I will elaborate on this later, but the social sciences have so so so many variables to consider. Our whole idea of social science is based on human social interaction and good luck understanding even the person next to you , or your partner let alone the other 7-8 billion people. Social science is hard. It’s not as black and white as some other sciences are seemingly. It’s a how could you possibly understand scenario...
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.
I will elaborate on this later, but the social sciences have so so so many variables to consider. Our whole idea of social science is based on human social interaction and good luck understanding even the person next to you , or your partner let alone the other 7-8 billion people. Social science is hard. It’s not as black and white as some other sciences are seemingly. It’s a how could you possibly understand scenario...
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.