The place the analogy really seems to fail to me is that it presumes there is this single tiny thing that matters (which is quite complimentary and thus a nice PR angle), when really there are probably thousands of things that will retrospectively be seen to have mattered and the english speaking singularitarian political movement is just one of them.
Well there may be some cases where a little effort can make a big difference—and it may pay for individuals to seek them out. However, there’s obviously a big influence from technological determinism—which would tend to damp out small fluctuations due to the efforts of individuals.
Do you know of any solid methodologies for predicting outcomes from technology? To cash out political determinism I’d go with something like Bruce Bruno De Mesquita’s work, but I don’t know any methods to analyze technological determination of history other than using case-by-case reasoning, and nearly all of the “cases” I’ve seen are post hoc.
Well there may be some cases where a little effort can make a big difference—and it may pay for individuals to seek them out. However, there’s obviously a big influence from technological determinism—which would tend to damp out small fluctuations due to the efforts of individuals.
Do you know of any solid methodologies for predicting outcomes from technology? To cash out political determinism I’d go with something like Bruce Bruno De Mesquita’s work, but I don’t know any methods to analyze technological determination of history other than using case-by-case reasoning, and nearly all of the “cases” I’ve seen are post hoc.
Nobody has a practical methodology for predicting the future in very much detail.
Technological determinism still seems like a big and important idea to me, though.