[Bakary]

What's interesting to note is that no matter how you dress it up, human beings are indeed biological machines and respond in surprisingly predictable ways. The companies which specialize in data gathering and analysis are increasingly able to corroborate this observation with concrete examples and algorithms. It's of course a tautology, but "normal" social interactions are just that: a set of arbitrary norms. Normal people are just as robotic as aspies in the sense that they mechanically respond to stimulus, except that we've collectively agreed on a delineation between what is considered robotic and what isn't.

It sounds abstract but you can immediately understand the idea simply by describing human behavior in literal terms and focus on the feeling of unease you experience from doing so.

Besides, if people manage to build strong connections with the scientific method, is that really so bad?

[dropit_sphere]

The thing that freaks us out about statements like "Normal human behavior is surprisingly robotic" is that they carry with them the idea that human behavior can be hacked. But that's just a question of competence. I mean, are we talking Roomba-robotic, or HK-47 robotic(without the bloodlust)?

Practically, as soon as someone starts "hacking" social norms---most often with either sales or scams in mind---then the norms adjust. That's why city folk are more standoffish than country folk, why your inbox is full and mostly unread, and why women at bars are closed-off.

I mean, OK, we're robots. But we're pretty good robots.

[iosDrone]

The majority of people who read things like this and take them seriously are weird socially and don't read social cues well.

[seppin]

> What's interesting to note is that no matter how you dress it up, human beings are indeed biological machines and respond in surprisingly predictable ways.

Is that why people that use a process to try and explain what people will do are nearly always wrong? Economics, politics, etc. People do respond to basic triggers of biology, but we have very little understanding of these trigger and where they originate from.

[Bakary]

It will certainly be interesting to see if data analysis can garner a greater understanding of these triggers over time.