re: #63 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Watching today’s Veritasium:

The entire ideas of randomness and efficiency when applied to groups of humans, as in a “market”, calls into question beliefs about ourselves as free-will actors.

Somehow we can act individually as though we have free will, but in the big picture we are part of a group that will manifest itself according to physics as described by math.

Author Isaac Asimov used this concept in his Foundation series, written back in the early ’50s. He called it “psychohistory” invented by psychohistorian Harry Selden. In the book, psychohistory’s fundamental premise is that it is impossible to predict future actions taken by individual humans but, grouped in large numbers, their actions can be predicted and, as a result, directed.