Hi Michael, I think this is a great comment! I would be really interested in a rough ‘civilizational trends database’ or anything that could help clarify what a sensible prior for social trend persistence would be.
I’m not exactly sure how this would work, but one trick might be to pick a few well-document times/regions in world history and try to log trends that historians think are worth remarking on. For example, for the late Roman Empire, the ‘religious trends’ subset of the database would include both the rise of Christianity (ultra-robust) and the rise of Sol Invictus worship (not nearly as robust). Although, especially for older periods, shorter-lived trends might be systematically under-discussed/under-recorded.
Hi Michael, I think this is a great comment! I would be really interested in a rough ‘civilizational trends database’ or anything that could help clarify what a sensible prior for social trend persistence would be.
I’m not exactly sure how this would work, but one trick might be to pick a few well-document times/regions in world history and try to log trends that historians think are worth remarking on. For example, for the late Roman Empire, the ‘religious trends’ subset of the database would include both the rise of Christianity (ultra-robust) and the rise of Sol Invictus worship (not nearly as robust). Although, especially for older periods, shorter-lived trends might be systematically under-discussed/under-recorded.
I think the closest things we’ve got that’s similar to this are:
Luke Muehlhauser’s work on ‘amateur macrohistory’ https://lukemuehlhauser.com/industrial-revolution/
The (more academic) Peter Turchin’s Seshat database: http://seshatdatabank.info/