh, oh, oh
Psychohistory
Qu'est-ce que c'est
Fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa fa far better
Run run run run, run run run away
Oh, oh, oh, ooh
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ooh

Empire is not bad

AI future predictions

just bomb kalgan, old empire wouldn't hesitate to kill a planet for even an insult like the mule gave. just blow up the fucking planet

>>213087484 (OP)
Game theory run by AI.
>>213088213
The show is garbage. They took the source mateiral and took a huge shit all over it.

Retards that love this show pretend that "reee it's too hard to adapt reee" when the reality is the showrunners and writers are talentless hacks who either never read the source material or intentionally shit on it because they think they're more creative than Asimov (they're retards and so are people that love this slop).

>>213087484 (OP)
It is a history of all of my exes starting from least psycho to the maximum retard.

>>213087484 (OP)
Pattern noticing

>>213088213
kek I literally said this whilst watching the dumpsterfire that was S2. It's literally just a bunch of swirling magic nonsense. They don't even make the pretence of glossing over it with technobabble. Like where the fuck did they get the Tardis-esque technology they supposedly have at the end of S2?
>Ummm...err...psychohistory...nigga
Utter fucking drivel.

>>213089452
The system predicts anomalies
Mule was created by a rot in the system. Psychohistory predicted the rot creating a problem but it couldn't predict the nature of the problem.

Does girl Daneel open her shirt like the book?

>>213090702
Wrong series. Even Will Smith couldn’t ruin I, Robot the source material was so good. Wtf is Hollywood doing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvOAA1U0li8

Is this the greatest gap between trailer quality and series quality in history?

>>213090750
But Daneel is in the Foundation show for whatever reason and they made him a girl

>>213087484 (OP)
Shits gonna go down. Get your go bag ready or you're fucked.

>>213090660
Underrated

>>213090827
Lol. Lmao even. Thank you for confirming that I shouldn’t bother with it

>>213087484 (OP)
>explain it to me like i'm 5
What if you could look at human history and psychology and quantize it into math.
Now imagine you perfected that math so you could predict with a high degree of accuracy how the grand scale of future human events would play out to some arbitrary point in the future.

>>213087484 (OP)
>explain it to me like i'm 5
You're reddit.

>>213087484 (OP)
Okay. If Elmo got really good at math he can predict what Grover will do later on.

This was the greatest moment of the entire show, Empire could so easily stand as a show on it's own.

>>213089452
You apparently don't understand how question marks work, you brown-eyed piece of shit.

>>213090750
>Wrong series.
Nah. Technically the robots, empire, and foundation books all take place in the same universe at different points in history. Robots obviously is when humans have expanded into established off world colonies and earth.
The empire books are about a galactic empire.
The foundation is the universe after the empire collapses.
In one of the later foundation books they reveal the robots were the super secret masterminds of everything.
I haven't watched the series. I figured it was just going to annoy me.

>>213090990
Mental how they fumbled all the Asimov stuff so hard but the one thing they invented for the show is literally the only decent thing about it.

>>213091028
I think he might be Fr*nch because they put a space before question marks

>>213091039
Same universe, entirely different epochs. That’s like saying a show about the civil war is the same as a show about Vikings because they both took place on the same planet

>>213089452
In the show he's basically magic but the implication that he can be predicted means the apparent magic is a product of understandable mechanisms.
I like to think of him as simply extremely persuasive, a master of charisma but on a level that completely dominates the normal ape brains we have. It's hard to represent something so hard to imagine on screen so magic is a good enough symbolic, theatrical representation of it.

>>213091170
>That’s like saying a show about the civil war is the same as a show about Vikings because they both took place on the same planet
Aren't they though?

>>213091068
The only conclusion is that Asimov was shit and reddit the whole time and that they should just have made a show about dickass cloned emperors.

>>213091210
Not really, no. You seem to be defending some really retarded choices the showrunners made: the Foundation (book) series is great and has more than enough interesting material on its own, they just shit it up

>>213091170
>>213091287
take the stick out of your ass retard, it's literally a joke about the character of daneel, who is in the show as a female, getting naked

>>213091068
Because Asimov doesn't translate well into television or film (that is going to be marketable).
They are incredibly slow, dense, and boring (which are all good things), but you can't expect retards to sit there for a season where there are no space battles or laser sword fights.
I, Robot doesn't have robots trying to take over the world, or going skynet. It is a series of short stories about some human finding a robot doing something weird, and investigating to discover it was some paradox created by the three laws, or when they think they aren't following the laws, and it turns out they are, just in a way that wasn't anticipated. With the exception of the last story where a large super-AI runs the global economy and they see occasions where its objectively doing harm to people, but when they dig in they realize a positronic brain dealing with that many individuals would fry itself when dealing with massive statistical numbers of people who can and will be harmed by its action or inaction, and so the positironic brain creates the zeroth law, where it quantifies a greater good, and strives to maximize positive outcomes for as many people as possible at the expense of the least amount of people being inconvenienced.

>>213091162
I think he might need to fuck off to a site that wasn't built by and for white Americans.

>>213090936
Lol no problem

>>213090941
>Explain it like I'm a golden retriever
>psychology and quantize


And you wonder why you're still stuck in the mail room

>>213091170
Except R. Daneel Olivaw himself shows up in one of the later foundation books (robots and empire)
And some authors have a singular self consistent universe, A lot of Heinlein's books take place in a single timeline.
But you have the opposite as well. Clarke's 2001-3001 are sequels so obviously in the same setting despite taking place ten, sixty, and a thousand years later.
But childhood's end, or Rendezvous with Rama don't. They're just random stand alone sci fi books.

>>213091337
I will not. I enjoyed the books and am saddened to see them turned into trash by people with less talent than Asimov had in his severed foreskin

>>213090990
>Dusk getting shoved into the wood chipper in a week

It's fucking sad bro

>>213091507
I know, I agree, and I like the later additions to the Foundation series a lot less than the first three books. Even Asimov ran out of ideas towards the end

>>213091531
really, you enjoyed all seven books?

>>213091441
A five year old knows what psychology is and you can figure out quantize through the context.

>>213091590
>>213091582
They got progressively worse, just like all the other scifi greats. Clarke is another good example, doesn’t change my point or my righteous indignation

>>213091389
No muttmerican is white, you mysery meat subhuman.

>>213091374
>I Robot doesn't have robots trying to take over the world
That's not true, they do try to take over the world, it's just justified through the Zeroth law which is "protect humanity from itself". This isn't done violently, however. More like "remove retards from positions of power".

>>213091582
>Even Asimov ran out of ideas
Its genuinely astonishing how much shit he published over his life. Fiction and non fiction and scientific papers.

>>213091595
Nope. This is the problem with tech types. An inability to get out of their own head. Think if it this way. Whenever you are forced to utter the words "they should" you have already lost.

>>213091705
I agree, he was prodigious and brilliant. I have a copy of Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright next to me right now. Turns out the climate has always been variable, who knew? Oh right, Isaac did

>>213091663
>they do try to take over the world
They're given control.
And I do mention the zeroth law in my post.
What I meant was that there's no skynet robot uprising where they storm a building a threaten to kill everyone because someone turned off their first law (despite the architecture of the positronic brain being built on top of the three laws, which is why they can't violate one of them without having a minor melty at least).

>>213087977
this chick could be the new queen of /tv/ if people actually watched the show , not saying its good or anything

I tapped out at book 3 I think, but in the books I read, the concept of psychohistory was introduced and explained fairly well, but didn't seem to get explored a lot or seem to have much of an impact. It served as a good starting premise but pretty soon psychohistory gets dropped entirely and you had psychics and the mule and other shit which drifted away from the original concept of what the Foundation was supposed to be. All that said, I did enjoy them but it really felt like the concept was better than the actual books turned out to be.

Is there more "psychohistory", so to speak, in the later books? Or more of the Foundation doing what it was supposed to do?

>>213091777
I'm pretty sure the AI secretly took control, and nobody noticed.

>>213091777
NTA but on a side note in our RL world it should be mandated that humans have actual old school hand operated mechanical kill switches for all data center and power plants. It should be mandated by law that these are solely manned and operated by humans.

Of course some faggot will automate some step of the process and ruin it but it should still be mandated by law regardless.

>>213091961
>New queen of /tv/

Nah. Too air headed and annoying.

>>213091975
Foundation was originally only supposed to be a trilogy and Asimov was convinced to write more by his publisher later

>>213092152
They were by far his most financially successful books.
That being said, the dude published so much that it averages out to almost 2000 words a day being published over his professional career.
He was a genuinely pretty interesting guy, and he was an early casualty of HIV after a blood transfusion before people even knew what to look for.

>>213087484 (OP)
I didn't watch Foundation, but DS9 was obviously touching on it with Bashir's future predictions with his band of retards.

Looking for that particular scene on YouTube I found this, and discovered some very imaginative casting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11TJ-YyUqVQ

>>213090702
As I recall there was a naked chick in the book anyway.

I also remember that they were trying to conceal the fact he was a robot, but he'd call Baley, "Partner Elijah" repeatedly. ChatGPT is smarter.

>>213087484 (OP)
If you lease an apartment to people that occasionally wake up and scream all night, you may not be able to know which nights it will happen, but you can safely say they'll be evicted within a month.

>>213089452
Bookfag, psychohistory didn't predict him, but it may have known what happened to both The Mule and The Second Foundationers was inevitable i.e. that "ultimate mentalism" was an expressible trait. They probably didn't expect it to pop up in the wild so soon, but they surely knew where they themselves were heading.

>>213093593
The second foundation was those people.
They exist because seldon knew predictions are just that, and he needed an ace up his sleeve, people who would continue to study and develop psychohistory to make sure the foundation stayed on track in the unlikely but inevitable occasion a black swan event happens that couldn't be predicted.

>>213093045
He view-screens a girl and she's naked as a jaybird because the only real taboo was co-habitating since everyone was a hyper isolated autist. I think he ends up banging her because she wants to know what its like, but that might be robots of dawn.

>>213087484 (OP)
You turn the behaviour of LARGE numbers of human beings into something you can model mathematically then use it to predict what's going to happen (and have a secret group of psychics to nudge highly UNpredictale freak occurrences back towards the desired outcome).

>>213089452
>how can Psychohistory predict him ?
It can't, that's the point. He's something that needs a special effort to deal with.

>>213090750
>Wrong series
Duuuude. Connected universes predate the MCU.

>>213089718
kek

>>213093882
Sounds familiar. I don't mind some of the concepts and seems somehow accurate, like everyone being a hyper-isolated autist with their own planet run by robuts, and bitch doesn't seem superficially different to a CURRENT YEAR OnlyFans camwhore.

Still I find his writing style a little hard to tolerate, so haven't read much of his original shit. I do remember that book annoying me in particular though.

>>213091170
But Asimov made a deliberate effort to connect everything through Daneel (though he's not in the middle empire era stories, so they're less connected).

>>213091374
>but you can't expect retards to sit there for a season where there are no space battles or laser sword fights.
But the Foundation novels do have the predicted crisis points that you could just jazz up with extra battles or whatever.

>>213094386
You’re right, I had forgotten that part, but it’s in the later books where it gets a little stupid anyway. I admit my error and humbly beg forgiveness: I should reread them. All of them. Regardless, I’m not watching the show and that’s that

>>213091975
I was able to power through them all but Foundation's Edge really soured me on the setting due to the whole Galaxia bit and essentially superseding the Pscyhohistory model with essentially turning humanity and all matter in the galaxy into a single minded superorganism.
Foundation and Earth at least had an interesting point that the plan to do so was already doomed with post-surgery Fallom/Daneel, but that was probably a setup for a sequel we'd never get and thus we're stuck with all of humanity hurtling toward inevitable doom via hivemind, which I found to be really stupid.

>>213091374
>I, Robot doesn't have robots trying to take over the world, or going skynet. It is a series of short stories about some human finding a robot doing something weird, and investigating...
So they should adapt the Elijah Bailey stories where you get murder mysteries as the main plot.

>>213087484 (OP)
Book Asimov wrote before the Butterfly Effect was discovered.

Blacked but it doesn't matter unless you wanted to fap

>>213091507
Interestingly, the 2001 sequels don't entirely work as being one continuity. I think 2010 may have incorporated elements from the 2001 movie rather than the book, and then the later sequels made changes to take into account where scientific theory had changed in the intervening years.

>>213090605
>showrunners and writers are talentless hacks
Clarke's Third Law states "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." What many fail to realize for most people Calculus or a transistor is "sufficiently advanced." Gaal Dornick being turned into a chick from a Luddite planet who became one of the galaxy's greatest mathematicians by finding a trove of magic textbooks was simply amazing.

>>213091752

>>213089046
Psychohistory does not actually work in real life. It's a sci fi concept handwaved

>>213094714
Game theory works though.

>>213094648
I know, it’s wild
>algae evolves
>oops, too much oxygen, not enough carbon dioxide, glaciers everywhere
>glaciers disappear for reasons
>land plants evolve, oops, not enough carbon dioxide, glaciers everywhere
>repeat
Fucking plants man. Isaac’s thing in Quasar was the recent (at the time) discovery of Milankovic cycles and that very slight eccentricities in the earth’s orbit can have huge effects. Tldr: we don’t know shit

>>213094714
Psychohistory is just the solution for various complexity problems and their associated emergent behaviors. Probably not possible (thank Godel, you asshole), but that was what Asimov was going for.

>>213089452

>>213094714
We have some rough (OK, VERY rough) 'law's of economics. It's not entirely impossible these could be refined over and over and over again until they were actually useful.

>>213094915
“Strong men of history” is a recurring theme, easily accounted for using equations 113.4 through 117.8. People. People never change

>>213088213
>In the show it's magic
Fucking how, the idea/concept isnt even far fetched or nebulous, how do you turn stats and prediction in magic?!

>>213095475
A coincidence is one thing. A hundred coincidences is magic.

>>213087484 (OP)

>>213095475
I think it was just him playing with the idea that sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic if you don’t understand it. Explain how an integrated circuit works. You can’t

>>213095475
>>213088213
the truth is it's magic in both, they tell you what it's supposed to be at the start of the books and then that's all the psychohistory you'll be seeing.
it's not some concept characters ruminate on like say the dark forest theory in three body problem, it's a plot device.

>>213095529
What coincidences?

>>213095873
You get lots of Hari and his adopted son working on its development in the prequels.

>>213088899
The crazy thing is it turns out you actually can detect the general behavior of crowds using dynamical systems.

>>213097347
Source?

>>213097485
I believe it was Chaos by James Gleick. But it may be a lesser known book on chaos math. I'll check my bookshelf in a bit.

>>213087484 (OP)
It's historical materialism applied to predict the general future course of history but the show is retarded and basically treats it like prophecy.

>>213089452

Like the entire point of the Mule in the books is psychohistory DIDN'T predict the Mule because he's such a genetic aberration and his abilities to change people's behavior means the Seldon plan is useless as a predictor because he can just change people's behavior regardless of the material conditions. In the show they somehow know he's coming ans that his name will be "The Mule" centuries in advance.

>>213097540
I'll look through Chaos and if you ever find that other book. Thanks.

>>213097540
>>213097633
Yes, that's the book. Good book even if I'm misremembering the factoid.

>>213097595
They know about him in advance because Gaal or her daughter (I forgot) make contact with him telepathically through space and time

>>213095475
David S Goyer has never had a statistics course in his life. How do you think he and his minions could write about it?

>>213087484 (OP)
Get this man a lint roller/

>>213087484 (OP)
in this story, there is a smart man. he's so smart that he knows what's going to happen next, even before it happens! but he's also a nice man, so he teaches people how he did it, so they can learn too, and stop bad things from happening.

Hari Seldon is too much of a Mary Sue in this show

>All the Cleons just sitting around drinking with each other
Too comfy, I hope they make a Cleon spinoff show.

>>213087484 (OP)
it's nonsense

The depiction of psychohistory in this thread is apologist. In the books it's far too specific to be what you are all saying it is.

>>213098942
Turns out the book was fiction as well. The guy in the thread earlier who thinks it’s possible to accurately predict long term behaviour and specific outcomes is out to lunch: if that were the case the author of the book would be a billionaire by predicting the stock market, not writing books about what “might” be possible

>>213091568
he's going to escape with day

Is this show any good? I loved the books as a kid.

>>213099141
That’s what I came here to find out and the consensus appears to be a resounding no

>>213099156
Okay thanks baibai~

>>213099091
>The guy in the thread earlier who thinks it’s possible to accurately predict long term behaviour and specific outcomes is out to lunch
NTA but that's definitely possible and I am a millionaire from predicting markets.
In a week the weather may suddenly turn unusually cold. I have no way to predict that but somehow, through some strange esoteric magic involving the stars and shit I can still be reasonably sure December will be colder than July.

>>213089452
He's the Great Man Theory crashing through the walls of big-picture statistical history like the kool aid guy.

>>213090990
>Empire could so easily stand as a show on it's own
Empire is the show, everything else is a subpar subplot

>>213099206
That’s broad trends. The sort of specificity implied by psychohistory is pure fantasy

>>213099327
You can predict that a Hitler will rise in Europe but not his name or exact time. When you see all the elements coming into place you can be relatively sure he's close.

>>213099091
Seldon's time-scales were very long sure-bets. Things that could safely be predicted using a massive amount of data to work with and a long enough time scale.

A Seldon-like crisis we might be facing right now is the problem of truth. We are rapidly losing the ability to discern fiction vs reality, which has been the foundation(!) of our civilization since the beginning.

>>213099453
So even if Trump didn't run for president in 2016 it was inevitable a bombastic outsider figure would have still gained a large following through the same channels Trump did.

I don't believe in Seldon's theories because my own research has shown that chaos from natural disasters is too much of a driver of world history.

>>213099616
The industrial evolution, or any technological explosion is sth that i guarantee his model cant predict

>>213099733
It actually is, that's one of the things it's good at.

>>213099592
Internet going mainstream lead to relatively party independent populist candidates all over the world including Obama. Trump used the same cynical methods Obama used but without the pretence that it's anything but politics.
As the glaring negative effects of globalization accumulate inevitably some of the populists will be nationalistic.

>>213099546
Our societies have always had a good dose of fiction thrown in. Kings do not have divine rights. Money that isn’t made from something rare doesn’t have value. Sounds like a skill issue

>>213100118
Emergent things are still things.

>>213100674
And? So is critical thinking

>>213089032
Best boys

>>213100732
Fiat money has value and kings had divine rights. These aren't fiction but emergent phenomena from complex systems. By your standard the idea of a human being is fiction because they're just carbon and water.

>>213100842
They’re more abstractions than pure fictions but the line is blurred. We can’t even recognize them because we think using languages that are also (emergent) abstractions. Point is, we also have the faculty of reason, also emergent from a big blob of brain cells. Use them is all I’m saying