One pattern that’s become abundantly clear to me over the course of this project is that humans are absolutely awful at studying anything with humans involved. The discrepancy between non-human-related sciences and human-related sciences is jarring especially because of the ubiquity (from our perspective) of effect these sciences study.
Even weirder than that is how confident humans are about their wrongness. As a species, we dedicate a massive amount of mind share to constructs like economics and insist sound principles guide these thoughts. Concepts like “Supply and Demand” “Elasticity” are championed as “basic” while completely failing in practice. Even though we can demonstrate that nearly every curve generated based on economic principles are inconsistent with the “real world”, we still award pseudo-nobel prizes to economists for cranking out theories of function which provide no practical framework for world.
The amazing part about economic theory is that it takes this failure and actually makes it part of the delusion, most economists argue that their principles are solid, it’s just irrational humans fucking everything up. I’ve called economics “Asperger’s Astrology” in the past, used as a metaphor to characterize human behavior indirectly. I’m pretty sure both economics and astrology have comparable efficacy in not only describing current micro and macro events, but predicting future events as well.
We see this type of confident re-assertion of failure across nearly all topics involving humans. Medicine is absolutely riddled with idiopathies, psychiatry is psychiatry (although to be fair that’s a medical specialty so maybe this is double dipping), sociology still can’t describe the mechanics of sociality, etc. Being consistently wrong about core mechanics is one thing, but being so confident about it even when presented with contrary evidence is something else altogether. Why do even otherwise stable sciences like biology suddenly get wonky when we start talking about humans?
Is this human shaped hole in our perception consistent in all species or just humans?