Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
human interaction will always show patterns -- and different modelers will draw different patterns from the same data. You cannot put people in boxes IMO; you have to deal with the person or group as they are and as they constantly shift and change.

Well, you can put 'em in boxes and rely on trends, I suppose. Seen a lot of folks do some fascinating variations on that. None successfully, as I recall...

All things considered, though, I don't guess a Physicist playing around with the People thing is any worse than Economists trying to do that...
I think the military might actually benefit from applying some principles of economics. And data analysis can make sense out of seamingly unrelated events. But it can't replace common sense. It was, after all, often physicists who built mathmatical models for pricing financial products. Oops!