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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) by shortscreen on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:47AM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:47AM (#610961) Journal

    Don't worry about it. Wasting time is what this is all about. So the question is, is physics deterministic? Some people say that quantum mechanics implies that it isn't. I'm not sure I believe them. I mean, what sense does it make to have this nice, orderly Newtonian universe, only with some random garbage down at the 100th decimal place mucking everything up? You say you can't measure a subatomic particle's position and velocity at the same time? You're probably just doing a shitty job, or the Russian hackers messed with your experiment.

    If physics is deterministic, there may be practical barriers to collecting and analyzing all the necessary data to model a specific human. 100,000,000,000 neurons, maybe a few petabytes of state data per neuron, I don't know. We'll have to wait for the GeForce GTXXX 9980 to come out. Or if we still had net neutrality we could start a crypto currency called FreeWillCoin and get kids to run up their parents electricity bill by mining this data for .000001 Doge per century.

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