Positive approach:

Might as well try at a language/model.
Per the physical sciences:

force, substance, motion, data


What is your smallest (for now) unit of motivation?
(or, enumerate the simplest forces)
What is the smallest unit actor?
(a person...or one personality among a few, or a mood, that sort of thing)
What is the unit of action?
(phsical acts, signals, gestures...etc).
How do we know for sure what is felt or happens?
(epistemics: damage, expressions, etc..)



If I were to model a person, a family, a town, or a country,
how would I break that down? Or...build it up, if you're still
working on the person.

All I can toss out is that there seem to be complex quantum states
of a person (at work, fight/flight, digging, angry, etc) that
form up around a stress or peasure.
Jung tried to break personalities down....thus the acronyms for
what kind of personality you are...
Kant tried to purify what is always right...for building blocks.


Wher do you start building? Presumably, with something so
small and incontrovertible you can trust the next step up.

I find it interesting that you are interested in both physics and psychology. I am interested in physics and sociology. I thought I would double major in physics and sociology but after a year of doing both I realized that it would take too long to do both and picked sociology because the subject matter (human interaction) is interesting and sociology has the most room to grow.

However, I was hoping to learn about human interaction the way I learn physics; as an interlocking whole. It turns out, sociology is in bits and quite disappointing for someone who expects science.

The fact that sociology is in bits means there is no need to try to destroy it. It has not yet been assembled. There is no logic holding the pieces together because there is no common language so I am not gunning for any part of social science. At this time I cannot say conclusively that anything in social science needs to be destroyed except complacency. What we have is not enough.

I like where you are going in the second post and I'll try to address that in the near future.

Complexity is the main trouble with modeling
systems. That inculdes current difficulties
in genetics and fusion research, etc.
It's easy to see chaos, but
there are some who recognize self-organization
takes place. Manuel Delanda has some very
interesting ideas on how large complex sytems
like hurricanes, geological systems, and
office politics form and change. There are
lectures on youtube. The somewhat stable
quanta of behavior are like the
"strange attractors" that appear in chaos theory.
When it comes to achieving some success against
high complexity, the current weather modeling
systems are a good example. There aren't many
other examples. Investment "rocket science"
works until successful actions are detected by
others and reactions rip the model apart effectively.
They predict while watching people, though, so they
are interesting sociological analogs.

You ask some interesting questions LM.

My approach has been to look for the social science equivalence on Newton's three laws. Definitions which are general and apply to many different orders of magnitude from atoms to objects to waves to galaxies.

However, to get back to the subject of the opening post, could we postulate that I had already done all that?

How can I improve my opening post to avoid all the skepticism and be more convincing?

I think you're spending a lot
of time on condemnation when even the well-read
in the areas would admit there are problems.
As a parallel (other than the Communist one,
where Capitalism was attacked but not decent
alternative was proposed, other than
"people's committies"), consider genetic
chemistry. A tremendous work has been done,
but very few magic bullets have been made.
The fundamental reasons are dawning: the
complexity of figuring out the tiny shifting
environments need to make things happen.

The social sciences are similar:
we can do a fair job making analogs of
'forces', 'masses', and 'motions', but
at some level, the models simplified to
make them locally true don't work more
globally or dynamically.

So you have two challenges, actually:

1) develop a more universal set of
players and interactions
(and more important than that, a universal
language)

2) develop a way to scale up in number or
intensity of action without losing
predictive of proscriptive power

But....you want a more credible opening.
Examples say this isn't just a reactionary impulse.
They can even happen on the grand scale.
Some hint about your way of discovering basic
elements would give confidence.
You can back up to something simple to start.

If you get past admitting a problem,
some inkling of a solution has to be there.
What is the most fundmental, concrete, real problem?
If you can't enumerate anything yet, it looks
like a complaint against reality.

I can predict what a flea does,
not so much for a cat,
hardly at all for a man (at least, over
longer time and less stress)...

Why is that?

Self-evident self-organizing seemed like a good
way to start out....it offers bubbles of success
in the wasteland. Successful villages,
birds and people who talk to get honey, etc...

Just some thoughts.