Wouldn’t it be great if we could feed enough information about the world into a huge computer to predict what will happen 10, 50, or even 1000s of years from now?
This is what Hari Seldon, in Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation does. Of course, as Asimov realised, we’d have to keep the predictions secret so people don’t interfere with the way things are supposed to turn out. Regardless of where you sit on the ‘It would be wonderful/awful’ spectrum, the very idea of predicting future states of the world continues to fascinate and perplex philosophers and social scientists. Why is it so difficult to make predictions about society? I suggest that the problem is not the complexity of the task, but the concepts we use to think about the world.
The first obstacle is the one that Asimov tried to head off; that people reflect on the predictions made about them and alter their behaviour accordingly. For example, if we’re told that looking someone in the eye is a marker of trustworthiness, conmen everywhere will practice maintaining eye contact. Studies have also shown that studying economics changes how students behave in social science laboratories — they behave as the models they learn about suggest they should. This is not a problem natural scientists usually face. But, as Asimov suggested, in principle it is possible to keep predictions secret.
Other philosophers have suggested that this self-reflection is really just a type of complexity, and that complexity can be dealt with. For example, physicists would be hard pressed to predict the path a particular leaf on a particular tree will take when it falls to the ground. Physics usually works at a more general level. In the same way, so the argument goes, perhaps we are thinking about predictions in the wrong way; we might be able to make predictions about a large number of human beings (Asimov suggests c. 75 billion people), and we might make those predictions about neurological or other features which humans can’t interfere with.
Our ability to process large amounts of data has allowed us to discover some surprising regularities in human behaviour. For example, a formula has been discovered that predicts the number of pages an internet user visits within a website. Interestingly, this formula was developed in the 1990s and has remained constant (at least until 2006) despite the developments in the internet since then 1. The data from peoples’ mobile phones suggests that their location is highly predictable. Nevertheless, we often want to predict what people will do in a wider sense than this- will they rebel, or will an Empire fall?
The second reason why it is difficult to find laws in the social sciences is …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
