-
Essay / Historian Essay - 1171
Many people may think that our human free will seems to contrast with the idea of ββ"law-like" regularities in our human behavior; however, scientists would think differently. The humanities attempt to answer and clarify these types of questions of uncertainty by examining and studying the past to help us understand and sometimes predict human behavior in the future. Despite the concept of human free will, human behavior can be quite predictable. An example would be that if potato prices increase, consumers will buy fewer potatoes, and similarly, if there is a food shortage, people will be unhappy. The law of large numbers, a contribution from the human sciences, allows short-term predictions on subjects such as deaths in a country, marriages or the number of births. Indeed, the law states that βin large populations, random variations tend to cancel each other out.β Since the law of large numbers allows us to predict the behavior of large groups rather than individual behavior, many laws of the human sciences are probabilistic in nature; However, scientists' predictions sometimes turn out to be wrong, because some predictions are based on trends rather than laws. I define trends as a concept that shows the direction of movement of a variable but does not give an explanation. On the other hand, I define law as a concept that shows the direction of