[SkyMarshal]

> The essential advantage a human has is the eye, which is extremely well adapted to picking out patterns.

I'm not sure that's an advantage. The human eye is so good at discerning patterns that it sees them even where they do not exist. Witness: technical analysis, Eliot Wave Theory, etc.

Quants use math to provide a more rigorous framework for eliminating hocus pocus like that, though they have been known to make less than rigorous assumptions from time to time (good ones like Paul Wilmott have been particularly prescient in calling out that tendancy).

> Nonetheless, i agree with the thesis that this kind of analysis will invade the rest of the social sciences. In fact, that's one of the reasons I learned to program.

Agreed. There's still anachronistic cruft that needs to be exorcised from the field, for example the notion of 'utility' that economists use to evaluate the psychology of decision making (good discussion about that on HN recently, forgot where). CS + X, for (almost) all X, is where the world is heading.

[disgruntledphd2]

I really wouldn't call picking out patterns by eye as hocus pocus, I see where you're coming from, but I find (in my own work) that a good graph can help me to understand a model. Again, this does play into the biases of humans, but given enough awareness of these, the intersection of algorithms to find automatic patterns and the ability of the human eye and mind to discern meaning and give interpretation to these patterns is a very powerful combination.