Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread | Sandy Pentland | Talks at Google

You bring up two very interesting and powerful phenomena: "siren servers" and "social physics". The first term is used by Jaron Lanier to describe computer systems that, like "sirens" of the sea, lure everyone into their beautiful environs, collect all of the data on them, and statistically model all of this data in ways that effectively master the nature of this individual - her beliefs, her abilities, her emotions - until ultimately that individual is made both completely vulnerable and completely powerless. Lanier's book is intentionally provocative and controversial, while rather intelligent and compassionate in its spirit, and I recommend checking it out: [link] . The second term comes from a talk at Google in 2014 called "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread" ( [this video] ) by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland. He describes research supporting the recent Nature publication you link to on social and cultural progress, which concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services across nations, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His statistical modeling results really strongly show - "like a law" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society. It's really interesting to consider how we could concentrate on using all of the data and models to make deep positive impacts on our society, while respecting our human dignity. To quote Pope Francis's address to the U.N. today: "Integral human dev

The field of social physics has lots to say about this: [this video] [link] > What pattern of exploration and social learning produced the best outcome? We discovered the answer when we plotted the return on investment each trader got against the diversity of ideas he or she harvested through social learning. Social physics supports a framing that groups are like "machines for finding the best ideas", and having group members with access to diverse sources of ideas (polygons from different spaces and experiences count as this) is part of a properly calibrated social network where the best ideas are within reach, to address any given challenge that may surface.

Nice! In case anyone is interested in the science of this effect and it's surprising power, this is an almost exact reproduction of an experiment, in the field of "connection science" or "social physics". (NOTE: The true value here is in the CROSS-INCENTIVIZATION with an existing social relationship, not just the money) The general truism that falls out of it is: When possible, always apply incentives to the social fabric, not individuals. i.e. incentivize the edges of the graph (the relationships), rather than the nodes (the people) in isolation. Seek results by always opting to strengthen social bonds, instead of trying to bend people (who are social creatures) into actions while neglecting their social context, which often pull them back into prior habits or prevent the new ones from sticking strongly. Under some experimental conditions, incentives are 30x more effective when you use the money to strengthen a social relationship around an activity, rather than incentivizing the activity itself. (Further, unlike a direct monetary incentive where removing the incentive strongly attenuates the effect, you could now remove the money incentive between you and your brother, and you're much more likely to keep performing the activity even without monetary incentive, because the persistent social incentive is bootstrapped.) This and other really interesting related research was pioneered by MIT's Sandy Pentland. It's very solid and applies in practice: His lab won the DARPA networ