SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Thursday July 02 2015, @12:23AM
I think Isaac Asimov had the right idea with the "social equations" of psychohistory. The way I understand the concept from reading the Foundation novels was that it is supposed to be a statistical technique. Just as statistical mechanics cannot predict the behaviour of an individual atom or molecule but is rather able to determine the properties of a very large ensemble of such particles, psychohistory as envisioned by Asimov isn't supposed to be able to predict the behaviour of individuals (which is what Zuckerberg seems to be looking for), but the overall behaviour of large masses of people: nations, empires, and such. Hari Seldon used it for instance to predict the decline and eventual collapse of the galactic empire, and to develop a plan to minimise the coming era of disorder from 30,000 years to only 1000.
If there is to be any hope of actually modelling human behaviour mathematically it will probably have to be in a similar statistical fashion. It's already very difficult to make predictions even about individual gas molecules in a container, which are much simpler objects and have far simpler interactions with one another than people in a society.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.