Living in a material world

Several steps in how the nation and society treat the results of strictly mathematical descriptions of social phenomena may help put things in better proportion from the public perspective. One step would be to demand greater transparency in models used as evidence to formulate social policy. Transparency in the assumptions and limits of validity for studies involving large complicated systems would offer government and society a better understanding of the instances where quantitative analysis is and is not appropriate. A further step involves actively incorporating groundtruthing from practitioners, when investigating the effects of proposed changes in public policy. Blind adherence to the materialist idea that today's best mathematical models should always provide the basis for social policy poses several problems. New biases are introduced, or perpetuated, by relying too heavily on materialist approaches. As computers become more powerful, society may be limited to considering variables that can be captured or counted so that they can be modeled mathematically.