I’ve curated this post. I feel really confused about theories of history, and have no idea whether the theory of secular cycles is true. But I think history is a really crucial and difficult field, and this post (along with its sequel) really helped me engage with models of this domain—by diving into a natural category (cyclic theories, which are common in many other social/biological fields) and using lots of robust, general approaches to figure out what’s true (degrees of freedom, independent search for datasets as spot check, etc).
I’ve curated this post. I feel really confused about theories of history, and have no idea whether the theory of secular cycles is true. But I think history is a really crucial and difficult field, and this post (along with its sequel) really helped me engage with models of this domain—by diving into a natural category (cyclic theories, which are common in many other social/biological fields) and using lots of robust, general approaches to figure out what’s true (degrees of freedom, independent search for datasets as spot check, etc).