04-18-2018, 01:47 PM
(04-12-2018, 07:25 PM)Mikebert Wrote: > You know John, you have posted detailed analyzes every day for
> years. This makes you an historian of the recent past with deep
> knowledge of the last 15 years. Think of it this way, a historian
> may spend years working on a monograph about the detailed events
> of a 15 year period in the 14th century, for example (I've read
> some). Such works come from reading scads of accounts of the
> period, which is exactly what you have done. If you were projected
> into the future 200 years you could write dozens of monographs
> about the early 21st century based on the your collected
> observations in real time.
> What I am getting at is you have all this material. Do you have a
> synthesis? I am not talking about GD. GD is your own construction,
> like those of my own. They provide insight. But others have
> studied these things before you. Do you engage with them in your
> intellectual work? Here is the reason. Your GD model is
> different. It appears to work by an mechanism that is dissimilar
> from those of other cycles. But it is of inconvenient
> length--around 70 years. I cannot relate it to any data set that I
> know about. Have you developed more compact ways to represent your
> thesis? Many thousands of pages of text isn't useful data because
> it requires enormous work to deal with. This work would most
> effectively be done by you.
> I don't usually check out this section very often, but when I do
> it's mostly presentation of what is going on now. There doesn't
> seem to be a separate theory section. So what is the objective you
> are trying to achieve?
I've read through your paper to understand your conclusions, though I
haven't attempted to follow the mathematical analysis leading to the
conclusions. I'll make some general comments, then end with some
suggestions.
So, as I understand it, you've found a way to put US presidents into
classes, where Trump are Carter are disjunctive and Reagan is
reconstructive. You've identified and analyzed various types of long
cycles, including political cycles, ecocnomic cycles, religious
cycles, cultural cycles, and instability/violence cycles in America in
the 1800s and 1900s.
So the first question going through my mind is - what is the target
audience of this paper? I assume that it's Turchin and his merry
band. The time that I met Turchin (in 2003), he spoke very highly of
you. So the question is why you didn't ask Turchin or one of his
students or one of his peers to review the paper. The fact that
Turchin currently has a vitriolic hatred of me (typical of most of the
world), makes me wonder what the interplay of personalities is here.
But the question about target audience has a broader significance
beyond personalities. Who do you actually expect to read and
understand this paper?
Let me explain through my own experience with the Fourth Turning Book
(FTB). I spent much of 2002 reading ftb pretty obsessively, trying to
understand the theory and its implications, and whether it was any
better than astrology. Obvious problems, like why was WW II a crisis
war, but WW I was not, simply made no sense at all.
By 2003, I had developed the "Principle of Localization," which said
that, rather than every country in the world being on the same
generational timeline, every nation or society has its own
generational timeline. That solved the world war problems, and many
other problems. With that addition, generational theory finally made
sense and seemed plausible.
The next issues were theory validation and target audience. The FTB
claimed that all the things that had happened in Anglo-American
history essentially had to have happened, and were driven by
generational changes. Well, if that's true, then it has to be
possible to use this generational theory, including the Principle of
Localization, to predict what happens next.
That's when I set up the Generational Dynamics web site, and started
writing articles that analyzed current events according to
generational theory. In my own mind, the purpose was clear: If I
could not use generational theory to analyze and predict current
events, then I would have to assume that the entire theory was based
on cherry-picking events in Anglo-American history, and was therefore
worthless as a theory.
The other issue for me was target audience. I wanted to write things
that people would actually read. So on 5/1/2003 I posted my article
on "Mideast Roadmap - Will it bring peace?" and interpreted Bush's
mideast roadmap to peace through generational theory, concluding that
the plan would fail. I remember thinking that this might be a
completely wrong. Six months later, the Israelis and Palestinians
might have shaken hands on a deal that would create two-states
side-by-side blah blah blah. I predicted that it couldn't happen, and
if it had happened, then I would have probably have completely dropped
my interest in generational theory forever, and gone on to lead a much
more normal and probably happier life.
You asked me recently why I don't write more about theory, and just
write about current events. The answer is that I write articles about
current events that people will actually read, but I also try to work
some generational theory into each article, for the people who are
interested in that. Out of the thousands of people who read my
articles, I would guess that less than 2% care about any of the
theoretical stuff at all, or try to understand it, and almost all of
them are familiar with the FTB.
There are two parts to the FTB. One part is theory, and that's what
interested me. The other part is social characterizations of
generations (Silents, Boomers, Xers, etc.), and this is what interests
most people. One thing that always surprises me about this forum is
that almost no one who contributes to this forum has any understanding
of the theory in the FTB. The poster child for this is Cynic Hero,
who doesn't understand even the simplest theoretical concept in FTB,
but sees the entire world through his hatred of Boomers.
So that brings me to your paper. Who do you expect will read it? Do
you care if anyone reads it? And how do you expect to validate it?
Let's take an example. You say that Trump is a disjunctive president,
and you say, "All disjunctive presidents have served a single
term. ... [A] disjunctive president is usually followed by at least
three presidential terms of the opposition party."
So OK, I read this, and thought, gee, you must conclude that Trump is
going to have only term, and it will be followed by three terms of
Democratic presidents.
But no, instead you say, "If he gains a second term, he will not be
disjunctive and 2008 will not look like a critical election."
Well, what does that mean? Was 2008 a critical election or not? Is
Trump a disjunctive president or not? I get the impression that one
has to wait until 2030 before we can answer either of those two
questions, and by then the answers will be useless.
So why did you make that last statement? Maybe you were just afraid
to go out on a limb and make a prediction that might turn out to be
wrong? This was also true of me with the roadmap to peace article,
but I did it anyway, since I decided that I really had nothing to
lose. If it was just fear, then you can decide whether you want to go
beyond your fear, and make some actual predictions that will allow
your theory to be validated or invalidated.
I should add that this really isn't all or nothing. No theory depends
on just one thing, and if you get one thing wrong, then you can go
back and adjust your theory. I did this, for example, when I
originally said that a major war in Syria was impossible in an
Awakening era, but then when it turned out to be a major war I ended
up developing an entire theory of Awakening era wars that applied to
dozens of nations. So my mistake really turned out to be a huge
benefit in the end.
So my point is that if you're hesitating out of fear of being wrong,
you might as well go ahead anyway, because right or wrong, you'll
learn a lot from it.
The second issue is that I'm very suspicious of any theory that
applies only to US history, and nothing else. As I said, my feeling
was that the FTB theory would be completely useless if it couldn't be
validated internationally. If all your examples are from US history,
then the charge of cherry-picking is quite justifiable.
So my suggestion is that you try to broaden your theory to other
countries. What does it mean for a country leader to be disjunctive,
reconstructive, etc., in a parliamentary system, or in a communist
dictatorship or in a fascist dictatorship?
I would think that if your theory is valid, then it would be possible
to made a more nuanced definition of the relevant terms, so that they
apply to other countries. An example of where I had to deal with that
issue is that FTB uses "high" to characterize a first turning, which
makes no sense at all for a country that was defeated, so I called it
a "recovery era," which applies to every nation, winners and losers.
So those would be my suggestions. Consider writing articles on how
your theory applies to current events. You actually used to do that
when you were writing your books on Kondratiev Cycles, since people
who bought your books could use them to make investing decisions. I
think that you should try to find a way back to that mode of thinking.
It's scary that you'll make mistakes, but correcting the mistakes will
make your theory better.
