{"id":174833,"date":"2017-05-01T21:16:50","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T05:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/?p=174833"},"modified":"2017-05-01T21:17:50","modified_gmt":"2017-05-02T05:17:50","slug":"on-understanding-the-algebra-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/2017\/05\/01\/on-understanding-the-algebra-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"On understanding the algebra of history"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Over the years I’ve convinced many people to read Scott Atran’s In God’s We Trust<\/a>. Why? Because it gives you a basic framework for understanding and interpreting religious phenomena.<\/b><\/p>\n

The cognitive anthropological toolkit does not give you the total resources of decomposing religious phenomena. But, it is probably a necessary toolkit to begin at the process of carving it up tractably. And since people talk about religion constantly I think it is important that learn to talk about it more rationally and empirically.<\/p>\n

I believe my friend Peter Turchin<\/a> is doing something similar with cliodynamics<\/a>, which attempts to model history formally and quantitatively.<\/strong> Unlike classical cliometric analysis, which was mostly descriptive, Peter attempts to construct models which make predictions which can be tested.<\/p>\n

Of course to test these models you need well organized data. To do this he has been instrumental in pushing forward the Seshat: Global History Databank<\/a> (which I have supported with a donation<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Cliodynamics is a few decades behind cognitive anthropology as a field. I’m still following it closely because it hasn’t hit the point of diminishing returns for me yet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I’m putting this post up mostly because on Twitter someone mentioned offhand that more people should know of Peter’s work.<\/p>\n

Well, here I am boosting him up a bit! Of his books, I’ve read three related to history, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires<\/a>, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall<\/a>, and Secular Cycles<\/a>. For those who are curious about Peter’s ecological scholarship, Complex Population Dynamics<\/a> may be of interest.<\/p>\n

Also, here are my 10 questions for Peter Turchin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And of course, you should checkout his website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the years I’ve convinced many people to read Scott Atran’s In God’s We Trust. Why? Because it gives you a basic framework for understanding and interpreting religious phenomena. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,19],"tags":[2737],"class_list":["post-174833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-history","tag-peter-turchin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawqfx-JtT","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}