I’ve long puzzled over differing interest in history and the future, in both fiction and non-fiction. And I’ve finally collected some numbers. Amazon.com says it has 37 million books on offer. Here are the fraction of those books it says are in these named categories:
Tragic. I wonder if they will ever learn enough to regret doing so in the future. http://www.brainpreservatio... might have been able to prevent such a casual dismissal of his morality and his life's purpose. Then again, maybe not. Most people are really no smart enough to avoid voting for Hitler. He never loses his popularity, he just takes new forms, even though he's one of the easiest kinds of people to create.
Due to the use of knowledge in society, in the sense written about by Hayek, specialists in any era can find out useful things about the past. Also, since humanity has not outgrown control by sociopaths, and the technology of law/politics/government is how progress has been made or lost with respect to dealing with them, it makes sense to improve our knowledge of past events, especially the events that led to the industrial revolution. It also makes sense to collate into a consistent narrative exactly what has transpired with banking, for-profit investment in war and destruction, and other high-hierarchical-level human systems.
Most "futurists" are not very familiar with the information contained in G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature From Jekyll Island," or Rothbard's less conspiracy-minded (but not better) "The Case Against the Fed." Few science fiction books care to examine a likely future, focusing instead on entertaining possibilities. A notable exception are the two sci-fi books by James Halperin, and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," by Heinlein. Those contain a lot of likely-to-happen individual ideas. (Not necessarily the Moon v. Earth thing, but more the "brainlike" processors, technology helps outmode enslavement thing.) In any case, I found the focus on history to be entertaining in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, because it became relevant again, in the future.
I also thought Dune's interpretation of Hitler's historical record in the far future was interesting, as was Norstrilia's conception of Drexlerian nanotech (written before Drexler's "Engines," I think).
Most people lack any moral framework at all, simply accepting what is handed to them by authority figures and taking it as valid. History contradicts this bland conformist acceptance, by teaching us that Stalin and Hitler were wrong, and their policies were wrong. Well, Bloomberg is attempting to take people's right to own firearms away in Nevada, as we speak, so that's one policy that is similar to the totalitarian position on guns (only police should have them).
History can be analyzed not just as discrete facts and occurrences, but as evidence that human networks of a certain level of advancement were able to universally advance to a certain level of comprehension, to the point where X% of a network was able to support, communicate, and modify ideas necessary to survive.
That is interesting to me. I think it will also be interesting to powerful computers in the future, when they are trying to decide how to interact with humans.
It's probably quite simple: We know or at least can reconstruct a lot about historical details, while trying to picture details about the future is futile. It's hard enough to even picture and predict broad trends especially considering that they are largely interacting with each other. Overall there can simply be much less said in terms of volume about the broad trends we might expect in the future than about all the details and broad strokes of history.
I would imagine that's the main reason but there there are probably also a slew of lesser reasons contributing.
1) By speculating about the future people will point and laugh if you get it wrong, thus you incur a potentially massive hit in social status if you choose to write about the future. It seems much more risky to write about the future than about the past.
2) Any halfway well-researched picture of how the future might look like is too crazy to swallow for most people, thus they are not interested in reading those "crazy speculations". And by extension the author is crazy as well and to be avoided.
3) My impression is that higher education talks a lot more about the past and little (if at all) about the future. Thus people in scientific fields simply know more about the past than what to expect from the future. Also overall there are a lot more fields of study concerned about the past (especially if we include natural history) than fields mainly concerned with the future.
Perhaps Amazon is not the best place to look for the future. I wonder what are the percentages in scientific literature. In the other extreme: patents are 100% about the future.
There also is not that much you can say about the future, It hasn't happened yet. Most people can provide the bulk of their speculations on the future in an essay.
Because "history" is not only an interest in the past but more importantly a genre of writing that was well established 2500 years ago. "Future" has no such connotation. You would find the reverse if you were to compare amazon searches of "novel" to searches of "old" or "ordinary."
I was responding to the claim (gwern's) that a real-versus-fiction effect explains history's popularity versus futorology. This isn't the correct explanation. We don't prefer the real to fiction in books--as proven by the popularity of general fiction compared to general nonfiction (not shown in the dataset).
In various ways, it's obvious that history is a richer field than futurology, and I too am struck by Robin's not seeing any of them. I suspect the reason is that he doesn't make direct use of much historical evidence (rather, using putative general principles, which were perhaps derived from history by others) in his futurology.
Did I imply otherwise? The point is that it isn't surprising that history is much larger chunk of nonfiction than science fiction is a chunk of fiction.
The same logic applies to all empirical truth claims; that is, we have only inferential knowledge of the present.
Our knowledge of the past is more like knowledge of the present than is knowledge of the future. This is because there is nothing comparable pertaining to the future like memory (or the written historical record) is to the past. (Notice that there is little writing about the prehistorical period, which might be, with the absence of an historical record, analogized to writing about the future.)
Books about history are not directly reporting truth. They are trying to *infer* truth from our many scattered noisy clues. Just like our books about the future are trying to infer that from many clues.
Yet elsewhere you call for political organizing. Who with? Who for?
Tragic. I wonder if they will ever learn enough to regret doing so in the future. http://www.brainpreservatio... might have been able to prevent such a casual dismissal of his morality and his life's purpose. Then again, maybe not. Most people are really no smart enough to avoid voting for Hitler. He never loses his popularity, he just takes new forms, even though he's one of the easiest kinds of people to create.
...Because most people are dull, immoral, and unimaginative.
Due to the use of knowledge in society, in the sense written about by Hayek, specialists in any era can find out useful things about the past. Also, since humanity has not outgrown control by sociopaths, and the technology of law/politics/government is how progress has been made or lost with respect to dealing with them, it makes sense to improve our knowledge of past events, especially the events that led to the industrial revolution. It also makes sense to collate into a consistent narrative exactly what has transpired with banking, for-profit investment in war and destruction, and other high-hierarchical-level human systems.
Most "futurists" are not very familiar with the information contained in G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature From Jekyll Island," or Rothbard's less conspiracy-minded (but not better) "The Case Against the Fed." Few science fiction books care to examine a likely future, focusing instead on entertaining possibilities. A notable exception are the two sci-fi books by James Halperin, and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," by Heinlein. Those contain a lot of likely-to-happen individual ideas. (Not necessarily the Moon v. Earth thing, but more the "brainlike" processors, technology helps outmode enslavement thing.) In any case, I found the focus on history to be entertaining in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, because it became relevant again, in the future.
I also thought Dune's interpretation of Hitler's historical record in the far future was interesting, as was Norstrilia's conception of Drexlerian nanotech (written before Drexler's "Engines," I think).
Most people lack any moral framework at all, simply accepting what is handed to them by authority figures and taking it as valid. History contradicts this bland conformist acceptance, by teaching us that Stalin and Hitler were wrong, and their policies were wrong. Well, Bloomberg is attempting to take people's right to own firearms away in Nevada, as we speak, so that's one policy that is similar to the totalitarian position on guns (only police should have them).
History can be analyzed not just as discrete facts and occurrences, but as evidence that human networks of a certain level of advancement were able to universally advance to a certain level of comprehension, to the point where X% of a network was able to support, communicate, and modify ideas necessary to survive.
That is interesting to me. I think it will also be interesting to powerful computers in the future, when they are trying to decide how to interact with humans.
It's probably quite simple: We know or at least can reconstruct a lot about historical details, while trying to picture details about the future is futile. It's hard enough to even picture and predict broad trends especially considering that they are largely interacting with each other. Overall there can simply be much less said in terms of volume about the broad trends we might expect in the future than about all the details and broad strokes of history.
I would imagine that's the main reason but there there are probably also a slew of lesser reasons contributing.
1) By speculating about the future people will point and laugh if you get it wrong, thus you incur a potentially massive hit in social status if you choose to write about the future. It seems much more risky to write about the future than about the past.
2) Any halfway well-researched picture of how the future might look like is too crazy to swallow for most people, thus they are not interested in reading those "crazy speculations". And by extension the author is crazy as well and to be avoided.
3) My impression is that higher education talks a lot more about the past and little (if at all) about the future. Thus people in scientific fields simply know more about the past than what to expect from the future. Also overall there are a lot more fields of study concerned about the past (especially if we include natural history) than fields mainly concerned with the future.
Perhaps Amazon is not the best place to look for the future. I wonder what are the percentages in scientific literature. In the other extreme: patents are 100% about the future.
Lots of history and science books end with speculative chapters on the future. They often seem unfocused and not really worth reading.
There also is not that much you can say about the future, It hasn't happened yet. Most people can provide the bulk of their speculations on the future in an essay.
Because "history" is not only an interest in the past but more importantly a genre of writing that was well established 2500 years ago. "Future" has no such connotation. You would find the reverse if you were to compare amazon searches of "novel" to searches of "old" or "ordinary."
I was responding to the claim (gwern's) that a real-versus-fiction effect explains history's popularity versus futorology. This isn't the correct explanation. We don't prefer the real to fiction in books--as proven by the popularity of general fiction compared to general nonfiction (not shown in the dataset).
In various ways, it's obvious that history is a richer field than futurology, and I too am struck by Robin's not seeing any of them. I suspect the reason is that he doesn't make direct use of much historical evidence (rather, using putative general principles, which were perhaps derived from history by others) in his futurology.
Did I imply otherwise? The point is that it isn't surprising that history is much larger chunk of nonfiction than science fiction is a chunk of fiction.
Yes, clearly. It's hard to wrap one's head around the immense intellectual dishonesty of Hanson's response to my criticisms.
That's your response? Really?
You have an awful lot to overcome.
They are trying to *infer* truth
The same logic applies to all empirical truth claims; that is, we have only inferential knowledge of the present.
Our knowledge of the past is more like knowledge of the present than is knowledge of the future. This is because there is nothing comparable pertaining to the future like memory (or the written historical record) is to the past. (Notice that there is little writing about the prehistorical period, which might be, with the absence of an historical record, analogized to writing about the future.)
The comparison I intended for contrast with fiction is the broad category nonfiction. Best sellers are (much?) more likely to be fiction.
Books about history are not directly reporting truth. They are trying to *infer* truth from our many scattered noisy clues. Just like our books about the future are trying to infer that from many clues.