I’ve always been interested in the questions of why people do what they do and why people feel and think as they do. Being of a philosophical and scientific orientation, my interest in those questions has led me to study the most philosophically deep schools of thought in economics, linguistics, and some of the other sciences of human action and the human mind.
To my surprise, though, many or even most people, at least in the modern West, find it uncomfortable to generalize about people. The problem with that is: Science, whether it’s about people or things, is about generalization. Thus, to find it uncomfortable to generalize about people is to find it uncomfortable to do science about people. In other words: To my surprise, the controversies in the sciences of human action and the human mind aren’t only about what the best models are but are also about whether models are even possible.
See below for some of what I’ve written on the psychology and sociology of that debate: