Phil Henshaw wrote:
And,... how does a poll, or a military analysis tell you what emotions are
going through people's minds?
Given a hunch or actual evidence that a class of emotions have relevance
to an interesting mass behavior, a poll could be open-ended, where those
polled would describe their feelings about some stimulus, and then a
knowledge engineer would listen carefully and formalize what they
heard. A model of psychological or sociological phenomena doesn't need
to be fixed. There could even be a feedback process where the polled
individuals would review the formalism to see that they agreed that the
interpretation was a accurate and if not, refine it. Alternatively, one
could in-principle accuse a person, or something more extreme, and take
careful notes on reactions based on available context and infer a
sub-model from those observations. Such stories, for many individuals,
could be converted into computer programs that describe how each agent
changes from state `Happy' to `Sad' to `Mad' (or whatever states
described) on the basis of different kinds of stimulation. Of course,
the polled individuals could lie or be delusional, or be easily led by
careless interviewer. But for the moment, the mind is still something
of a black box.
Marcus
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