Shades of the ancient past. The Catholic (Truth) versus Protestant (Heresy) as it were.
Eron had already laid out the problem as a mathematical puzzle—which he was keeping secret until he understood it better. The trouble stemmed from a mathematical definition of secrecy that was inherently inconsistent. That was the easy part. Eron wasn’t sure he knew what to do about it except that the same rules had to apply to everyone—the inconsistency deriving from the false dichotomy between Pscholar and layman.
(1) Under what circumstances was the keeping of a secret benign?
(2) Under what circumstances did the keeping of a secret prove detrimental?
Sloppy group thinking, akin to that which had abruptly terminated poor Yorick’s life during the Great Rithian Die-off, was to be avoided at all costs. There were worse fates than being sent to heaven as an indoor garden decoration, but not many. Yet Eron was not going to be able to refine his thinking by conducting social experiments, say, in the grand manner of that Emperor-of-Everything-plus-Russia Napoleon or by mind-slaving k la Cloun-the-Stubbom. Young Osa was beginning to think of himself as an ancient astronomer he couldn’t test his ideas about the functioning of stars by building different kinds of stars—but what he could do was observe the stars that already existed. History was his sky.
Of the men in Rigone’s book, Eron took a liking to Max Planck. He had always assumed that Planck was one of those ancient Bronze-Age shamans who fooled around with black body radiation in a cave and, by the light of a gas lamp, used chalkboard and bronze piping and primitive electrical oven to come up with a curve which fit the experimental data, all without ever grasping the true meaning of the mysterious revelation gifted him by his Nordic gods. But reading Planck’s original papers uncovered a different story. Planck wasn’t an experimentalist at all. He was a paper-and-pencil theoretician who maintained roots in a rich soil of other people’s observations. Equations were carefully derived from first principles to match the best experimental results. When they didn’t he was brilliantly able to finagle a new equation to fit the experiment, but never satisfied until he could derive the finagle from first principles.
Planck’s finest finagle, the quantum of action, he fussed over until he had a convincing derivation from the simplest mechanical laws and a deep understanding of Boltzmann’s then-new statistical mechanics—which every student of psychohistory was familiar with as the ancient foundation stone of the Founder’s mathematics. (Boltzmann was often referred to by students at the Lyceum as the great-grandancestor of psychohistory.) In plain words—unmistakably clear over millennia of language change—Planck warned his students that they were not to use the quantum of action in any prediction that required reversibility since all quantum events were tied to an increase in entropy.
Eron was amazed and delighted by this piece of ancient wisdom!
Later generations of quantum theoreticians had ignored Planck (and had sidelined Boltzmann as underivable from first principles) and clung for dear life to their newtonian roots in the Law of Conservation of Information, a law about as valid as Ptolemy’s assumption that a released rock instantly reverts to a universal rest mode. During the heady pre-Yorick years of scientific prolificacy, armies of superstitious physicists hunted up new heavens for information gone missing: under rocks, on the surface of black holes, behind the locked doors of alternate worlds—all heavens where the physicists were sure to find their home after they died. The debate was only resolved by the Great Die-off when the physicists, as well as everyone else, fell off the top of the exponential curve to their silence or, if they lived, to more pressing questions of survival.
Yorick had nothing to say about the matter.
Perhaps because of Reinstone, certainly because of his adventures on Rith, Eron had taken up the hobby of teasing a psychohistorical thread through the shards of Rith’s history. His first five years at the Lyceum had been an ideal opportunity to collect all sorts of odd bits and pieces of ancient history which had languished in various archives. His psychohistorical manipulations of these pieces surprised him by regularly deviating from the standard Rithian stereotypes.
Building a model of some segment of Rith’s history was not the same as predicting the future. To predict the future one had to jump off the curve’s endpoint with the hope that you were jumping in the same direction as the curve. History was different. It was an interpolation between known points, a less acrobatic feat. For instance, with just the meager data he had about the era of the Flying Fortress, the equations gave a high probability of a devastating nuclear fusion-fission war—but the record showed no such event so Eron could prune off that branch and thus refine his analysis.
Connecting his thread through the topozone crossing of the Great Rithian Die-off was a more difficult extrapolation. There was enough material from the prior centuries of the Ramp-up to see the excitement of the early scientific revolution driving the population expansion, and plenty of evidence of the cavalier optimism of the richer nations, which were getting richer in their high-rise penthouse supported by the Atlas of an increasingly ignorant breeding population... And after the Die-off there was plenty of material to understand the strange cultures which had produced the sublight starships.
But in between the Die-off and the Rejuvenation? Only the shadows of illiterate men too busy dying and surviving to record their thoughts.
Every single one of the cultures that had fed the Ramp-up with its dynamism and energy simply vanished during the free-fall of infrastructure collapse as the population dropped by ten(?), fifteen(?) billion. The peoples who emerged from the disaster, and who later founded the first interstellar colonies, bore no kin to their parent cultures in languages, institutions, religions, or racial characteristics. It wasn’t an easy scene for a historian to sort out even with the splicing tools of psychohistory.
But it was good practice.
Eron divided his study of secret societies into three broad groups. Rithian history made up in longevity for what it lacked in depth. The ten thousand years of sublight expansion produced hundreds of examples of secret societies, each of the colonies isolated from all the others, so the influences which made and drove them were easy to model. The Hyperdrive Era contained a plethora of interstellar conflicts in which secrecy had been both a viable survival strategy for undergroups and a viable method of retaining power for overgroups.
There was no verdict in favor of secrecy or against it. Both strategies were valid responses to different kinds of challenge. Both were fatal when improperly applied.
Eron’s methodology was very Planckian. He set up a complete mathematical model governing secrecy and disclosure. Then he fed some historical event into it, comparing the model’s output and the historical record. That gave him the flaws in his model—and sometimes the bias in the historical record. (How reliable was the Inquisition’s account of the Catholic extermination of the Albigensians since at the end of that conflict there were no Albigensians left to leave an account of their own?)
From the results of the comparison between theory and observation Eron then finagled his model to give the results it should have given—after which he lived a few months of frustration figuring out the underlying psychohistorical basis of the finagle. Then he applied the new model to a new set of historical events for a new iteration of theory.
During this trying exercise Eron was consoled by reading in Latin the works of Johann Kepler, who wrote in the 598th century BGE, during the time of the bloody collapse of the
Ptolemaic cosmology. Kepler published amusing accounts of his sustained effort, through seventy different hypotheses, to fit Tycho Brahe’s measurements of the path of Mars to a theoretical curve, chiding himself in print for first having exhausted all possible variations of the circle before trying something sensible—merely because he was caught up in the universal dogma, held by Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, the Jesuits, die Inquisition, and an infallible Pope, which took for granted that circleness was the
one true perfect shape befitting God’s perfect design for the Solar System. But God had preferred ellipses.
Kepler doggedly continued his research, his mind full of hypotheses to be tested, even as the holocaust of the Thirty Year Religious War engulfed everything about him. Men began to doubt creeds that preached a Savior but practiced wholesale fratricide. The psychohistorical seeds of the distrust of all religion ripened, ready to take root in the centuries ahead. Kepler found the means to publish Tycho’s star-maps in spite of the chaos, but long before the war was over Kepler perished, one among ten million as sapiens Catholic and sapiens Protestant slaughtered, maimed, raped, pillaged, and burned men, women, children, witches, and heretics in the name of their Christ.
Eron’s refined model of galactic civilization and the Founder’s classical model almost always gave the same historical outcome—except under one circumstance, where Eron’s formulation of die laws seemed to give remarkably better results.
The Founder’s model wasn’t self-referential. By the very nature of his mathematics he had to assume that his Pschol-ars would be living in a universe isolated from history. That worked very well if the job was back-predicting a past they couldn’t influence. But when predicting the future it became the source of their need for secrecy. Yet because secrecy was never perfect, the Founder’s mathematics carried in its retina a blind spot. During the Interregnum the Pscholars’ arm of the Fellowship was a tiny underfunded group that had the resources to keep track of only a very few critical leverage points. In effect, it was isolated from history, and thus the Founder’s math was a very good approximation to the real situation.
However, since the establishment of the Pax Pscholaris of 13,157 GE, the situation had subtly changed. At the end of the Interregnum the Pscholars’ power had been mostly symbolic, but sixteen centuries later that power was real; they were the single most powerful group in galactic history. They were no longer outside of history, they rode history— and secrecy was steadily weakening as a vehicle by which to maintain the fiction of isolation required by the Founder’s equations. So far as Eron could tell, this once-useful approximation was now dangerously close to failure. Another Ptolemaic system.
It was time to take his math out of his private mnemoni-fier and put it to test in the huge galactic model maintained by the Lyceum. Second Rank Konn gladly provided him with the machine space and gave him higher than normal runtime priority for a Rank Eight student. He wasn’t allowed to modify the sacrosanct model himself but he could use any of its routines, up to the full set, or, for experimental purposes, flag out what he didn’t want to use and flag in his own alterations.
Because he was amending some of the basic rules, he made up different sets of initial conditions that were critically designed to highlight his modifications. Using a revamped model with the Galaxy’s real initial conditions could come later when he had a revision he could trust
The secrecy assumptions were so strongly built into the standard model that Eron spent months tracking them down and rephrasing the affected codes. It was a hermit’s existence with zero social life. His waking-sleeping cycle became erratic until he was out of tune with the corridor world around him. Sometimes he didn’t notice that he was wearing mixed pairs of colored socks, even mismatched shoes. He was known to appear at odd hours barefoot and in pajamas. Konn once sent Magda over to trim his hair.
His adversary and archfiend was the galactic model’s intelligent compiler. Cavalierly it might reject his code with polite little scolds. “Code syntactically correct. However, suggest you try instead:.. .” and its suggestion comprised only seven percent of the code Eron had spent a whole watch writing and ran in two percent of the time. “Danger: Matrix sem246 is near singular to level epsilon in regions... Suggest adding branch to routine Az34mask to avoid probability 0.000072 that run will balloon to unacceptable error levels.” “Job terminated: Do not use this code before reading ARcmvE-doc-274/12/13476 by First Rank Pscholar Yem Esonu, attached. Comprehension test required.” A whole textbook! “Syntactic error in your use of morads, automatically corrected. Any disagreements with this decision to be filed in log-morad.” Sometimes the complier even ran his program with polite reluctance, ending in: “Job Terminated,” a title appended to a thousand-line analysis of the problem. Once Eron got the dreaded ciyptic termination message: “Outside the parameters of human nature.” Deep in imagined retorts, Eron slipped a red sock on one foot and a green sock on the other.
Slowly, slowly he beat the compiler into a state of respectful submission. But it was the simulations which began to run without compiler comment that gave him the most intellectual distress. Sometimes he felt like a twelve-year-old novice god; whenever he thought he had his universe elegantly designed to perfection, the damn thing would blow up on him and he’d have to go back to scratch and build a new universe.
His method was simple. He developed and tested definitions of info exchange between intelligent nodes: secrets having viscous flow, open info having fluid flow. He allowed no node a privileged position. For instance, in Eron’s math there was no absolute resting place for psychohistorical knowledge and so no need to differentiate between prediction as a tool used by generals or physicists or biologists or parents raising children and prediction as a tool used by psychohistorians.
Thus Eron avoided the conundrum: “If the Fellowship node is the natural resting place of all psychohistorical knowledge, what happens when we resolve this Fellowship into its component nodes, the individual psychohistorians? Where is the natural resting place of psychohistorical knowledge now? Who is Pope? And how does he keep the secret of psychohistory unto himself without murdering all the other psychohistorians?” In another version of the conundrum it was possible to ask: “How did the Founder preserve the secret methods of psychohistory by teaching them to his disciples?” And in still another version: “If the Fellowship cannot predict its own internal behavior because all of its members know the methods of psychohistory, then how can it know itself well enough to lead the Galaxy?” Under the squabbling leadership of the Olympian gods, the squabbling Greeks first became vassals of Rome and then vassals of Turkey.
Eron’s new and precise definitions, as they always do, opened up a whole new field of mathematics: a vista from which to view the starry ecumen without the obstruction of corridor walls. He named his methodology Arekean iteration after the famous Galactic folk hero Arek who, in countless different versions, began his tribulations by formulating a disastrous plan that escalated into frightful trouble which he fast-danced his way out of by the cunning creation of a new and worse plan that... until finally, at the very last in-amin, a hair’s breadth from disease, death, and disgrace, he made a final plan that saved him for a happy ending and the story could end.
Law-1: Any observed change in circumstance initiates a prediction by the observer.
Law-2: If the prediction indicates good fortune, prediction ceases.
Law-3: If the prediction indicates an unpleasant outcome, die observer actively seeks to falsify the prediction by initiating further changes to his circumstances.
Law-4: Prediction/action is an interative process that continues until good fortune is predicted.
The dynamics of those simple laws were interesting.
When Eron attached (to the methods of prediction) a high coefficient of secrecy, each node, whether community or individual, tended to optimize only its own future. Nonoptimal falsification of negative predictions dominated.
A rancher predicts good fortune raising cows.
The farmer, noting the arrival of cows, predicts them eating his wheat and falsifies this prediction by poisoning the rancher's cattle so that he can predict a profit raising wheat.
The rancher, noting this change in his circumstances, predicts bankruptcy but falsifies this dire prediction by burning the farmer’s bam, which allows him to predict a profit in cattle next year.
The farmer then rolls out the barbed wire and builds a machine-gun nest in hi
s water tower, enabling him to predict a profit in wheat next year.
Eron watched this high-secrecy version of his model with fascination. Armies with secret archives of contingency plans mushroomed. Brother assassinated brother. Counterproductive falsification of negative prediction was the rule. A Time of Troubles? An Interregnum? Whatever you wanted to call it, power gradually accumulated in the hands of the best predictors who continued to maintain their advantage through secrecy while the number of distinct nodes dwindled. No matter how small or large the stage, in the final state one predictor ruled in a sea of enemies. Splendid Wisdom?
When Eron set the same coefficient of secrecy low enough so that all nodes were sharing each other’s negative predictions, quite another dynamic took over: predictive iteration accelerated faster than falsifying action. The farmer planning to poison the cows iterated to the burning of his barn before he bought the poison, each new iteration leading to another negative prediction in an endless sequence— which could be terminated only by a falsification which resulted in good fortune for both rancher and farmer.
The equations converged to either of two stable states:
(1) a semistable state in which a prime node managed the future of all other nodes.
(2) a stable state in which distributed iterative predicting (a) damped out, over all subgroups of nodes, predictions which had negative consequences while (b) leaving generally positive predictions to run their course.
Psychohistorical Crisis Page 62