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Overview
If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We’re social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors.
Thanks to the millions of digital bread crumbs people leave behind via smartphones, GPS devices, and the Internet, the amount of new information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until now, sociologists have depended on limited data sets and surveys that tell us how people say they think and behave, rather than what they actually do. As a result, we’ve been stuck with the same stale social structures—classes, markets—and a focus on individual actors, data snapshots, and steady states. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest.
Pentland and his teams have found that they can study patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual content of the information and predict with stunning accuracy how productive and effective that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. We can maximize a group’s collective intelligence to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations and guide them through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities, social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow.
Social Physics will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work—and can be made to work better, at every level of society. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781101625576 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 01/30/2014 |
Sold by: | Penguin Group |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 320 |
File size: | 3 MB |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface: The Origin of the Book vii
Acknowledgments xi
1 From Ideas to Actions
Using Big Data to Understand How Human Societies Evolve 1
What Is Social Physics? 4
A Practical Science 6
Big Data 8
A Rich Social Science 10
Plan for the book 15
Data-Rich Societies: Promethean Fire 17
Special Topic: Language 19
Part I Social Physius
2 Exploration
How Can We Find Good Ideas and Make Good Decisions? 25
Social Learning 29
Idea Flow 32
Idea Flow and Decision Making 34
Tuning Networks 38
Exploration 39
3 Idea Flow
The Building Blocks of Collective Intelligence 43
Habits, Preferences, and Curiosity 46
Habits versus Beliefs 55
Collectively Rational, Not Individually Rational 58
Common Sense 60
4 Engagement
How Can We All Work Together? 62
Social Pressure 65
Digital Engagement 70
Subjugation and Conflict 75
Rules of Engagement 77
Next Steps 79
Special Topic: The Mathematics of Social Influence
Part II Idea Machines
5 Collective Intelligence
How Patterns of Interaction Translate into Collective Intelligence 87
Measuring What You Manage 92
Productivity 93
Creativity 96
Improving Idea Flow 103
6 Shaping Organizations
Social Intelligence Through Visualization of Interaction Patterns 105
Engagement 108
Exploration 112
Diversity 114
Social Intelligence 116
7 Organizational Change
Social Network Incentives Can Be Used to Create Instant Organizations and Guide Them Through Disruptive Change 120
Instant Organizations 124
Organizations in Stress 127
Trust 128
Next Steps 131
Special Topic: Social Signals 131
Part III Data-Rich Cities
8 Sensing Cities
How Mobile Sensing Can Enable Cities to Become More Healthy, Safe, and Efficient 137
Visualizing the City 140
Transportation 144
Health and Disease 145
Social Network Interventions 150
Living in a Data-Rich Society 153
9 City Science
How Social Physics and Big Data Are Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Cities and Development 155
The Social Physics of Cities 156
Social Ties in Cities 157
Exploring the City 160
Idea Flow in Cities 165
Designing Better Cities 167
Data-Rich Cities 170
Next Steps 171
Special Topic: Digital Networks Versus Face-To-Face 172
Part IV Data-Rich Societies
10 Privacy
What Will a Data-Rich Future Look Like? 177
A New Deal on Data 180
Enforcement 182
The Wild, Wild Weh 183
Data-Rich Systems: Challenges 184
Social Physics: Promoting Free Will and Human Dignity 189
11 Living with Data
How Social Physics Might Help Us Design a Human-Centric, Data-Rich Society 193
Natural Law: Exchanges, Not Markets 199
Living in a Networked Society 203
Data for Development: D4D 212
Summary: Promethean Fire 215
Appendices:
Reality Mining 217
Openpds 225
Fast, Slow, and Free Will 235
Math 241
Notes 265
References 279
Index 295