#social physics

[misentropy]

Marchetti Constant

In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day.

This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land is governed by its accessibility—which is to say, by the reasonable speed of transport to reach it.

Even if there is a vast amount of land available in the country, that land has no value in an urban context, unless transportation makes it quickly accessible to the urban core. And that pattern has repeated itself, again and again, as new mobility modes have appeared. This means that the physical size of cities is a function of the speed of the transportation technologies that are available. And, as speed increases, cities can occupy more land, bringing down the price of land, and therefore of housing, in newly accessed territory.

// Source

[misentropy]

social physics

In the early eighteen-thirties, a Belgian astronomer and mathematician named Adolphe Quetelet analyzed the numbers and discovered a remarkable pattern. The crime records were startlingly consistent. Year after year, irrespective of the actions of courts and prisons, the number of murders, rapes, and robberies reached almost exactly the same total. There is a “terrifying exactitude with which crimes reproduce themselves,” Quetelet said. “We know in advance how many individuals will dirty their hands with the blood of others. How many will be forgers, how many poisoners.”

To Quetelet, the evidence suggested that there was something deeper to discover. He developed the idea of a “Social Physics,” and began to explore the possibility that human lives, like planets, had an underlying mechanistic trajectory. There’s something unsettling in the idea that, amid the vagaries of choice, chance, and circumstance, mathematics can tell us something about what it is to be human. Yet Quetelet’s overarching findings still stand: at some level, human life can be quantified and predicted. We can now forecast, with remarkable accuracy, the number of women in Germany who will choose to have a baby each year, the number of car accidents in Canada, the number of plane crashes across the Southern Hemisphere, even the number of people who will visit a New York City emergency room on a Friday evening.

// Source

[kenyatta]

The concept in the book that caught the public imagination, and never let go, is that of the average man. Inasmuch as his concept made any sense at all, Quételet was well aware that it was also necessary to consider the average woman, average child and, for various populations, different instances of all of these. He noticed early on that his data for attributes such as height or weight (duly restricted to a single gender and age group) tended to cluster around a single value. If we draw the data as a bar-chart, the tallest bar is in the middle, while the others slope away from it on either side. It presents the characteristic shape of a bell curve, already known to mathematicians, as Quételet acknowledged. The whole shape is roughly symmetrical, so the central peak – representing commonest value – is also the average value. Many types of data show this pattern, and it was Quételet who realised its importance in social science. Tables and graphs are all very well, but Quételet wanted a snappy summary, one that conveyed the main point in a vivid, memorable manner. So instead of saying ‘the average value of the bell curve for the heights of some class of human males over 20 years of age is 1.74 metres’, he preferred: ‘the average man (in that class) is 1.74 metres tall’. He could then compare average men across different populations. How does the average Belgian infantryman stack up to the average French farmer? Is ‘he’ shorter, taller, lighter, heavier, or much the same? How does ‘he’ compare with the average German military officer? How does the average man in Brussels compare with his counterpart in London? What about the average woman? Average child? Which country’s average man is more likely to be a murderer or a victim? Or be a doctor, devoted to saving lives, rather than a suicide, intent on ending his own? A different average man (or woman or child) is needed for each attribute. As Stephen Stigler put it in The History of Statistics (1986), Quételet considered that ‘the average man was a device for smoothing away the random variations of society and revealing the regularities that were to be the laws of his “social physics”.’

Our behaviour in bulk is more predictable than we like to imagine | Aeon Essays

[dalliasne]

"It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who must fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers."

[whataboutzana]

“It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.” Alex Pentland, Social Physics

[austinkleon]

It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.

Alex Pentland, Social Physics

[baileye]

Alex Pentland, Social Physics:

“Without the obligations provided by strong social ties, capitalism often turns rapacious and politics turn poisonous.” 

[we’re so good to each other in person, so bad to each other at scale/when we’re faceless/detail-less to one another]

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Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments: it’s human nature to exchange not only goods but also ideas, assistance, and favors out of sympathy.

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From Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone essay written in 1997; the book in 2001:

“When economic and political negotiation is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are reduced. At the same time, networks of civic engagement embody past success at collaboration, which can serve as a cultural template for future collaboration. Finally, dense networks of interaction probably broaden the participants’ sense of self, developing the “I” into the “we”, or (in the language of rational-choice theorists) enhancing the participants’ “taste” for collective benefits.” 

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From Clare Malone’s piece Why Donald Trump? on Fivethirtyeight a few months ago: 

“Something inspirational seems to be happening among the assembled - a sense of collective identity being discovered. … Trump has offered people something more potent than party allegiance: empowerment.“