A piece of toast lands flat on its buttered side in the dirt, every time it flees from the clutches of your hungry hands. A mystical woman, drowning in shawls and muttering about the appearance of a tall dark stranger, as she peers into your teacup. A classroom of blackboards overflows with equations in search of answering the tragedy of why your poor toast always lands on its face.
While the most traditional techniques of prediction performed can assume your future through a series of intuitive guesses, the mathematical techniques use history as their substrate. By siloing prediction methods in this way, each time, only one facet of the future is seen: one grounded in cold data, the other a whimsical guess. Behavioral prediction aims to marry the two.
Merge numbers and intuition for behavioral prediction
In isolation, neither of these methods are a match for the unpredictability of human nature. Future events do not emerge from numbers, but rather as a result of human behavior. If there was a way to combine the nuanced intuition of human fortune-tellers with the precision of data, our predictions could more accurately portray the truth.
In a contemporary setting, the world has seen an amalgamation of the styles of fortune tellers and mathematicians. By aligning intuitive observation with empirical methods, the precision of maths can be coupled with the fluidity of social science to perform behavioral prediction. A metaphorical structured robot dressed in flesh.
Remain fluid yet robust
Yuval Harari, in his book Homo Deus (276) very elegantly lays out the formula to historic measures of knowledge. By combining, on one hand, Experience and Sensitivity, and on the other Empirical Data and Mathematics; you get the creation of knowledge.
We suggest that by combining all four elements, and using the knowledge derived from them, one can begin to formulate the tools for accurate prediction.
Maths has served as a great predictor for elements of life that can be tracked, stacked and repeated, but remain shallow without an understanding of human spontaneity and their susceptibility to being swayed by the world around them.
