No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Butterfly effect. Even Hari Sheldon in the Foundation series couldn't do that.
Psychohistory was designed for large groups. It wasn't designed for single creatures like butterflies
It wasn't because it couldn't. Hari tried it and failed. Applying Psychohistory to only large enough populations was his compromise. This is mentioned in Prelude to Foundation. I think Hari specifically mentions how complex predicting weather is iirc. That's why I mentioned it in the first place.
At the time Hari tried to apply it at the small scale, it was impossible. I believe by the time Gaia takes over the science could be applied to the single organism but that also feels like cheating.
The whole point of prelude and forward was that his attempts to start on the smaller scale by going backwards in time was a fools errand and impossible but starting with the relatively small scale of just Trantor was doable as it had sufficient mass to apply the generalized mathematics towards. The variables on the smaller scales were too numerous but as you abstract towards larger bodies, it reduces the complexity to the point it becomes calculable.
Well, not the whole point but still
No shade but I could not take the premise of that book seriously. The idea that any complex system could be mapped thousands of years into the future is so incredibly unrealistic to me that I was unable to suspend my disbelief.
I'm a massive Dune fan though so I have no leg to stand on. Hold on a second while I re-calibrate my metabolism and use my genetic heritage to recall events that happened 30000 years ago.
So, what Hari does is basically game theory on a massive scale. The larger the group, the less complexity because you're abstracting the different possible issues individuals would have out of the problem. Instead of making it more complex, it simplifies the whole thing because all the chaotic bits cancel each other out.
And slight spoiler warning for an old story but you find out later that the whole thing isn't just predicted ahead of time and let loose but a group of people follow along in the shadows to keep the plan on track.