> "Even though Forrester had no expertise in urban affairs—or in social science more generally—Collins agreed that a collaboration could prove fruitful." This

> "Even though Forrester had no expertise in urban affairs—or in social science more generally—Collins agreed that a collaboration could prove fruitful." This is one of the most interesting sentences to me. I have long been convinced that the efforts to reduce behaviour and models down to pure numbers, and disregard the human element - whether willfully or through ignorance or naivety), are more harmful than we think. I think we are seeing similar things with how the attempt to 'personalise' services like news by crunching user behaviour into 'predictive' algorithms has led to the rise of echo chambers and fake news. Or, I suppose you could consider the attempts to reduce bundles of derivatives to simple algorithms, that largely led to the 2008 financial crisis. It seems a particularly human thing to assume we know far more about what's going on than we actually do.