This documentary blew my mind. It talks about how specific mathematical principles dictate the ebb and flow of society (i.e. pop culture, war, peace, elections, stock market, etc) as a whole, in addition to, all of nature, of which, society is a part of. It's simple and easy to understand despite the subject matter. The three principles are the Elliot Wave Principle, Logarithmic Spiral, and Fibonacci Sequence/Ratio (.618). It simply is nothing less than amazing how this documentary fits it all together. A great example of how mathematics isn't just numbers and formulas, but the very language of the reality that surrounds us all, every day of our lives, and far after our deaths.

Length: 60 minutes

Last edited by Comrade Stalin on Jul-08-2010 at 07:05

I only watched the music part of the video and it seems kinda tenuous to me.. People can always draw arbitrary correlations. after the fact.. This is what conspiracy theorists do.. They revisit past events, then see what parallels they can draw to other events to weave a story. But perhaps the music choices and other things in the various eras was inevitable ..just a natural part of our cultural evolution. Some of our music and pop culture leaked to the communist countries in the 80s and they were miserable in spite of looking and dressing like us. And besides, what constitutes "happy" music can vary from person to person..It's all subjective. I didn't watch the most of the documentary..but if the guy can do a similar study worldwide on other cultures..and maybe had some hard data rather than his opinion of what a "happy" mood looks like, I'd be more impressed.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt I only watched the music part of the video and it seems kinda tenuous to me.. People can always draw arbitrary correlations. after the fact.. This is what conspiracy theorists do.. They revisit past events, then see what parallels they can draw to other events to weave a story. But perhaps the music choices and other things in the various eras was inevitable ..just a natural part of our cultural evolution. Some of our music and pop culture leaked to the communist countries in the 80s and they were miserable in spite of looking and dressing like us. And besides, what constitutes "happy" music can vary from person to person..It's all subjective. I didn't watch the most of the documentary..but if the guy can do a similar study worldwide on other cultures..and maybe had some hard data rather than his opinion of what a "happy" mood looks like, I'd be more impressed.

You do have to give them credit for admitting much of it is unproven and that the field is in its infancy. The best thing for socionomics would be for researchers to test the theory and really see if there is a higher frequency of negative themed songs during periods of pessimism. I'm thinking about researching whether stock market performance and presidential election results are correlated.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt I only watched the music part of the video and it seems kinda tenuous to me.. People can always draw arbitrary correlations. after the fact.. This is what conspiracy theorists do.. They revisit past events, then see what parallels they can draw to other events to weave a story. But perhaps the music choices and other things in the various eras was inevitable ..just a natural part of our cultural evolution. Some of our music and pop culture leaked to the communist countries in the 80s and they were miserable in spite of looking and dressing like us. And besides, what constitutes "happy" music can vary from person to person..It's all subjective. I didn't watch the most of the documentary..but if the guy can do a similar study worldwide on other cultures..and maybe had some hard data rather than his opinion of what a "happy" mood looks like, I'd be more impressed.

I agree with the ease of revisiting past events to find corelations and to weave story lines into those events. What I don't completely agree with is that these efforts are either wasted or firm revelations of truth. They are useful in presenting the 'possible', trying to find the 'probable', and are extremely good for practicing the process of critical analysis. All of this can be used to look forward.

I don't agree with your description of the validity cultural analysis as tied to sociology and economics. I've actually noticed that economics is a really good indicator of what cultural products are consumed.

Vampire 'culture' is a good example. There was a high in the early 90's as goth culture was spured on by the likes of Ann Rice, 'The Crow', and a company called White Wolf which wrote about a fictional world of darkness as it created games. Right now there is a resergence which is dwarfing the 90's goth culture. Vampire TV shows abound, movies are doing quite well and I'm sure there are other strains of the same thing which I'm not aware of because of how well the TV shows are doing.

Economically this fits really well. The 90's were a period of recession but it was nothing like how bad things are today, thus it would be expected that cultural consumption of items that do well in economic hard times is higher.

I'd expect to see the same trends in music. 90's and 70's style 'heavy' music was very angry but that sentiment got washed out as the 2000's / 80s prosperity set in. The genres of 'heavy metal' in the late '70s and 'alternative' in the '90s probably wouldn't have been more than a foot note if the economy had been stable, that's assuming they would have developed at all.

I'd also suggest that 'happy' music can be identified in the same way that 'sad' or 'angry' music can be identified, maybe even quantified. A friend of mine pointed out that certain chords are basically happy (or maybe that was chord progressions?) where as others were sad. For example, who wouldn't be able to identify the sadness in Johny Cash's 'Hurt', or the anger in Rage Against the Machine or Metalica (early metalica, drunk metalica, broke metalica).

Although this is only a budding thought, I find that music is basically all emotion, that it is a way of communicating emotions directly without words. Sure it's imperfect but I'm pretty certain that those who are 'literate' in the language of music can understand the emotions of a live performance exceptionally well.

Why people consume a type of music at any time is where I do see debates arrising. Did those in comunist Russia consume Western culture because they were 'happy' or because they wanted to be 'happy'? Or maybe it was because they were angry about thier system and consumption of foreign culture was a type of rebelion (against state, system, or simply parents)?

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Originally posted by Comrade Stalin This documentary blew my mind. It talks about how specific mathematical principles dictate the ebb and flow of society (i.e. pop culture, war, peace, elections, stock market, etc) as a whole, in addition to, all of nature, of which, society is a part of. It's simple and easy to understand despite the subject matter. The three principles are the Elliot Wave Principle, Logarithmic Spiral, and Fibonacci Sequence/Ratio (.618). It simply is nothing less than amazing how this documentary fits it all together. A great example of how mathematics isn't just numbers and formulas, but the very language of the reality that surrounds us all, every day of our lives, and far after our deaths.

Math, like music, is a language for sure. They are both good at describing different things. Math can describe patterns and simple events, music is better at describing complex events like emotions or break ups, or family deaths, or violent urges without direction or clear cause.

Funny thing is that math can be used to describe music fairly well but to get the exact musical performance would involve huge calculations, especially a stage show where images are a part of the performance.

Calling math the language of reality is getting way out of line though. Math has significant failings which need to be understood. When math is used to describe anything it is always a simplification which is being described. For example, the green on a computer screen is pretty clearly a wave length being emitted. This can be quantified but only in theory. As complexity is added varriations in the wavelength being ommited will occur and particulate interferance will shift and change the whole process. That isn't even getting into the errors of measurement or perception.

At best, math provides an excelent way of expressing quantifiable relationships in aproximate terms based on the past. Much like theorizing about history, these aproximations are not useless but they should never be seen as perfect.

Bah, I got through 40 mins of this and couldn't finish it.

There is a lot of 'wrong' with this video and the people in it. The detractors were actually quite well spoken though.

I wouldn't throw it out though, there are some quite valid observations, like that wars are late in bear markets and come not in the first but second decline. .... yeah, fun stuff. Don't forget that one of those wars that they used to demonstrate this was the Civil war.

What seems to be a consistent trend in the film and the arguments of those who were trying to bolster support for thier work was that they were basically completely arbitrary. The statement about wars was actually a good one to illustrate this. They only looked at US wars but there are two sides to any war. Not to mention they didn't do any demonstration of how many of the thousands of wars that there have been in the past were explainable by bear markets.

what of Vietnam, Korea, the Spanish Civil war, world war one, the boar war, the Russian revolution, the Iraqi war, the on going columbian civil war, the 6 day war, etc. etc. etc.

Just because one or two events apears to follow a patern doesn't mean all events will do so.

I think that looking at the hard data behind this wave methodology will find that it has math which sits there and is just applied in an arbitrary way so that it fits. I'd be willing to bet that the exact same 'theory' could be applied if the number of peaks / troughs was 3, 7, 19, 34 etc. It's all just a cover for arbitrary decisions... rationalizing if you will.

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Originally posted by atbell I think that looking at the hard data behind this wave methodology will find that it has math which sits there and is just applied in an arbitrary way so that it fits. I'd be willing to bet that the exact same 'theory' could be applied if the number of peaks / troughs was 3, 7, 19, 34 etc. It's all just a cover for arbitrary decisions... rationalizing if you will.

That was my impression.. I agree the topic is interesting..but the question is, what's the point? Some things are interesting to lay back and think about, but even if a direct connection could be drawn after the fact, is there any point in doing so other than for amusement? Does socionomics have any PREDICTIVE power? Is there any way to falsify this "theory"? If not, it becomes pseudoscience/pseudoeconomics.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt If not, it becomes pseudoscience/pseudoeconomics.

like the austrian school.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN like the austrian school.

No.

Yes!

I would think the physical properties of waves and cycles would apply to all things we study. The saying, "history repeats itself" rings a bell. Light waves, sound waves, energy waves...the universe is full of waves, and I personally find usefulness in predicting future events with waves and cycles.