The Times, They Are A-Changin’ Our Science
Looking to the past for a way out of the replication crisis in the future
By MARTIN REZNY
I’m just gonna say it right away — astrology, the answer may be astrology. Oh noes, he used the bad word, somebody call the science police! Still here? Okay, let’s give it a try. I’m being serious, actually, but I’ll have to leave you scratching your head for a bit until I establish what I’m solving.
If you have a degree in any science or even a mere study, you may be aware that there’s this thing now called the replication crisis, chiefly in the realm of social science. In short, to establish that some theory works, it needs to be tested and pass the test not just once, but at least more often than not.
Ideally, a scientific theory should pass all of the tests always, and in physics, for example, that’s pretty much what you get — gravity or energy don’t have off days. In softer sciences, like psychology or sociology, the standard is more lenient, because humans and societies are messy.
The reason for why what’s happening is being called a crisis is that even under the more lenient standard (statistical significance of p < 0.05), many previously established theories are now failing their tests. How many is somewhat debatable, but it could be as much as over 50% of all of them.
I’m not going to provide sources for this, because you shouldn’t trust me anyway and because everything could be different tomorrow, so if you’re skeptical (unaware) of this being a thing, feel free to go check what the authoritative sources are saying about it this week. I’ll wait for you here.
Do we agree on the premise now? Yes? Good. So, as I was saying, many social science studies that used to pass their tests are not passing them anymore. My initial idea of why that is was that maybe the standards of research in the field were even more BS that I thought while studying.
And sure, this probably is a part of the problem, coupled with many ambitious researchers fudging or tweaking the numbers to make the test results look like what best suits their career advancement. But after some debates with experts, I no longer think this is the core of the problem.
It was brought to my attention that to some extent, this should have been and was expected, because guess what, times are changing. Testing average people in the 50s shouldn’t be expected to produce the same results as testing average people in the 90s, since who people are has changed.
The main obvious reasons for this evolution over time seem to be:
- Changing generations — there is no clear or hard scientific theory of how this works exactly, but it seems intuitively true that different groups of people who were born around the same time share unique social conditions that were part of their upbringing or growing up that make them uniquely distinct from different groups of people born around different times. This seems to be an inescapable result of the highly complex and unpredictable, but constant evolution of political reality.
- Learning feedback loop — every time humanity discovers something, whether through a religious revelation, happenstance, a social experiment, or through the application of the scientific method, it gains a new understanding that makes it forever different. Human psychology seems to be very adaptive, so by trying to figure it out, you’re very likely to make it shift specifically to slip your grasp. Consequences of new cultural learnings are also often chaotic and wildly unpredictable.
- Black swan events — to make things even more unpredictable, there’s a whole class of game-changing, (social) reality-shifting events called black swans by statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb which can be literally anything. Maybe an asteroid hits Earth. Maybe a virus mutates and a pandemic starts. Maybe someone invents crypto. Or the aliens land on the White House lawn. Some of these events can be somewhat expected and prepared for, but usually not in their important specifics.
Considering all of these times-changing factors, it’s almost as if the one true scientific theory of human psychology (with a real explanatory or predictive power) would have to be able to predict and account for all of the possible external circumstances that the human mind may have to contend with, while also explaining all of the ways in which a human mind may respond to any specific combination of circumstances in any given times.
You know what, this is sounding familiar. Hm, I could swear somebody a while back tried to come up with this sort of thing. What was it called… Oh, right, astrology, this is exactly what astrology is trying to be. And when I say exactly, I mean exactly. But let’s again forget we’re talking about astrology, let’s call this hypothetical future-proof social science something else, like time-ology, human time studies, or dialectical demographics.
Put simply, so that social scientists can’t accuse me of any mysticism, if you want to have a good psychological or social or political theory, then:
a) The theory needs to be psycho-socio-political all at once.
b) You have to account for when the test subjects were born.
c) “When” someone is born means at what point of which sequence their existence was initiated.
d) “Sequence” in this context is probably an iterative spiral, and may not be linear, and there may be additional dimensions of time interacting with each other (depending on how complicated the underlying universe is).
e) If the universe is a fractal or a (simulated) mathematical parametric system, maybe there isn’t any fundamental difference between what we see as different entities (they could be manifestations of the same equations), so there could be major correlations between the nature or transformations of people and countries and planets and so on if they were all initiated at the same or similar point in time (of the spiral sequence, so spiralence, maybe?).
Okay, the last couple of components are not that simple, so for simplicity’s sake, feel free to ignore anything beyond “iterative spiral”. We can leave the actual mind physics of the multiverse for later. It would be more than enough to get us started if we tried to design our tests with the context of the changing times taken into account.
Now, when I said that astrology is trying to be exactly this kind of thing, I didn’t mean that it has succeeded at it. I’m just about to publish a book about astrology in which I’m discussing all of the relevant research that has been done to either prove or debunk it, and my conclusion is that we need to do way more testing to know anything. But the concept is inspired.
We could try to do again what ancient astrologers attempted to do. We could change a bunch of things, approach the problem in different ways. We could also try to properly check the astrological lore to be sure whether the ancients already were onto something or not. Why duplicate effort?
For example, take generations. It is a fact that the commonly agreed-upon generations along with their rough demarkations match the movements of Pluto from one sign into another exceptionally well. Both in terms of when each transition happened, and in terms of the content of each sign.
Don’t ask me why that is, or how it’s possible, or how it makes any sense, but it is a fact. Could be a coincidence, sure, but it’s a suspicious coincidence. In the astrological lore, Pluto is supposed to describe shifts in dominant politics. So, the thing that a generation should have in common.
A person born with a particular Pluto therefore means a person growing up within a specific political paradigm. According to astrological lore, the zodiac is a logical, inevitable sequence. In the case of Pluto, it’s basically historical dialectics, or quite literaly one thing after another, at the speed of generations growing up (20 years on average per one sign of Pluto).
From the beginning of the 20th century, there was the speeding up of travel and innovation (gemini), followed by a rise of nationalism (cancer), followed by the ultimate war (leo), folowed by reconstruction (virgo), followed by the flourishing of culture (libra), followed by the rejection of repression (scorpio), followed by a conjuncture (sagittarius), followed by belt-tightening (capricorn). Now we’re entering the geopolitical equivalent of winter (aquarius), so adaptation to harsh environment via ingenuity and egalitarian cooperation. These periods match generations. See for yourself.
Maybe the astrologers have stumbled onto something here, maybe not. Maybe only here. We don’t really know, we haven’t checked very well. The important takeaway for social scientists here is that even if this match is a fluke, it shows how to construct a theory of the mind politic across time.
If the society or a polity is comprised of humans, it may be going through the same mental motions as an individual human, just slower. Maybe how a human changes their mind on average over the course of a lifetime, up to 120 years, so does a political system, just over the course of 250-ish years.
If that’s the case, then if someone is born under a Pluto in scorpio, maybe what that means in psycho-socio-political terms is that while the individual is young, the political cycle is in the equivalent of the mindset of a 50-year-old; whereas if the individual was born under a Pluto in aries, a new political entity was also recently born. Inescapable dynamics ensue.
Does this make sense? Am I crazy for suggesting this? Come on, help me out here. It took me about five years of closely studying astrology and the surrounding scientific “debate” to arrive at this basic sense, and it already feels very advanced. Who knows what might occur to me after five more.
I’m willing to give it a shot, maybe write another book, or several (if this is a sign of how deep the rabbit hole could go). If this sounds interesting to you, like it maybe could be a thing, let me know. It would be great if I wasn’t shouting all of this into a void. If you think it’s BS, great, bring it on.
In any case, you can’t say the ancients weren’t ambitious. I mean, how is this the FIRST thing they came up with?
