Prediction

Today was one of those days when absolutely nothing happened the way I expected. Nothing negative, just entirely different from what I had planned when I got up this morning. I was a little discomfited by it for a while, but soon realized that, no, this day was good.

My reflection tonight is that the various “behavioral” sciences that I studied along the way usually posited that prediction was essential to those “sciences” being considered “science.” The idea was that a scientist associates variables with each other, so that prediction of a dependent variable from a knowledge of an independent variable would be possible. The scheme gets very sophisticated but that was considered the basic scheme and if that was not possible then you weren't doing science.

But I think that what is characteristic of people is that you really can't predict what they will do, not just because there is so much uncertainty and non-determination, such as in my day today, but because we think.

So tonight, just by chance, I'm looking through my notebooks and I come across this little gem from Jung in Memories, Dreams and Reflections:

There is no guarantee – not for a single moment – that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer – at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.

A brilliant sociologist, Herbert Blumer, gave his presidential address to the American Sociological Association on “Sociological Analysis and the Variable,” in which he very clearly indicated how it is that we can't predict what people will do when they think. He told me years later, however, that no one in the field of sociology subsequently ever even mentioned his address.

I recently saw a panel of economists being questioned on why almost none of them foresaw the recent economic disaster. There were lots of defensive smiles and accusations and such, but none of them seemed to doubt that their “science” was about prediction.

And this, finally, raises a question that I have been working over for many years: Why is it that academics, of all people, would hold that people are predictable?

Oh, Yes, Wild Ronald Laing in The Divided Self: " So the person who says he is a machine is mad, while many of those who say men are machines are considered great scientists!"

        
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