202508291340 Status: #idea Tags: #history #epistemology #prediction #methodology #great_founder_theory # Systematically improving an explicit theory of history Most people, even those who care about history, have an *implicit* theory of history that they subscribe to. That is, they have some unarticulated set of ideas for how events unfold and use those ideas to predict how events in the present day will unfold. These theories will typically fall into several broad buckets, such as great man theory, Marxist dialectics, etc. It is impossible to improve upon an implicit theory of history (since by definition we cannot explain the theory itself). Thus, in order to become better historians, we must instead make our theory of history explicit and then test its predictions against the real world. The highest throughput way to do this is through "backtesting" the theory - go back and read history, and see if you can predict an event that happened beyond the last time period that you read about. There is possibility for "leakage" here if you vaguely remember bits of information from the time period that you are trying to predict. Hence, the highest fidelity way to measure the accuracy of your model of history is to make bets on political and historical events on betting markets such as Polymarket. ## Related Ideas - [[Great institutions require planning and insight from the beginning]] - [[Political systems decay because they lack a system of rejuvenation]] - [[Social technologies are the operating system for a civilization]] - [[The Chinese threat nearly caused an American-Soviet rapprochement]] - [[The Qin dynasty developed advanced social technology for centralization]] - [[Think in terms of limits to expose trends or bottlenecks in a system]] --- # References [[Great Founder Theory]]