I don’t normally blog about blogs, and for some reason I am missing the blog roll widget, but if I had one Freakonomics would definitely be on there. At the moment there is a very interesting post by Stephen J. Dubner regarding an economic approach to human behavior by Gary Becker. (So I am blogging about a blog about something someone else wrote…and on it goes.)
Essential the post is about whether all deaths are suicides. The premise is that we devote resources to achieve aims and that some aims supercede others. So my need to satisfy my sweet-tooth will override my need to avoid getting diabetes. While the post is interesting, the real fun begins in the comments. There were 50 last I checked.
Users begin discussing the differences in methods of inquiry based on approach. So for example a scientist may take a “physics” approach or a “biological” approach. A Marxist will take an economic approach (with a certain bias), while a capitalist might have the same approach but with a different bias.
I was thinking of things in terms of an algorythm. (I think my programmer background might be showing just a little!) Human behavior could be broken down to some complex problem in which certain goals or aims outweighed each other but only when certain variables were populated or values were set.
I guess that is what computer behavioral models do. I once saw this mob behavior model that predicted human behavior in a mall if there was fire and it was absolutely fascinating since it predicted some people would run into the fire and sure enough, people do.