Mathematics of War

[Gringo Malandro]

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!

[Larry Dunbar]

"But it can't replace common sense. It was, after all, often physicists who built mathmatical models for pricing financial products. Oops!"

True, common sense would have told us not to put that much power in the hands of greedy and unregulated bodies, but how was the physicist supposed to know? It doesn't seem related.

Sean pretty-much just laid it out without any conclusions, as did the physicists who put the mathmatical models for pricing financial products together. It was then on a need-to-know protocol. The financial sector picked the wrong guys.