As a computer scientist working on problems of human behavior, I am often asked why I chose this particular domain. The questions come from various perspectives - whether such problems are better suited for psychologists and marketers, why these problems are interesting at all, whether human behavior contains too much randomness to be mathematically tractable, whether the problems are ill-posed, and whether they are even objectively solvable. For the ones interested in the art of diction, I try to lay out my motivations in the quotes given at the bottom. For others, I try to explain through a simple narrative given below and answer the questions more scientifically in my papers.
Behavior is unsolved.
To illustrate this point, let me tell you a little story. Kelin is an eager advertiser who releases a campaign on Facebook one Friday evening, paying $1000 to run an ad across California. With each launch, she silently sends a prayer that the ad resonates with her customers, draws clicks, leads to purchases of her product, ensures her campaign's success, and lands her the long-awaited promotion. Come Monday morning, Kelin witnesses human behavior in all its varied glory (within the platform's constraints, obviously): she has received 28 comments on her post, 867 likes, 9045 views, 349 clicks, and 28 purchases. Satisfied but seeking improvement, she tweaks a few words she feels might better appeal to Californians and relaunches. This time, her metrics jumped by 10.8%. Puzzled by the reasons but pleased with the outcome, she presses on.
From my perspective, Kelin and countless others like her replicate daily what the pioneering botanist Gregor Mendel did in the 1800s. The difference is that the subjects for Mendel were peas and for Kelin, it is humans. Mendel was trying to solve the puzzle of why some pea plants are tall and some small, some green while some yellow, and some pea seeds round while some wrinkled. The modern-day Kelins are trying to solve what makes people click, comment, like, and purchase, why certain words perform better in California while others in Texas, how behavior can be modified, and so on. Mendel's laboratory was his 2-acre Moravian monastery farm. Kelin's laboratory is the digital landscape of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Google, and her website.
Before Mendel, the general understanding of heredity was philosophical (and not scientific) and consisted of theories like: Spontaneous Generation (organisms could arise spontaneously from non-living matter), Lamarckism (traits acquired by an organism during its lifetime could be passed on to its offspring), Blending Inheritance (traits of offspring were a blend of the traits of their parents), and Preformationism (miniature versions of organisms existed within the reproductive cells of parents). Today, 150 years later, we know to a very high degree of certainty, how traits in organisms arise and their mechanism of inheritance, to the point that we can calculate the probability of a certain type of rare cancer in the offspring of two given parents. However, Kelin's problem of who will click on her ad and how to maximize that remains unsolved and is often considered not worthy enough to be solved by science. Before the heroics of Mendel and Darwin, even the science of heredity was considered a domain of philosophy and not worth the seriousness of science.
Rocket science is considered the hardest of sciences. It is solved. It is solved to the extent that interplanetary launches over millions of kilometers can be planned to an accuracy of a few meters. Yet human conduct stays inscrutable, quirky, maddingly difficult to forecast and optimize for. It is unsolved to the extent that even opinion polls conducted right before the day of the election give opposite results to what is the actual outcome the next day.
In my opinion, if behavior is not the problem to be worth solving, then what is!
The quotes below present the above argument in an aphoristic manner:
"We're actually much better at planning the flight path of an interplanetary rocket (rocket science) than we are at managing the economy, merging two corporations, or even predicting how many copies of a book will sell (behavior prediction). So why is it that rocket science seems hard, whereas problems having to do with people - which arguably are much harder - seem like they ought to be just a matter of common sense (easily predictable)?"
- Duncan J. Watts
Also,
"If the brain were so simple we could understand (predict) it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
- Emerson Pugh
But,
"Nothing in Nature is random (unpredictable). A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge (ignorance)."
- Baruch Spinoza
While,
Ignorance is bliss.
- Thomas Gray
but,
"Timendi causa est nescire." (Ignorance is (also) the cause of fear.)
- Seneca
And,
"What would life be if we had (only fear and) no courage to attempt anything?"
- Vincent Van Gogh