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The Limits of Big Data For Social Engineering
An anonymous reader writes "In his new book, Social Physics, MIT data scientist Alex 'Sandy' Pentland argues that by analyzing data from smartphones, social media, and credit-card systems, we'll soon be able to have a mathematical understanding of 'the basic mechanisms of social interactions.' Social scientists will be able to understand and predict the interactions of people the way physicists understand and predict the interactions of objects. That will, in turn, enable governments and businesses to create incentive systems to 'tune' people's behavior, making society more productive and creative. In a review of Pentland's book in Technology Review, Nicholas Carr argues that such data-based social engineering 'will tend to perpetuate existing social structures and dynamics' and 'encourage us to optimize the status quo rather than challenge it.' Carr writes, 'Defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier, but it ignores the deep, structural sources of social ills. Pentland may be right that our behavior is determined largely by social norms and the influences of our peers, but what he fails to see is that those norms and influences are themselves shaped by history, politics, and economics, not to mention power and prejudice.'"
What could possibly go wrong?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is for some BA forum. Not a BS forum like this!
Ah, Asimov was ahead of his time.
I think I wrote that back in middle school
10 wake up
20 go somewhere public
30 regret it and go home
40 sleep 28800
50 GOTO 10
I read that as 'we would like to change your opinion by using tricks'.
This strikes me as mass manipulation.
If you want to change someones opinion you need to show them why it is bad.
For example yesterday I demonstrated to a waitress how her feeding of the jukebox was a bad idea. All of her fellow employees were saying 'dont put any more money into that it is a waste of money'. 'But its only 2 dollars a day'. I spoke up with 'what if you had say 500 dollars right now what would you do?' 'OH I would pay off some bills'. 'That is about what you spend per year on that box.' 'oh had not thought of it that way'.
Honestly, I manipulated her. I was a bit tired of her choice of music. But I used a monetary manipulation to make her stop.
This sort of manipulation is used to force others into your opinion. A difference of opinion is not a bad thing. However, there are those out there would would see you dead for not thinking exactly like them (and this is more groups than the ones you are thinking of).
Many of us technical types would love for this line of inquiry to be fruitful. But to have a 'physics of people' you have to know the values of all the parameters needed to specify the current state of a person and you need to know all interactions of that person with the rest of the universe. Phrased like that you can see how ludicrous it is to dream of using the methods of physics for social science. Physics works because the fundamental constituents of the universe happen to be only a small number of particles whose interactions are amazingly simple. For example all electrons are exactly identical and interact via only 3 forces (with some uncertainties about effects on scales larger than galaxies and energies higher than trillions of electron volts). The hope for a theory of sociology is a false hope. The hope for a useful phenomenology might be more reasonable and big data can help.
seem to me to be two separate things. Statistics tells you what happens when. Understanding tells you why things happen when they do. Statistics can give you data, but not reasons. Understanding requires both. Even with all the data in the world, we're still going to need some kind of interpretative framework to make sense of it all, and creating that framework is the one thing Big Data doesn't make easier.
What are they going to do when they find out it doesn't work for smart people or people who make conscious decisions to alter their behavior based on their own research? They will just be ignored as outliers because they don't fit in to the statistical modeling. How does the machine learning algorithm model a learning human unless it knows where they're going before they do? What if people inside the model start computing social interactions based on a different model? Do we prohibit these people from evolving their behavior because they don't live inside the machine's conception of how they should act?
Social scientists will be able to understand and predict the interactions of people the way physicists understand and predict the interactions of objects
Since social scientists are completely unable to quantify anything in their field of study, I somehow doubt that they will ever come anywhere close to doing "real" science in the way that physicists can: with their "laws", measurements and equations.
But maybe this person doesn't really have much idea how proper scientists do their work?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I've found that most people don't appreciate it when they realize they are being 'handled' and it usually ends badly.
The question is ... how long will it take the population to realize they are ... if ever?
Someone was supposed to apply the PAX before they published this article
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
... typically think they can predict individual events from statistics. That is not how it works. Statistics lets you predict statistical things, e.g. how the average of, say, 1000 people will react given a specific situation, when you have an observation how the average of 1000 other people reacted to that situation, but only if the selection was random and there are not many possible reactions. It tells you exactly nothing about how a specific individual will react.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The irony is that at a deeper level it's utterly unpredictable what and when a single particle will do in physics. Take a lump of uranium -- it's easy to predict when how much of it will have decayed to lead. It works all the time, always the same. But look at a single uranium atom and there's no way to predict when it will decay. It may be the next second or in a thousand years. All you have is probabilities but these work out into cold, hard predictable facts if what you're dealing with is a lump large enough.
Psychology works very similar. You can't predict what an individual person will do, but look at enough of them and you'll be able to predict what will happen if you have good enough data. YOU may have "free will" and the freedom to do what you want but as a mass we may still follow strict laws, like everything else in nature.
You may feel insulted by that or you may see such things as great tools for better understanding of social dynamics.
It was called "the Soviet Union." Adding smart phone and Facebook data wouldn't have made that clusterfuck of genocidal failure any better...
I haven't read the book, but this summary sounds a lot like the new left's cultural marxism, with the latter half referencing political correctness as justification. Whether it is or not, most people don't like being 'gamed' in this way, and when they find out, the backlash can be far worse than the desired outcome and/or the original status quo.
We knew you'd say that.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It didn't take much to be ahead of Romney's GOTV tech solution, seeing as it was either crashed, unreachable, or unuseable for most of election day.
I'm getting my Ph.D. in behavioral and institutional economics, so this is right up my ally. Carr's response, that "defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier" but misses the deeper structure is dead on, but it's more than this. Social norms may determine much of our behavioral responses, but norms vary tremendously by the institution from which they come: how your group of friends prefer to treat each other != how other's prefer to treat each other != how strangers are "supposed" to treat each other in NYC != out strangers are supposed to treat each other in a small town. Moreover, while these norms may be highly correlated with your behavioral responses, people select into institutions (friend circles, communities, neighborhoods, etc) to a large degree based off their compatibility with the institutions norms; e.g. think about outcomes of social group formation, from mostly scratch, freshman year of college.
This all matters for the article's context because the behavioral parameters they estimate only approximate social norm's suggested behavior, but the suggestions ultimately come from those who chose to adhere to that particular set of norms; trying to "tune" people in ways they don't intrinsically want will fail because they'll just reselect or simply ignore the competing suggestions in favor of those authentic to the group into which they selected. If they take into account that all norms are highly idiosyncratic to their parent institution, it may help with better targeting of products, programs, and information, but the targeting will still have to be revised as people revise their norms; an institution will not revise its norms to conform to what an outside entity feels they should be. So, yeah, I don't think catering to the current observed state of the world can keep norms and society from evolving any more than, say, de jure segregation laws catering to status quo racists/-ism can keep people from forming revising their views about the morality of racism, the laws surrounding it, and their behavioral responses to such societal "tuning", especially over years and generations.
Cool, you keep giving her sacks of potatoes and understanding why she's angry. I'd rather give her a box of chocolates, and not understand why I got laid.
weinersmith