Social Science Growing Up

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”

—Will Durant, American historian, born November 5, 1885


266px-Test tube PSF“Sciences” like economics, sociology, psychology, and history are notoriously squishy, compared to the big dogs like physics or mathematics. Biology began the transition with the theory of evolution, and decisively crossed over with the development of genetics, culminating in the triumph of the discovery of DNA.

The traditional problem for the wimpy social sciences is that you can’t really do experiments on the scale that would be required for rigor. Testing some of the things that we would like to know would be flatly immoral. Raising a child in complete isolation, for instance. Other phenomena were simply too hard to study before the recent availability of massive amounts of “perfectly accurate” data from the internet.

 

Network science discovers deep similarities in the structure and dynamics of all networks: biological ones like the play of proteins in cell metabolism, food webs in natural ecosystems, and human social networks work alike. As we learn more about one, we learn more about them all. We can move away from guesswork and metaphysics, finally. Fiscal and monetary policy, for example, which are not now sufficiently well understood for rigorous treatment, will be informed by solid science rather than by the faith-based blather that passes for debate today. Exciting times.


Go try something fun: Interactive graph of all musical genres, including samples. Every Noise at Once


Today in #westernma

THURSDAY November 7  
8:30-10:00AM Holyoke Ask a Chamber Expert: Board Development
12:00-2:00PM Easthampton Easthampton Don’t Eat Lunch Alone
5:30-7:00PM Holyoke Women Business Owners’ Alliance After 5

Reading

“More and more of normal human social behavior is taking place in a form that is digital and online, meaning we get perfectly accurate measurement and twitterapithe ability to draw on true randomization—both highly elusive qualities of pre-Internet social science research. … Now, we can simply tap into Twitter’s API and get an enormous, random sample. We can map out the social graph of the accounts in our sample, and study how information spreads, or fails to, within this structure. And network scientists weren’t waiting around for Twitter’s structured data to come along—Barabási and his peers were examining the linked structure of the web practically from the beginning of the web itself.

“The result has been a model of networks that has proven to be very broadly applicable beyond the bounds of human connections.”

The Golden Age of Social Science Has Begun


The Last Word

“Life is to blame for everything.”

—Robert Musil, Austrian writer, born November 6, 1880

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