Agreed that humans are complicated, but I still think there are a lot of reasons to suggest that we can get pretty far with relatively obtainable measures. We have the history of ~100 Billion people at this point to guide us. There are clear case studies of large groups being influenced in intentional predictable ways. Religious groups and wartime information efforts clearly worked. Marketing campaigns clearly seem to influence large numbers of people in relatively predictable ways. And much of that has been with what seems like relatively little scientific understanding at the scale that could be done with modern internet data.
We don’t need perfect models of individuals to be able to make big, deliberate changes.
Agreed that humans are complicated, but I still think there are a lot of reasons to suggest that we can get pretty far with relatively obtainable measures. We have the history of ~100 Billion people at this point to guide us. There are clear case studies of large groups being influenced in intentional predictable ways. Religious groups and wartime information efforts clearly worked. Marketing campaigns clearly seem to influence large numbers of people in relatively predictable ways. And much of that has been with what seems like relatively little scientific understanding at the scale that could be done with modern internet data.
We don’t need perfect models of individuals to be able to make big, deliberate changes.