Popper vs. Macrohistory: what can we really say about the long-term future?

Talk I gave at the Oxford Karl Popper Society:

The quick summary: Physical eschatology, futures studies and macrohistory try to talk about the long-term future in different ways. Karl Popper launched a broadside against historicism, the approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim. While the main target was the historicism supporting socialism and fascism, the critique has also scared away many from looking at the future – a serious problem for making the social sciences useful. In the talk I look at various aspects of Popper’s critique and how damaging they are. Some parts are fairly unproblematic because they demand too high precision or determinism, and can be circumvented by using a more Bayesian approach. His main point about knowledge growth making the future impossible to determine still stands and is a major restriction on what we can say – yet there are some ways to reason about the future even with this restriction. The lack of ergodicity of history may be a new problem to recognize: we should not think it would repeat if we re-run it. That does not rule out local patterns, but the overall endpoint appears random… or perhaps selectable. Except that doing it may turn out to be very, very hard.

My main conclusions are that longtermist views like most Effective Altruism are not affected much by the indeterminacy of Popper’s critique (or the non-ergodicity issue); here the big important issue is how much we can affect the future. That seems to be an open question, well worth pursuing. Macrohistory may be set for a comeback, especially if new methodologies in experimental history, big data history, or even Popper’s own “technological social science” were developed. That one cannot reach certitude does not prevent relevant and reliable (enough) input to decisions in some domains. Knowing which domains that are is another key research issue. In futures studies the critique is largely internalized by now, but it might be worth telling other disciplines about it. To me the most intriguing conclusion is that physical eschatology needs to take the action of intelligent life into account – and that means accepting some pretty far-reaching indeterminacy and non-ergodicity on vast scales.

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