The Death of Behavioral Economics
Many approaches to modelling humans commit pseudo-scientific equivocations,<p>Discrete models of intelligence (ie., AI) fail to capture continuous dynamical phenomena (eg., growth, body adaption, etc.) The equivocation is, &quot;a discrete simulation of (spatio-temporally continuous) X possess the same properties as X&quot;.<p>fMRI &quot;investigations&quot; into the brain look at region blood perfusion (etc.) as a guide to &quot;activation&quot;. Equivocations here abound: &quot;activity in blood&quot; is &quot;activity in dynamical behaviour response&quot;, etc.<p>Social psychology and behavioural economics: humans have no hysteresis (ie., individuals have no personal histories) so their aggregate behaviour is context-insensitive and can be studied &quot;as a pattern&quot;. The equivocation: &quot;situational behaviour&quot; is &quot;context-free behaviour&quot;.<p>And so on.<p>It is obvious, from the outside, that these maximally-reductionist projects are doomed to fail. The target of study (humans) cannot be reduced to one small category of explanation which can then be generalised free from extremely simplifying assumptions.<p>What we have in each case is largely hyper-specialised academics, routinely with no great deal of self-awareness, taking some paradigm principle in their field and forcing all human behaviour into it.<p>What is disheartening to me is how mindnumbing an effect this has on the public. The current wave of AI hysteria has left many unable even to parse ordinary questions such as, &quot;What do you think of what I&#x27;m wearing?&quot;<p>..which according to an NLP-AI defender is an invitation to have 1trillion historical documents summaried into a response.<p>Rather than the &#x2F;obvious&#x2F; invitation to a particular human to exercise, based on their personal history of aesthetic experiences, a judgment of taste. For them to tell me their opinion.<p>The whole world of interior human life is routinely obliterated in this hysteria and we are left thinking that humans merely &quot;generate text&quot; on the occasion that otehr humans &quot;generate text&quot;.<p>This, and all of these fields, are mind-numbing reductions of human complexity into toy models which barely function on their own critera -- let alone as models of any natural phenomenon. This is all pseudoscience.