Alex Pentland

Social physics is a metaphor Sandy Pentland adopts to embrace a class of data science research. It is largely, but not exclusively, about the flow of ideas between individuals taken from large datasets of telephone and actual mobility, talk, and other residue of human behaviour.

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.… (more)

My boss read this book recently and has been referencing it, so I figured I should at least know what he's talking about... Really interesting research - that we're always sending subliminal signals with our tone, pitch, minute body language, etc. - and that this impacts our conversations, business pitches, relationships. Cool. Makes sense. But the author basically says that these things are so ingrained and nuanced that we don't even know we're doing them and they're hard (if not impossible) to detect and modify. So I was left know that these "honest signals" are very important, but I can't do anything about the signals I'm sending... that was a let down.… (more)