Comment by bofadeez
5 hours ago
Human action isn’t just another physical process because it’s driven by intention, not mechanical causation. A rock falls because gravity compels it; a person acts because they want something to happen. That difference makes human behavior fundamentally qualitative. It’s rooted in meaning, interpretation, and choice. You can measure motion, but you can’t measure purpose. Once you strip away intention to fit behavior into a mathematical model, you’re no longer describing human action. You’re describing an abstraction that behaves like a machine. The numbers might be tidy, but they stop representing what people actually do.
Do you not believe that a person's wants can be shaped by the media they are exposed to?
Do you not believe that people sometimes seek out media that confirms their existing biases?
Long Term Capital Management went bankrupt because they believed they could model human behavior with their team of Nobel Prize winning economists and Fields Medal mathematicians. Most machine learning quant funds fail for a reason [1]. Behavior is highly unpredictable by modeling in practice.
[1] https://www.garp.org/hubfs/Whitepapers/a1Z1W0000054x6lUAA.pd... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRUlSm4gdQ4