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posted by janrinok on Sunday December 17 2017, @07:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the that-sums-it-up dept.

The answer should be NO, but, do you think this would work ?

Good scientists are not only able to uncover patterns in the things they study, but to use this information to predict the future. Meteorologists study atmospheric pressure and wind speed to predict the trajectories of future storms. A biologist may predict the growth of a tumor based on its current size and development. A financial analyst may try to predict the ups and downs of a stock based on things like market capitalization or cash flow.

Perhaps even more interesting than the above phenomena is that of predicting the behavior of human beings. Attempts to predict how people will behave have existed since the origins of humankind. Early humans had to trust their instincts. Today, marketers, politicians, trial lawyers and more make their living on predicting human behavior. Predicting human behavior, in all of its forms, is big business. So, how does mathematics do in predicting our own behavior in general? Despite advances in stock market analytics, economics, political polling and cognitive neuroscience – all of which ultimately endeavor to predict human behavior – science may never be able to do so with perfect certainty.

[...] As technology develops, scientists may find that we can predict human behavior rather well in one area, while still lacking in another. It's very difficult to give an overall sense of the limitations. For instance, facial recognition may be easier to emulate because vision is one of many human sensory processing systems, or because there are only so many ways faces can differ. On the other hand, predicting voting behavior, especially based on the 2016 presidential election, is quite another story. There are many complex and not yet understood reasons why humans do what they do.

Still others argue that, theoretically at least, that perfect prediction will someday be possible. Until then, with any luck, mathematics and statistics may help us increasingly account for what people, on average, will do next.

https://theconversation.com/can-math-predict-what-youll-do-next-78892


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Sunday December 17 2017, @10:56AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 17 2017, @10:56AM (#610948) Journal

    It depends on what you mean by "predict." If you mean "able to say exactly what will happen," the answer is a definitive NO, and that's because of physics and math. We know from things like quantum behavior and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that we can only predict probabilities for microscopic phenomena, not certainties -- and even if we could make exact predictions, it would require perfect knowledge of the physical world, which we can never have beyond a certain level of absolute precision.

    And since there are places where quantum effects and uncertainty have been observed to influence macroscopic behavior of a system, we can never make absolute predictions. That's what math and physics actually tell us beyond any doubt.

    It's not that hard to build an example in today's world too. One can build a detector where a particle, such as an electron or photon can go through one of two slots with equal probability. Just use the output of such an experiment to make real world decisions (like you were flipping a coin) and you just created a quantum system which is influencing your behavior in a macroscopic system.

    And don't forget Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Any sufficiently complex mathematical system (reality qualifies BTW) can be shown to have statements which can't be proven from inside the system. Just make your behavior part of that unprovable statement and you're golden.

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