New converts or someone stealing Johns work?

[at99sy]

Just saw this and thought I would pass it along. Very similar to Johns work here on GD but some of her data seems a bit off as far as timelines
but the gist is generational in nature.
http://www.livescience.com/22109-cycles ... -2020.html


Ciao

SY

[Reality Check]

Just saw this and thought I would pass it along. Very similar to Johns work here on GD but some of her data seems a bit off as far as timelines
but the gist is generational in nature.

It appears this is just regurgitation of information in books by Dr. Peter Turchin.

Perhaps it is regurgitated in an attempt at commercialization of Turchin's work by a third party ?

This lady ( in the article linked in the previous post ) links an article on a "sister web site" which in turn credits Dr. Turchin for the theory.

Sister web site article: http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/274 ... tates.html


Peter Turchin related information:

http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/people/turchin/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin

Cliodynamics related information:

http://escholarship.org/uc/irows_cliodynamics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics

[John]

I met with Professor Turchin in 2003, and mentioned the meeting
briefly in my recent World View column:

** 21-Jul-12 World View -- Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees pour into neighboring countries
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 21#e120721

When I met with him, he scoffed at historical cycles, but now he seems
to have adopted them.

I would probably be very flattered if he actually "stole" my work, but
he's got everything completely wrong.



http://cliodynamics.info/

This is completely screwed up. He's comparing "violence" during the
1860s civil war crisis era with riots and demonstrations in the 1920
Unraveling era.

The "missing spike of 1820" completely overlooks the War of 1812. That's
really bizarre. This is all cherry picking.

Then he ignores WW II, I assume because it didn't take place on
American soil, while the 1920 demonstrations did, and the War of 1812
did.

His 50 year cycles makes no sense at all, as he should be aware, based
on his own work with population dynamics, which would indicate that
any cycle would be related to the human lifetime (80 years).

Well, I'll try writing to him again, and suggest some sort of
collaboration. He's ignored me in the past, and I assume he will
again, since he's a professor and I'm a nobody, but it's worth a shot,
I suppose.

John

[Higgenbotham]

This is completely screwed up.

I'd have to agree. The right measure of intensity of violence in my opinion has to be something like the kill rate. And if people don't remember it over a long period of time so there is that collective memory, then it isn't intense violence and not worthy of a spike on a graph (just because you want it to be 50 years from another spike).

This work to me looks to be a side effect of the education bubble.

[Trevor]

I thought the 1920's would be classified more as the post-unraveling era, since it was from 55-65 years after the civil war.

As for the "forgotten" 1820 spike, there were actually quite a few demonstrations and awakening events, with abolitionism, the Transcendentalism movement, abolishing property requirements for voters and others. Definitely looks like cherry-picking to me.

[Reality Check]

I thought the 1920's would be classified more as the post-unraveling era, since it was from 55-65 years after the civil war.

The way the above graph represents it - the civil war occurred in the decade of 1870s ( 1861 - 1870 ) and the decade of the 1920's was ( 1911-1920 ) so that would make it 50 years.

[Reality Check]

From a data point of view this is rather strange.

I scanned the data points for the U.S. used by Turchin.

Data can be found here: http://cliodynamics.info/PDF/USPVdata.xls

Turchin is defining the intensity of violence as the number of persons dieing during a 10 year period.

But he appears to consider a very few number of deaths during a 10 year period relevant.

He appears to ignore starvations which are man made, epidemics that are man made, attacks by Indians and pirates from neighboring countries, attacks by Indians on the frontiers within the United States, murders that were NOT treated as racial or political or riots by the newspapers, executions by governments of prisoners not considered political by newspapers, all wars by one government against another government and some, perhaps most, war like killings by non-government groups against individuals and other groups, as if they were the same as dieing of old age.

This appears to be just a case of combing through a very limited selection of historical newspaper articles and selecting those reports of death that meet his very limited and inconsistent definition of violence. Or, more likely, reading books by people who combed through such newspaper articles and using the numbers reported in those books as his "research data". Civilian deaths related to crisis wars, for example. often exceed the combat deaths, yet Turchin apparently considers such collateral damage deaths "non-violent".

The number of "violent" deaths he considers "very high" during a 10 year period is for example 160 deaths on his graph above, yet he ignores thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of violent deaths, and violence related deaths, during many ten year periods he considers "low violence".

Turchin's practice of considering only a very few, select number of violent deaths for his research, versus the huge number of the violent deaths he ignores, and the huge number of unnatural deaths as the result of violent acts by men, raises serious questions as to the claim this is science.

[John]

Thanks for finding that spreadsheet. That's a very interesting
list of events.

There's a back story to what's going on here. When I met Professor
Turchin, he mentioned that he admired the work of Mike Alexander.
Now, Mike Alexander (a Gen-Xer, by the way) and I had a fairly cordial
relationship for years in the old Fourth Turning Forum, and he
actually helped me in developing Generational Dynamics by his
criticisms. But as time went on, I was able to respond satisfactorily
to all his criticisms. This just made him angry, and he started
making various attacks on me, some personal, and I started responding
by criticizing some of his work.

This was particularly about his work on Kondratiev Cycles. I actually
agreed that his conclusions about Kondratiev Cycles were correct, and
I provided some theoretical justifications, showing how Kondratiev
Cycles integrate with Generational Cycles. Well, this never satisfied
him, since he was pretty dedicated to refuting generational cycles.
(This was particularly ironic, because he was in the Fourth Turning
forum, which was ABOUT generational cycles, and he apparently thinks
that Strauss and Howe are full of crap.)

As part of this discussion, I took the appendix of one of his books, that
I had purchased, that contained a list of "events" that supported his theories.
I went through a bunch of his events, and showed that they were almost
completely cherry-picked to support his timeline.

I did some searching, and found the discussion in the old Fourth Turning
Forum. It starts here:
http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/show ... post183733

The Kondratiev Cycles are 50-year technology cycles. I showed that
the Kondratiev Cycles are consistent with generational cycles, but are
dominated by generation cycles, which would explain why Kondratiev
cycle theory was blown out of the water by WW II.

So, it's quite possible that Turchin's selection of events is based on
Mike Alexander's selections, which are totally cherry-picked. This
would explain how Turchin came to his 50-year political cycles. It's
actually possible that Kondratiev Cycles are correlated with
non-crisis wars, though that requires additional research.

As you know, I quit the FTF in total disgust at the nasty, vicious
climate there, often directed at me. Mike Alexander and Sean Love
were two of the leaders of that climate. So if Turchin is really in
bed with Mike Alexander, then there's absolutely no hope that he'll be
open to anything I say, although I am going to write to him.

John

[Trevor]

I did some searching and I can't find a single basis for that cycle. Cherry-picking would be putting it mildly.

[John]

I did some searching and I can't find a single basis for that cycle. Cherry-picking would be putting it mildly.

Did you identify any specific counterexamples?