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Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg figures there could be a formula that explains how people think. During a wide-ranging online question-and-answer session on his Facebook page Tuesday, Zuckerberg told famed physicist Stephen Hawking he would like to find that equation.
"I'm most interested in questions about people," Zuckerberg said in a written chat forum response to Hawking asking what big questions in science he would like to know the answers to. Zuckerberg responded with a list that included how the brain works and immortality.
"I'm also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about," Zuckerberg added. "I bet there is."
http://phys.org/news/2015-07-facebook-zuckerberg-figure-social-equation.html
Will Zuckerberg be a real life Hari Seldon ? Does SN think there can be a social equation ? If yes, can that equation be formulated in a way that can cater to all (or majority) of social relationships ?
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Wednesday July 01 2015, @11:08PM
There's probably not one equation, there's probably more than 7 billion of them; one for each living person. We all process stimuli and inputs differently. These concepts are abstractions in our mind but can be structured into formalized systems of symbols (sounds, shapes) so that other minds with a sufficiently congruent mapping of symbols can turn them back into abstract primitive concepts and perform mental work within their own internal "low level" language. There's also so much random noise fed in at every level that I suspect he's found one of those "not even wrong" ideas.
If there was one equation or model that described the rich complexity possible in this system, we wouldn't have culture. We'd be no more complicated than flatworms or algae. I'm confident that a big data operation with the breadth and depth of Facebook can perform some pretty impressive feats of quantitative sociology (not to mention provide ample opportunity for unethical human experiments), but psychohistory it ain't.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by GoonDu on Thursday July 02 2015, @01:48AM
>We all process stimuli and inputs differently.
I agree to that to a certain extent, we all use the same wetware after all, just configured differently so there is a lot of similarities between us. Therefore, we can probably come out with a model that can predict to a certain degree on how we behave (granted, it will have a shit load of variables). Population wise, we can probably come out with a model on how population under certain culture work, considering the fact that humans can generalise a certain culture and understand what is socially acceptable in it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday July 02 2015, @03:08AM
A person can be unpredictable. People are predictable.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by TK on Thursday July 02 2015, @06:01PM
The formula is the same, but the constant vary from person to person.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum