#behavior

Now more than ever we can witness first-hand how global and linked information has become. With the ongoing spread of the Corona Virus we are witnessing this phenomenon where the sum of people, objects, places, has become the essence of modern times. From here we can see information moving and influencing in real-time those who are connected on the web without geo-limitations.

This virus has infected thousands of people from China to Europe while slowly creeping  into North America. The pattern indicates the travel flow of people and goods being shipped from Asia, with China in the middle of a vast web of commercial routes across the globe. Now this COVID-19 disease has followed this very same pattern as airline destinations have become further apart, meaning passengers can directly arrive to places where before a stopover was needed.

From China to Europe through Iran, the Silk Road is still relevant today more than ever.

This translates into a faster spread of any disease as we grew more dependent from Asian markets to sustain western economies. COVID-19 is now affecting people’s lives and marketplaces on a global scale; something SARS failed to do back in 2003 because China wasn’t as influential as it today, but also because air routes were fewer and more limited than they are now. One important datum is the spread in Iran and neighboring countries, where from east to west the virus followed the ancient Silk Road to Europe.

Each day during these events dictated by the Corona Virus the movement of information and its influence can be directly seen. Beyond the traditional information medium there’s a whole realm of social platforms, where true and false data quickly spread to millions of users. We will see the law affecting our lives furthermore, governments will apply a soft and direct censorship in the near future to prevent the spread of false news; however, this will also impact the rest and content creators will have to deal with it on their own terms.

The relationship creates important data useful to understand behavior.

In terms of hyperconnectivity we can reference the virus map and see the network of data on a global scale. People are connected to objects and object to places. A person is sharing content through a smartphone that at the same time is providing geo-data to determine location. The sum of these three elements creates behaviors to explore and to exploit. Explore because we can refine information and use it to understand how people move, this can grant to act with better tools should the next endemic disease happen. Exploit because fear can be worked to push masses towards one direction instead of another, so we can predict shady uses of people’s reactions to affect events like government elections, markets, and the public opinion.

Augmented reality can display data in 3d providing more accurate predictions and visualization methods.

Through Internet Of Things (IOT) we have a large network of people, objects, places, and it is the next frontier of human and technological studies. Phones connected to tablets, sensors connected to computers, thermostats connected to smartphones, traffic lights connected to cars, and so on. Artificial  intelligece can now extrapolate behevioral models to predict the future with more accuracy; therefore data can now indicate 3d models providing unprecedented levels of details. Imagine this technology becoming an essential tool to understand diseases’ patterns of their spreading, it would help contain and minimize fatalities reducing damages to this economy that today knows no boundaries.

Yes, there’s a big scare of the upcoming years where automation will be the protagonist of the next industrial revolution. AI and labor simplification are going to shift the way we value production through the markets and how we understand modern capitalism.

The next years will be characterized by the 5G network advancing which will pull a whole new line of smart devices onto production, and therefore onto sale with their relative marketing and digital content sale through the web, press, and television. This alone will spark new interest in the next major change society will face towards the technological front.

5G network will unfold the potential of remote business opportunities.

But what’s next? After smartphones and similar we will see more automation in terms of car manufacturing, which doesn’t directly mean self-driving cars invading the streets, but more electronic components being manufactured and installed into our cars driving us to work. Phone features will be heavily integrated into car systems. 

We shouldn’t be surprised if our next car will be ready for McDonald’s drive-through payments just like our transponder when paying to ride certain highways. The vehicle of tomorrow is based on our current behavior we develop thanks to the smartphone in our hands.

AI will manage our behavior when they will govern payments through cars. 

Augmented reality is already playing it’s part with enriched User Interfaces which provide a better User Experience. Cars interiors are becoming futuristic for the need to implement new-found technology and to put it to good use, but also to market it so automakers can develop new standards.

Brands will invest into the car industry to propose custom solutions to make vehicles original. Your next car interior will feature patterns nobody else will have, thus making the brand experience more unique and long-lasting. Here 3D printing of different kinds will help making this into a reality to the point even local artisan shops will have their impact.

Individualism will be the key element in the next market change towards Industry 4.0

But what does it mean? It means we will have very soon a different approach on our product creation. We are going to upset the very fabric of how we understand social behavior in the first place; thus we will have to deal with a shift in the way individuals in the workplace interact between.

Industry 4.0 is going to reshape market habits all the way to our simple daily interaction, creating new behavior with the prospect of a new set of rules for society to absorb. The next decade will be about the user and a tailored marketing experience to fit his/her needs.

The famous porn video-hosting website Pornhub has once again made headlines for its peculiar content, but not what you think. This time it has nothing to do with XXX titles or soft-core, but the website is hosting some of the forbidden topic YouTube has taken action against; this time is about guns since the incremental weapon assault against civilians happening in the US from Las Vegas to Florida.

Here’s the link to one of the gun video from the channel In Range TV Show(WARNING: NSFW link video!!!). If you cannot watch the video I’ll explain it briefly to you. Two guys in camouflage uniform are at a shooting range discussing about pistols, in this case the famous Glock manufacturer, with all the pros and cons of the weapon. Each of the guys pitches in what’s their opinion their view and the video continues with them in action at the range (not THAT action).

It’s interesting how change has affected the online platforms after real life events unfolded in tragic occasions, defining discussion policies that are influencing what video channels can host and what content creators can discuss. In light of this shift of wind, several Youtubers have been posting for the past months essays and v-logs arguing that free speech is important, that forbidding certain topics like guns, Islam, terrorism, shootings, violence attacks, is censorship and there ought to be a transparent conversation in order to address these problems to resolve them.

Sex, guns, violence, are being marginalized once again into a specific platform just like it happened 60 years ago with pulp magazines.

What is interesting here is how a platform like Pornhub has begun changing its behavior. Forbidden topics unable to be hosted on YouTube and other hosting sites had to converge onto pornography hosting portals to survive. The taboo effect has created a new behavior that might reshape the way we see adult-themed websites; they will diversify their capability and portfolio offering content creator the chance to upload what other platforms forbid.

This is a whole new economy for places like Pornhub that can offer a new type of service and monetize it, without the effort of advertising or actively stealing the user-base from YouTube. The need for content creators to expand their video channel has been met by an unlikely platform originally born to host hardcore material. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if YouTube looses the opportunity to fix their topic policies, or to open a whole new branch dedicated to content that cannot exist on their original brand anymore. What In Range TV Show has done was to adapt to their need to supply their viewers with uncensored material -something that has been disrupted- and they did so the smartest way that has already prompted others to do the same. This is the first and clear signal YouTube has to think about in terms of user behavior if they don’t want to loose millions of followers, views, and monetization.

…The approach of behaviorism is in some respects different from that of panphysicalism, but it resembles the latter in its hopeless attempt to deal with human action without reference to consciousness and aiming at ends. It bases its reasoning on the slogan “adjustment.” Like any other being, man adjusts himself to the conditions of his environment. But behaviorism fails to explain why different people adjust themselves to the same conditions in different ways. Why do some people flee violent aggression while others resist it? Why did the peoples of Western Europe adjust themselves to the scarcity of all things on which human well-being depends in a way entirely different from that of the Orientals?

Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms.Behaviorism wants to observe human behavior from without and to deal with it merely as reaction to a definite situation. It punctiliously avoids any reference to meaning and purpose. However, a situation cannot be described without analyzing the meaning which the man concerned finds in it. If one avoids dealing with this meaning, one neglects the essential factor that decisively determines the mode of reaction. This reaction is not automatic but depends entirely upon the interpretation and value judgments of the individual, who aims to bring about, if feasible, a situation which he prefers to the state of affairs that would prevail if he were not to interfere. Consider a behaviorist describing the situation which an offer to sell brings about without reference to the meaning each party attaches to it!

In fact, behaviorism would outlaw the study of human action and substitute physiology for it. The behaviorists never succeeded in making clear the difference between physiology and behaviorism. Watson declared that physiology is “particularly interested in the functioning of parts of the animal… Behaviorism, on the other hand, while it is intensely interested in all of the functioning of these parts, is intrinsically interested in what the whole animal will do.”2 However, such physiological phenomena as the resistance of the body to infection or the growth and aging of an individual can certainly not be called behavior of parts. On the other hand, if one wants to call such a gesture as the movement of an arm (either to strike or to caress) behavior of the whole human animal, the idea can only be that such a gesture cannot be imputed to any separate part of the being.

But what else can this something to which it must be imputed be if not the meaning and the intention of the actor or that unnamed thing from which meaning and intention originate? Behaviorism asserts that it wants to predict human behavior. But it is impossible to predict the reaction of a man accosted by another with the words “you rat” without referring to the meaning that the man spoken to attaches to the epithet.

Both varieties of positivism decline to recognize the fact that men aim purposefully at definite ends. As they see it, all events must be interpreted in the relationship of stimulus and response, and there is no room left for a search for final causes. Against this rigid dogmatism it is necessary to stress the point that the rejection of finalism in dealing with events outside the sphere of human action is enjoined upon science only by the insufficiency of human reason. The natural sciences must refrain from dealing with final causes because they are unable to discover any final causes, not because they can prove that no final causes are operative. The cognizance of the interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the regularity in their concatenation and sequence, and the fact that causality research works and has enlarged human knowledge, do not peremptorily preclude the assumption that final causes are operative in the universe.

The reason for the natural sciences’ neglect of final causes and their exclusive preoccupation with causality research is that this method works. The contrivances designed according to the scientific theories run the way the theories predicted and thus provide a pragmatic verification for their correctness. On the other hand the magic devices did not come up to expectations and do not bear witness to the magic world view.

It is obvious that it is also impossible to demonstrate satisfactorily by ratiocination that the alter ego is a being that aims purposively at ends. But the same pragmatic proof that can be advanced in favor of the exclusive use of causal research in the field of nature can be advanced in favor of the exclusive use of teleological methods in the field of human action. It works, while the idea of dealing with men as if they were stones or mice does not work. It works not only in the search for knowledge and theories but no less in daily practice.

The positivist arrives at his point of view surreptitiously. He denies to his fellow men the faculty of choosing ends and the means to attain these ends, but at the same time he claims for himself the ability to choose consciously between various methods of scientific procedure. He shifts his ground as soon as it comes to problems of engineering, whether technological or “social.” He designs plans and policies which cannot be interpreted as merely being automatic reactions to stimuli. He wants to deprive all his fellows of the right to act in order to reserve this privilege for himself alone. He is a virtual dictator.

As the behaviorist tells us, man can be thought of as “an assembled organic machine ready to run.”3 He disregards the fact that while machines run the way the engineer and the operator make them run, men run spontaneously here and there. “At birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords.”4 Starting from this manifest falsehood, the behaviorist proposes to operate the “human Ford” the way the operator drives his car. He acts as if he owned humanity and were called upon to control and to shape it according to his own designs. For he himself is above the law, the godsent ruler of mankind.5

As long as positivism does not explain philosophies and theories, and the plans and policies derived from them, in terms of its stimulus-response scheme, it defeats itself.

          — Ludwig von Mises, Theory & History, Chapter 11

…However, it would be more precise to say that Mises and Rothbard consider indifference to be irrelevant for the explanation of human action. The fact is that an acting person always does something. This is the starting point for any science of human action. Our knowledge of the existence of choice alternatives and of purposes enables us to explain this fact. Thus when we see that Paul eats ice cream we explain this observation by relating it to possible alternative actions that Paul could have performed. We say that he preferred eating ice cream to any other choice he had had. Clearly, this explanation would be impossible if we assumed that Paul were indifferent between eating ice cream and other possible activities. We would still be faced with the undeniable fact that he does eat ice cream, but we could not explain it. Paul’s psychological indifference is thus particularly unsuited as an account of what he does. And so is indifference in general utterly unsuited as an explanation of what people do.[…]

[T]he starting point of the Austrian analysis is not a freely floating choice theory, which is then somehow applied to the real world, but real human action. Choice theory refers to the relations which link realized and non-realized parts of human action, and when applying choice theory we can thus explain any given activity by relating it to other elements of the same action. We can relate an activity to foregone alternatives (“Paul prefers eating ice cream to all other alternatives”) or to purposes (“Paul eats ice cream in order to grow fat and ugly”). In both cases we explain a real-world phenomenon in terms of the relationships in which it stands. 

It is against this background that we have to understand Mises’s critique of the behaviorist perspective on phenomena like “rush hour at the Grand Central Station.” 

There are no laws relating the behavior of people rushing back and forth to previous or later behavior. However, we can explain their behavior by relating it to the underlying purposes, like getting from home to the train, and from there to work, etc. 

Having this in mind, it is easy to give an economic account of the psychic phenomenon of indifference between two events. For example, Paul might be indifferent between buying the red or the green sweater. An economic analysis of Paul’s action could stress that he prefers to be indifferent rather than choose either the red or the green sweater (which implies of course that he does choose a third option—standing around and gazing at the various sweaters). It could also stress that Paul does not choose to buy either a red or a green sweater for a certain reason, for example, because he wants to keep his money or because he wants to deliver a (futile) proof of the importance of indifference in human action. In short, indifference as we know it by introspection is a fact to be explained. It is not and, as we have argued, cannot possibly itself be an explanation of human action.

It is also easy to deal with Caplan’s counterexample of a preference that is not revealed in action. Says Caplan (1999, p. 826):

my preference for ice cream at the current instant cannot be revealed, since by the time I managed to find an ice cream vendor the current instant would have passed. Buying ice cream ten minutes from now only reveals a preference for ice cream then. And yet, I have introspective knowledge that I want some ice cream right now.

This description of a “non-revealed preference” is interesting only as an account of Caplan’s mental state of affairs (that is, of a fact to be explained). But it is irrelevant for the explanation of what Caplan does. It does not tell us why he sits in his office and thinks of a “preference” for ice cream that does not materialize in action. Economic science can explain his behavior only by relating what Caplan does to what he might have done instead. It states that Caplan prefers to spend his time imagining a satisfaction that he cannot obtain.

          — Jörg Guido Hülsman, Economic Science and Neoclassicism