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Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread— The Lessons From A New Science (2014)

by Alex Pentland(Favorite Author)

3.37 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1594205655 (ISBN13: 9781594205651)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Penguin Press HC, The

review 1: "The most productive people are constantly developing and testing a new story, adding newly discovered ideas to the story and then trying it out on everyone they meet. Like sculpting raw clay into a beautiful statue, over time their story becomes more and more compelling. Finally they decide that it is time to act on it, to bring it into the light and test it against reality. To these people, the practice of harvesting, winnowing, and sculpting ideas feels like play. In fact, some of them call it 'serious play.'" (26-7)"On average, it turned out that the social network incentive scheme worked almost four times more efficiently than a traditional individual-incentive market approach. For the buddies that had the most interactions with their assigned target, the social ... morenetwork incentive worked almost eight times better than the standard market approach." (on the FunFit experiment, 68)"This social network incentive [performed by a Swiss utility] caused electricity consumption to drop by 17 percent, twice the best result seen in earlier conservation campaigns and more than four times more effective than the typical energy reduction campaign." (72)"These bursts of exploration -- shopping trips, days off that are spent wandering around the city, weekend getaways -- seem to be important in growing the local ecology of cities. If we looked at cities with greater than average rates of exploration in the credit card data, we found that in subsequent years they had a higher GDP, a larger population, and a greater variety of stores and restaurants. It makes sense that more exploration, which results in a greater number of interactions between current norms and new ideas, would be a driver of innovative behavior." (162-3)"[O]n-the-fly reduction of the dimensionality and scope of the data so that only the minimum needed for the specific problem is shared makes things safer. Such a mechanism also allows users to safely grant and revoke data access, to share data anonymously without needing a trusted third party, and to monitor and audit data uses." (229)
review 2: The author proposed a new discipline of social physics as a quantitative social science that describes reliable mathematical connections between information/idea and people’s behavior. He also formulated the lifecycle of idea---it has to be created (or explored), distributed (or flowed), and applied (or engaged), and goes on to apply them to various organizations and cities. The author made a very convincing argument on the importance of data and need for data-driven design of society. My main criticism is that only small fraction of key ideas presented in the papers are explained. It bothers me more that the length of text dedicated for a given experiment (or paper) is more than enough. less

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