Though my physics metaphor looks more like cosmology than quantum mechanics (which, because he'll be dealing in probabilities, is what he's drifting toward).
What's the idea? Think pattterns, not people
Can we can ever learn to understand people and societies, businesses and other groups of all sorts, the same way we do atoms and molecules and the physical matter they make up? Are we ever going to have something like "social physics"? For centuries, philosophers and social scientists of all stripes have come up with thousands of explanations as to why we cannot; why people are essentially different and somehow stand apart from the rest of nature. The very idea of social physics, they say, is an absurdity and that's all there is to it.
Of course, we all know that people are notoriously unpredictable (or so we hear), and human psychology is immensely complicated (which is true enough). But....it seems that modern science is beginning to prove that all this talk of impossibility is probably way overblown and very, very mistaken. I've just finished writing a book called The Social Atom, due to be published by Bloomsbury Press in the U.S. in May, 2007. The book offers a snapshot, illustrated with plenty of stories, of an exploding new area of research which has shown that social physics is possible, and that science can bring the human world within its grasp -- even in strict mathematical terms.
As a book is inherently limited in what it can cover, I've started this blog as a way of taking a closer look at some of the real-world examples in the book, and as a way to explore related ideas and examples that I either didn't have space to mention there or I've learned about since then. The book covers the beginnings of a very important new movement in science -- but most of the good stuff is surely yet to come!
I think the most important idea in the entire book is the notion that our primary obstacle to understanding the human social world is our tendency to fixate on the complexity of the human individual. When we see some social surprise that we can't understand -- a riot, a sudden wave of social protest, some crazy and seemingly senseless new fashion or the unexpected collapse of a great company -- and we often think that it's the baffling behaviour of the people involved, as individuals, that leads to our puzzlement. But the real reason is often quite different -- it is not the people as individuals that confound us, but the collective social patterns that well up among them. Even if people were completely simple automatons -- with all their behaviour fully and easily predictable -- we'd still often be confused by the amazing and surprising things that happen when you put 10 or 100 of them together.
The truth is that we lack all but the most rudimentary capacity for understanding the patterns of social behaviour that emerge in our world or why they emerge so readily. In other words, we've been trained to think in exactly the wrong way. This surely sounds awfully vague and maybe a little doubtful. But it isn't, as I hope future posts will begin to make clear...
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You do understand that the
You do understand that the writer acts as if sociologists and political scientists don't exist right? That people have never sought to predict and/or explain activities like riots, rebellions, and revolutions? "A new movement in science?"
Go here and check out the paper topics. Does his idea still look new afterwards?
We've always tried
We've always tried predicting the decisions of crowds. I could have gone back to reading chicken entrails
What's new is the metaphor used to direct one's investigations...the physics metaphor.
i see this. but what he's
i see this.
but what he's attempting to do here is use his expertise--which ideologically speaking has a force all of its own...it's PHYSICS right?--as a trump card rather than a specific methodology. you said it yourself, physics is a METAPHOR. i could never get away with this myself...going into some sort of public space and say i've got a different way to look at the physical universe based on politics. i'd (rightly) get laughed out of whatever space i was in...even if the room were full of science hating anti-evolutionists.
and part of this is because we think of physics as infallible, as somehow being objective and pure. but to the extent that we think this way, this type of thinking is the product of IDEOLOGY, not of "fact." using physics as a metaphor here gives the author a false privilege over social scientists who've been wrestling with this stuff for literally one hundred years.
I see. Not a lot I can do,
I see.
Not a lot I can do, though. It's a genuinely useful metaphor. And it's starting to look like it's physics or economics (the current metaphor).
Kondratieff had the
Kondratieff had the metaphorical balance right waaaaaay ahead of his time....,
Everyone is talking about the dollar, the housing market and the stock market. Those trends are pretty predictable at this time. But there is bigger picture involving subjects of greater impact that people don't ant to discuss. The taboo is our system that depends upon the ridiculous assumption of continuous growth.
Kondratieff predicted this 80 years ago and was killed by Stalin for being so accurate. He was charged with being an enemy of the people because he said that the western business cycle repeats in boom-bust, multi-generational cycles that always end in a debt cleansing war.....,
serendipitous link f'ya.....,
Survival of the Likeliest...,
There IS no difference
There IS no difference between physics and chemistry/biology. The physics metaphor is being applied to sociological stuff.
hmmm.....,
so, there IS some difference between chemistry/biology and sociology then? fascinating, particularly in light of this, which seems to suggest that the sociological - and the narrative explication of the same - is just so much extraneous and distracting window-dressing.
Am I missing something here, or have Spence and his peers been reduced to credulous oogaboogaz poking through entrails?
It doesn't suggest anything of the kind
I don't suggest. I state.
chemistry/biology differs from sociology in a similar way as construction differs from archetecture.