Social physics
by Alex Pentland · first published 2014
13mentions
3recommended by
6HN commenters
2015–2025first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks.
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…comes to physical activity. An incredible amount of knowledge work happens implicitly when people organize spontaneously without them even being aware. Alex Pentland wrote an interesting book on it called Social Physics where he tried to empirically measure how much more effective in-person exchange of information is.
on “Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice” ↗I urge everyone to read Social Physics by Alex Pentland, it addresses some of the topics in the article and provides a more holistic mental framework for big data. It's a good read. https://www.amazon.com/Social-Physics-Networks-Make-Smarter/...
on “The Fall of Big Data” ↗Yay! Social physics :) There's a great Authors at Google talk by Sandy Pentland, about his book of the same name. Gives a good overview of the book, but 100% still worth a read after watching, esp if you are someone who…
on “How Trolls Overran the Public Square” ↗…when trying tease apart economic and online segregation. Pentland also received a great deal of criticism in Shoshana Zuboff’s book Surveillance Capitalism [3]. The gist of her critique of Pentland’s social physics is that it amounts to a justification of behaviorist attempt at mass social control. Having heard a presentation of Pentland’s at a NetSci conference a few years ago, I didn’t think it that over arching,…
on “Segregated interactions in urban and online spaces” ↗Alexander Pentland's book, Social Physics, actually had a very empiric approach to measuring the productivity of employees and compared remote and physical workers and there was a significant gap for remote-based work. The reason is that face-to-face…
on “Quarantine will normalize WFH and recession will denormalize full-time jobs” ↗…working from home). Much more importantly though is the question if remote work facilitates the same degree of long term capital formation that traditional work environments do. Alexander Pentland's work (Social Physics)[1] casts doubt on this. Physical interaction turns out to be quite vital when it comes to cross-pollination of ideas, starting new business ventures and basically just transferring knowledge. It's the…
on “Have we just stumbled on the biggest productivity increase of the century?” ↗The most profound thing I know about cities + public policy: Google hosted a talk in 2014 by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland called "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread". His research concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue.…
on “New Cities” ↗It reminds me of a chapter in Alex Pentland's book Social Physics where he looked at the performance of IIRC eToro traders and the degree to which ideas spread among traders and the collective returns on investment. When there was extreme levels of connectivity and…
on “Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation” ↗Alex Pentland wrote a book about a decade ago, Social Physics[1], where he empirically studied how ideas spread in firms. Comparing remote and office workers was one part of it, and he found a strong advantage for in-office work. The reason is pretty straight forward,…
on “Working from home isn't going away, even if some CEOs wish it would” ↗…sites (mostly solo, not endangering anyone or anything) and calculating shares recursively in networks/sequences/chains fits some ideas. Something like reverse incentive mechanism proposed in the book 'Social Physics' by Alex Pentland. Blockhains do something similar/exactly that, don't they?
on “Ask HN: Looking for algorithms to calculate shares in sequences and networks” ↗…otherness and decide what gets to cross inside your boundary and become tomorrow's you, tomorrows self. Minds thrive similarly when immersed in diversity of thought and experience. (See Alex Pentland's Social Physics book) These things aren't as different as they might seem, if you cross your eyes and look at it abstractly like a universe might. The universe doesn't really quibble between the information that my…
on “Writing as Transformation” ↗Nice! In case anyone is interested in the science of this effect and it's surprising power, this is an almost exact reproduction of an experiment, in the field of "connection science" or "social physics". (NOTE: The true value here is in the CROSS-INCENTIVIZATION with an existing social relationship, not just the money) The general truism that falls out of it is: When possible, always apply incentives…
on “I tricked myself into working out 3 times per week” ↗You bring up two very interesting and powerful phenomena: "siren servers" and "social physics". The first term is used by Jaron Lanier to describe computer systems that, like "sirens" of the sea, lure everyone into their beautiful environs, collect all of the data on them, and statistically model…
on “From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities” ↗