what determines the behaviour of physical objects is the thing itself, but what determines the behaviour of living creatures is their perception of the thing itself. The reason this matters so much is that most models of human behaviour and most economic models are blind to this distinction. It won’t surprise you to know that I am sceptical about the promise of ‘big data’, which is frequently promoted as though it were some kind of panacea. Like many things that emerge from the technology sector, we become so drunk on the early possible benefit of a technology that we forget to calculate the
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