(2023-04-05) Davies History Is The Bygone Which Wont Stay Bygone

Dan Davies: history is the bygone which won't stay bygone. One of the many silly little bees that buzz round my bonnet is the following argument against “the lessons of history”.

you have to correctly choose which historical example is relevant to the current situation.

4. All of which seems much more difficult than just knuckling down and solving your own problem

I kind-of sort-of believe this.

However! Let’s consider this extract from a description of an artificial intelligence chatbot:

“This dependence of the probability on what came earlier is a marked characteristic of the sequences of letters

it’s taken from page 170-171 of “An Introduction to Cybernetics”, written by the psychiatrist and mathematician William Ross Ashby in 1956

A ”Markov chain” is a sort of generalisation of the “random walk” – it can deal with situations where the next step is not wholly random

having zero memory. The “Markov” criterion for processes is that their next state is only dependent on their current state

you can often “recode” a non-Markov process to have this property, by including some of the past path in the current state

you might still be able to describe it as a Markov chain by saying that (A,C) is one state and (B,C) is a different state

This obviously gives you a much bigger “transition matrix” of states for the system to be in, but the big matrix still has the Markov property

More interestingly, you can sometimes apply this recoding trick in reverse. If a system has unobservable states, then you might be able to nevertheless improve your prediction of its next move by looking at how it got there

“History” is that part of the past which might be considered to describe an unobservable state of the system in the present. The rest is just stories.