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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.
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?
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.
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.