Is there any possibility that mathematical modeling and algebraic calculations can encompass the complexity of psychology?
If you want an accurate model of how people think, it’s almost certainly the case that simple math isn’t going to be able to do it. But if the goal is to get an approximate model that’s useful in applying in a few situations that’s a different story. Let’s say you’re hiring job candidates and you want to get information from their résumés and interviews and you want to understand how people translate that into a decision. If you want to understand that decision in thorough detail for one person any mathematical model is going to miss a lot. But suppose I want to understand that for employment movements in the economy as a whole and whether certain racial groups find it difficult to be employed. Then we might be able to get much more mileage out of a simple model. Have we missed 50% of what’s going on? Yes, but we captured 50%. The difficult thing about social science is that you know you’re never going to be right, you’re always going to be just approximately correct. Are we ever going
