Also, I am a scientist not a liberal arts dilettante..
Well maybe that is your problem as you don't know that humans don't work like machines and cannot be reduced to algorithms.
There is a risk which must be identified and acknowledged. Once this is done there must be strategies to mitigate this risk, and then this must be communicated to people.
Humans act based on emotion, and the most powerful emotion is fear, especially in a society like Guyana where people see themselves as being powerless. And where they feel that they lack an ability to defend themselves against powerful interests. But yet feel very vulnerable to these forces. So they cling to the "tribe".
True in 1992, when most Africans voted PNC and not WPA. Will be true in 2015 when most Indians will vote PPP and not AFC....The trick is to woo enough to vote AFC and you don't do this by disrespecting them. Because the PPP didn't need Africans to win. APNU AFC will have to have some Indians to win.
Sorry if you think that is whining. Now go back to your computer programming but understand that we are dealing with humans. You cannot program humans to do what you wish them to do. They act on their own free will, and often quite irrationally when it is based on fear. Just ask the impoverished souls of Mississippi why they voted for a man who damned most of them as "Takers".
I do not know that the human intellect is not reducible to mathematics. Actually, every thing we have done in science so far has been to take the mechanics of the mind and mirror it mathematically in machines. Who know...we may be on the right path. The eventuality may arise when those concentrations of algorithms themselves spark a consciousness of its own. I do not know how it comes about but that is not impossible. There is nothing special about the mind except its complexity and mathematics is the thread of all complexities simplified so far.
We do not need lessons in psychology except they aid the messaging. That is to remove the PPP from office because of their entrenched corruption. Any messaging is to highlight that, offer change from it and propose in simple terms alternatives. The PPP has been so prodigious in their work at robbing us there are many areas to mine such messages. That is the aim of the campaign and its ends are to win. The minutia of government and governing will follow. It is the broad sweeping scopes of our problems and who caused them and that the Opposition will address them.