"Modeling people is tricky. Physicist Marie Gelmont once famously said, imagine how difficult physics would be. If electrons could think [laugh] so what did he mean human? What he meant was that you know if you take an electron or a carbon atom or even a water molecule it doesn't think it doesn't try to make sense of the world it doesn't have any goals or objectives or anything like that no beliefs so it's pretty straight forward to model how those things function when you look at people, people are much more complicated right? We're purposeful, we've got goals we've got objectives we've got things we want to do, we've got belief structures, we're messy. And because of that you just don't quite know how we're going to behave. Now on top of that we're diverse, right? We want different things. We have different goals and objectives. So this combination of sort of purposeful, thinking actors who are different means that it can be really hard to understand what they do and how they act. "- Transcript from Scott Page Coursera
Scott Page Model Thinking MOOC Course