Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming paradox

Re:Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming ... by cbozeman on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @10:53PM (#28229827)

I'm going to take the opposite position and posit that the "problem" with studying humans is that we just don't know enough yet.

We can't predict human behavior because our science is simply not advanced enough. I think once we have as strong an understanding of biology as we do something like say, physics or mathematics, we'll find it significantly easier to predict human behavior.

Or put another way, I don't think we can't predict human behavior because humans are "special", but because we're actually kind dumb on a cosmic scale.

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Re:Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming ... by derbOac on Thursday August 19, 2021 @08:35PM (#28241068)

I've started to wonder if there's some ceiling to predictability in a complexity sense. People throw this idea around in terms of emergent phenomena at all levels of analysis, but it would be interesting to see it empirically and robustly so. Will we be able to predict human behavior better? Probably but my guess is there might be some limit, or at least some sweet spot in terms of how far down you'd want to go the hierarchy of level of explanation.

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