4  Predicticable Masses

People are complicated & unpredictable, but you’d be surprised to learn this talking to your STEM colleagues.

The fantasy of the rational actor as a real individual is an unfortunate extrapolation from such tools as Rational Choice Theory in economics, but it is consistent with how STEMians do their work.

One of the most remarkable revelations in the understanding of human nature made in the last century, was that we are not autonomous —– despite our insistence that we indeed are — that our decisions are our own, that we have free will, that we are rational and act in our own best interests.

We can trace the roots of this understanding to Freud’s acknowledgement of the sub-conscious1 and its manifestation in the cognitive heuristics described by the Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (summarized in Kahneman (2011)), which gave birth to cognitive psychology and behavioral economics. The understanding of our unknown lives which may be manipulated are put into practice with marketing & advertising, but also in public policy such as “nudge theory” (Murayama et al. (2023)). One may even see links between our uncontrolable sub-conscious and determinism, an argument recently gaining traction with such publications as Free Will (Harris (2012)).

  • 1 A revealing documentary on the topic is the documentary series The Century of the Self (Adam Curtis, 2002, see producer and BBC ([2009?])) where a direct line is drawn from Freud to his nephew Edward Bernays and the subsequent rise of the public relations

    • All this is to say that we, as people, but also as STEMians, have a strong desire to be able to predict the actions of others, which is to say, we would like to influence other people’s behavior. It’s a neat input-output story. The reality, unfortunately is that we change our behavior based on the reality We behave in the limits afforded by:

    The scientific method as the process for implementing a rationalistic approach has been called the greatest human invention. The scientific method is the foundational cornerstone of STEM and approaches used in STEM.