Far more academics study the past than the future. That is, while most academics may study unchanging truths which apply equally well to all times, among academics who focus on particular times other than our own, far more focus on past than future times. Why?
Hello,I stumbled on your exchange here of last october when I Googled for "History of Futurism"; this is quite an other question than the one you are asking. Nevertheless we do share a fascination.
My key project would be:What is the history of futurism (not: futurology!) and how can this history best be demonstrated?
In my view futurism is a superior challenge and perhaps the greatest mastership of a historian. In futurism a historian can prove his real value.
I am an amateur hisatorian very much because of my fascination with the future.
Good luck. I hope this is helpful.I am open to any further exchange.
Kindes regardsTheo Korthals Altes, The Hague, The Netherlands
Andrew, you might be interested in Future Wars: The World's Most Dangerous Flashpoints by Col. Trevor Dupuy. It is also an attempt at a more rigorous futurism. The events described were to take place after the book was written, but that is now our past. An interesting aspect is that the style of the writing makes it seem as if it is an account shortly after the event, and there is no obvious indication of where it diverges from history to speculation, though I suppose if I had read it a decade earlier I could tell more easily.
You can specialize in the future, but it's hard to be an expert in it, since it hasn't happened yet. One thing that's cool about academic history is that involves close study of real historical documents. This can be even be done when considering counterfactuals; see, Niall Ferguson's chapter in his Virtual History book, where he addresses counterfactual questions about World War 1 using historical documents. Or even consider a straight history book such as A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War.
The future doesn't have these documents, and it seems to me that the possibilities of being an expert in the future are much more limited. I could imagine some angles (for example, looking at historical views of the future, or studying prediction markets), but there's just a lot less there than for studying the past.
I think Stuart Buck nails it. To put it another way, academics are typically experts in their area of study. I will teach statistics and maybe political science, but it would be unusual for me to teach a class on literature, for example. I'm interested in literature but am no expert on it. Occasionally you will see a professor teaching outside his or her expertise but it's rare. There are lots of people who are experts on the past but, as Stuart points out, none who are experts on the future. One could argue about whether it's a good idea for profs to generally restrict themselves to teaching about their area of expertise, but I think there are some good reasons for this.
You say, "study the future." I say that's not possible, for the simple reason that one can't "study" something that doesn't exist. You can study current data and make predictions about the future, but that's not the same thing. Plus, whatever data points you might have when studying the events of 1507 far exceed the number of data points that you have for the year 2507 (namely, zero).
I find it striking that most everyone seems to think it reasonably obvious that we should expect more study of history than the future, and yet people offer widely differing explanations for this phenomena.
Everyone has forgotten differences of taste. Some of us (I'm a psychologist and historian) find (say) the early Greeks quite interesting. In their case, for example, you see the human mind addressing important questions for the first time, with no accumulated thought to reckon with, either to agree with or rebut. It's also easy to see how their answers are shaped (or, if you prefer, biased) by their culture, precisely because its both familiar (the origin of ours) and distant (in time): it stands out much more clearly than our own.I also find (as I tell my students) that history provides a good way of revealing current cultural arrangements as equally products of their times resting on unexamined assumptions. Fot example, in the thread above, one commentator alludes to the tenure process as the reason for choosing the past over the future as one's object of study. But history as a discipline both amateur and professional precedes the coming of the modern concept of tenure. David Hume supported himself by his History of England, not his philosophical works, which sold poorly, and both for him were ways of investigating the constancies and follies of human nature.
I think a big part of the problem is that there is no accepted paradigm for doing serious research on "the future". Futurologists have developed some methods(scenario analysis etc.) but they are held in low regard by most people, and rightly so.
I am interested in the future, and I have read many papers on the future that I have found carefully researched and insightful. But I can't think of a single such good paper that was written by a self-described "futurologist" or by somebody listing "futures studies" as their main specialization. Furthermore, these good papers use a wide variety of methods and argument styles. They don't seem to follow any recipe for conducting a good study on the future. Instead, they seem to rely on unique ideas for how some particular aspect of the future can be constrained or determined using some unanticipated combination of information, reasons, and analytic tools.
With history it is very different. You can almost arbitrarily decide to study some part of history, and then follow fairly obvious methods to find out about it - go to archives, compare different documents carefully, interview witnesses, examine artifacts, etc.
If you could consistently find things commonly reckoned to have (say) a 0.2% chance of occurring and more accurately estimate them at 2%, that could be quite valuable. Likewise if the generally reckoned probability is 20%.
The difficulty of making decent predictions about the future is more to the point. Predictions about future politics, wars, economies, etc., is notoriously difficult, and even people you might expect to be experts are consistently worse at it than not-specially-sophisticated statistical models. (See Philip Tetlock's book on "expert political judgement".) Which might indicate that someone armed with humility and statistics might have a useful futurological contribution to make, I guess, but for there to be a worthwhile academic study of futurology I think we'd need to be better at it than that.
The starting question is: "What could you answer with futurism?"
Is there something that one could predict with meaningful likelihood that is both meaningfully precise and not rather obvious?
If I could make predictions that would come true 2% of the time, the effort hardly seems productive. By contrast, most predictions that would come true 50% or more of the time seem to require such strong existing evidence that they should be pretty close to obvious.
Also, it seems exquisitely difficult to come up with a procedure for predicting the future.
Or is there some example of something we might be able to predict that doesn't seem already obvious?
Gray, most intellectuals feel physics has proven itself in all the modern physical devices around them, and they have taken enough math classes to have the strong impression mathematicians know what they are talking about.
I think those mentioning endowment and data have it about right.
Historians don't study history. They study documents, artifacts, and records. From those they devise stories or arguments which they believe best explain those materials.
Futurists don't study the future. I hold that the future hasn't happened and does not exist. It therefore cannot be studied. And futurists can't inspect information from the future. So the futurist needs a basic method or faith.
Morality: A master directive pushes mankind to a great future. Setbacks and confusion occur along the way but there is a purpose. See Marx below.
Doom or fate: To everything there is a season. A man riseth up and is cut down.
Mere extrapolation: Airplanes have gotten bigger for a century. By 2107 airliners will seat 10,000 people and fly 20,000 mph. Well, in 1907 one could read that the trains of 2007 would travel 1000 mph and ocean liners at least 100.
Analysis and insight: Marxism is a good example, He thought he had detected the master pattern of history by reading history, economics, and how the implications of capitalism dictated its demise. Intellectuals believe the best and brightest can figure it out, men just like themselves.
Oracle techniques: Ask many respected people what they think. Then sift their answers. If you believe this works then read Barron's next Saturday and make a fortune in stocks on Monday.
Everyone is a futurist and expects some events and not others. Very few insist they "know".
Hello,I stumbled on your exchange here of last october when I Googled for "History of Futurism"; this is quite an other question than the one you are asking. Nevertheless we do share a fascination.
My key project would be:What is the history of futurism (not: futurology!) and how can this history best be demonstrated?
In my view futurism is a superior challenge and perhaps the greatest mastership of a historian. In futurism a historian can prove his real value.
I am an amateur hisatorian very much because of my fascination with the future.
Good luck. I hope this is helpful.I am open to any further exchange.
Kindes regardsTheo Korthals Altes, The Hague, The Netherlands
Andrew, you might be interested in Future Wars: The World's Most Dangerous Flashpoints by Col. Trevor Dupuy. It is also an attempt at a more rigorous futurism. The events described were to take place after the book was written, but that is now our past. An interesting aspect is that the style of the writing makes it seem as if it is an account shortly after the event, and there is no obvious indication of where it diverges from history to speculation, though I suppose if I had read it a decade earlier I could tell more easily.
Robin,
You can specialize in the future, but it's hard to be an expert in it, since it hasn't happened yet. One thing that's cool about academic history is that involves close study of real historical documents. This can be even be done when considering counterfactuals; see, Niall Ferguson's chapter in his Virtual History book, where he addresses counterfactual questions about World War 1 using historical documents. Or even consider a straight history book such as A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War.
The future doesn't have these documents, and it seems to me that the possibilities of being an expert in the future are much more limited. I could imagine some angles (for example, looking at historical views of the future, or studying prediction markets), but there's just a lot less there than for studying the past.
Adirian, plenty of social scientists study topics full of advocates and politics - why not the future as well?
Senthil, the past is not with us - it is gone.
Pseudo, all the data we can access is in the present, not the past.
Timothy, of course future events can be assigned probabilities.
Eric, if you can't predict they your explanation is suspect.
Psycho and g, any improved accuracy can help in making decisions.
Nick, many other fields, like sociology and political science, have an eclectic mix of methods.
Tom, surely the huge demand for science fiction shows many have a taste for the future as well.
Stuart, you could say the past doesn't exist any more than the future does.
Andrew, if some can specialize in the past, why can't others specialize in the future?
I think Stuart Buck nails it. To put it another way, academics are typically experts in their area of study. I will teach statistics and maybe political science, but it would be unusual for me to teach a class on literature, for example. I'm interested in literature but am no expert on it. Occasionally you will see a professor teaching outside his or her expertise but it's rare. There are lots of people who are experts on the past but, as Stuart points out, none who are experts on the future. One could argue about whether it's a good idea for profs to generally restrict themselves to teaching about their area of expertise, but I think there are some good reasons for this.
You say, "study the future." I say that's not possible, for the simple reason that one can't "study" something that doesn't exist. You can study current data and make predictions about the future, but that's not the same thing. Plus, whatever data points you might have when studying the events of 1507 far exceed the number of data points that you have for the year 2507 (namely, zero).
I find it striking that most everyone seems to think it reasonably obvious that we should expect more study of history than the future, and yet people offer widely differing explanations for this phenomena.
Everyone has forgotten differences of taste. Some of us (I'm a psychologist and historian) find (say) the early Greeks quite interesting. In their case, for example, you see the human mind addressing important questions for the first time, with no accumulated thought to reckon with, either to agree with or rebut. It's also easy to see how their answers are shaped (or, if you prefer, biased) by their culture, precisely because its both familiar (the origin of ours) and distant (in time): it stands out much more clearly than our own.I also find (as I tell my students) that history provides a good way of revealing current cultural arrangements as equally products of their times resting on unexamined assumptions. Fot example, in the thread above, one commentator alludes to the tenure process as the reason for choosing the past over the future as one's object of study. But history as a discipline both amateur and professional precedes the coming of the modern concept of tenure. David Hume supported himself by his History of England, not his philosophical works, which sold poorly, and both for him were ways of investigating the constancies and follies of human nature.
I think a big part of the problem is that there is no accepted paradigm for doing serious research on "the future". Futurologists have developed some methods(scenario analysis etc.) but they are held in low regard by most people, and rightly so.
I am interested in the future, and I have read many papers on the future that I have found carefully researched and insightful. But I can't think of a single such good paper that was written by a self-described "futurologist" or by somebody listing "futures studies" as their main specialization. Furthermore, these good papers use a wide variety of methods and argument styles. They don't seem to follow any recipe for conducting a good study on the future. Instead, they seem to rely on unique ideas for how some particular aspect of the future can be constrained or determined using some unanticipated combination of information, reasons, and analytic tools.
With history it is very different. You can almost arbitrarily decide to study some part of history, and then follow fairly obvious methods to find out about it - go to archives, compare different documents carefully, interview witnesses, examine artifacts, etc.
If you could consistently find things commonly reckoned to have (say) a 0.2% chance of occurring and more accurately estimate them at 2%, that could be quite valuable. Likewise if the generally reckoned probability is 20%.
The difficulty of making decent predictions about the future is more to the point. Predictions about future politics, wars, economies, etc., is notoriously difficult, and even people you might expect to be experts are consistently worse at it than not-specially-sophisticated statistical models. (See Philip Tetlock's book on "expert political judgement".) Which might indicate that someone armed with humility and statistics might have a useful futurological contribution to make, I guess, but for there to be a worthwhile academic study of futurology I think we'd need to be better at it than that.
The starting question is: "What could you answer with futurism?"
Is there something that one could predict with meaningful likelihood that is both meaningfully precise and not rather obvious?
If I could make predictions that would come true 2% of the time, the effort hardly seems productive. By contrast, most predictions that would come true 50% or more of the time seem to require such strong existing evidence that they should be pretty close to obvious.
Also, it seems exquisitely difficult to come up with a procedure for predicting the future.
Or is there some example of something we might be able to predict that doesn't seem already obvious?
Because Black Swans are easier to explain than to predict.
Perhaps amateur evaluators hold 'futurism' to the same standard as math or physics, and futurism simply hasn't proven itself.
Gray, most intellectuals feel physics has proven itself in all the modern physical devices around them, and they have taken enough math classes to have the strong impression mathematicians know what they are talking about.
I think those mentioning endowment and data have it about right.
Historians don't study history. They study documents, artifacts, and records. From those they devise stories or arguments which they believe best explain those materials.
Futurists don't study the future. I hold that the future hasn't happened and does not exist. It therefore cannot be studied. And futurists can't inspect information from the future. So the futurist needs a basic method or faith.
Morality: A master directive pushes mankind to a great future. Setbacks and confusion occur along the way but there is a purpose. See Marx below.
Doom or fate: To everything there is a season. A man riseth up and is cut down.
Mere extrapolation: Airplanes have gotten bigger for a century. By 2107 airliners will seat 10,000 people and fly 20,000 mph. Well, in 1907 one could read that the trains of 2007 would travel 1000 mph and ocean liners at least 100.
Analysis and insight: Marxism is a good example, He thought he had detected the master pattern of history by reading history, economics, and how the implications of capitalism dictated its demise. Intellectuals believe the best and brightest can figure it out, men just like themselves.
Oracle techniques: Ask many respected people what they think. Then sift their answers. If you believe this works then read Barron's next Saturday and make a fortune in stocks on Monday.
Everyone is a futurist and expects some events and not others. Very few insist they "know".
If Robin's argument is correct, then why does it fail for, say, theoretical physics or mathematics.