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Loading... Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons from a New Science (2014)by Alex Pentland
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A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)303.48Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Processes Social change Causes of changeLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I came to this book after reading Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capital. In this book Zuboff made Pentland one of her chief boogeymen of a reductive behavioural science, heir to B.F. Skinner’s lab rats.
One of Pentland’s long term initiatives is to create a digital commons where scientists roam freely analyzing our digital breadcrumbs and help us solve very large societal problems including the spread of infectious diseases, urban transportation, poverty, degradation of natural habitat..
All worthy ends.
I couldn’t agree more with him that greater cooperation could lead to some terrific breakthroughs of these and other intractable problems if the data were secure, and if the behemoth data aggregators like Google, facebook, amazon, and others couldn’t use the datasets to beat their commercial competitors into submission.
And as long as we retained ownership of our data. ( )