>>14364037Look up community detection in mathematics being applied to neuroscience and internet communities. Then look up how blue light patterning can be used to alter emotional states. Then look up the addictive capacity of mobile games.
That addictive capacity is what I mean by alchemic approach to sociology/psychology. We have some methods we know work from trial and error without broad overarching understanding. We have a skinner box that is in most people's hands constantly with the capacity to pattern haptic, aural, and visual feedback. The mathematics stuff is just from being friends with the applied math PhD students. The hot button topic at my university is the application of community detection in graphs to data from neuroscience as well as the application to identify the flow of information in groups on the Internet.
I might look into getting ya some papers later on the subjects, but in my slightly autistic view the consequences are quite obvious. It's only a matter of time and data at this point. With our phones capturing usage data the data isn't going to be a long term issue. But there is a clear isomorphism between those fields through graph theory at the moment and we have a lot of brute force computational methods for graphs.
Sorry I just realized I typed group theory in my original post
