In existographies, Alex Paul Pentland (1952-) (CR:5), commonly known as “Sandy”, is an American computational social scientist, organizational engineer, and mobile information systems pioneer, as he defines himself, noted for his 2000s to present work in the field of what seems to be "computational evolutionary psychology", pure and applied, or the use of computer and digital technology to study unconscious social behavior behind conscious action and decisions, in a Mark Buchanan-conceived social physics like style; similar to the way an entomologist studies the behavior and social meaning of wiggle dance of the honey bee, some of which resulting in his 2008 Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World and his 2014 Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—the Lessons from a New Science. [1]See main: Social Physics (misnomers)Pentland’s use of the term “social physics” to describe his work is an example of a scientific misnomer, in the sense that there is no actual “physics” in his social physics, similar to the way there is no actual physics in the sociophysics of Serge Galam, similar to the way there is no actual “thermodynamics” in Claude Shannon’s so-called entropy-based “information theory”. This is evidenced in the following 2014 Q&A: [4]
Berinato: “You use a lot terminology in the book from physics and fluid dynamics. You talk a lot about flows and transfers. Is social science going to move toward a much more deterministic, data based approach like those hard sciences? Sometimes in the book, you get the sense that people are just atoms in a molecule. And there’s sort of a determinism to it.”
Pentland: “A lot of the terms are drawn from things like fluid dynamics and other statistical types of physics. And so you get to the question of determinism and free will. Can’t we make up our own minds? Of course we can make up our own minds. But this stuff we call culture is shared between us. When we use an approach that’s based on social physics, rather than something that’s based on straightforward economics, we find that we can get four, eight times the efficiency at incenting correct and cooperative behavior.”
“Together with my research group, I have built a computer system that measures a set of nonlinguistic social signals, such as engagement, mirroring, activity, and stress, by analyzing ‘tone of voice’ over one-minute periods. We are examining some of the most important interactions a human being can have: finding a mate, getting a job, negotiating a salary, finding one’s place in one’s social network. These are activities for which we prepare intellectually and strategically, sometimes for decades, and yet the largely unconscious social signaling that occurs at the start of the interaction appears to be more predictive of its outcome than either the contextual facts. I suspect but cannot prove [that] a very large part of our behavior is determined by mainly unconscious social signaling, which sets the context, risk, and reward structure within which traditional cognitive processes proceed.”
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| The 2014 logo for Pentland's Social Physics group at MIT Media Labs. [3] |
“How can we create organizations and governments that are cooperative, productive, and creative? These are the questions of social physics, and they are especially important right now, because of global competition, environmental challenges, and government failure. The engine that drives social physics is big data: the newly ubiquitous digital data that is becoming available about all aspects of human life. By using these data to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior we can hope to engineer better social systems.”
“Alex Pentland’s book Social Physics and other recent publications about the topic have little to do with physics and more to do with the analysis of big data. In that respect, they share the original intention of Comte’s philosophy—to build knowledge on observation and experiment. But instead of understanding the generative mechanisms underlying a phenomenon, the focus of big data analysts is on regulating processes such as traffic flow, on developing apps such as Uber that make use of Big Data, and on solving problems such as predicting what customers will order online.”— Frank Schweltzer (2018), “Sociophysics” (Ѻ), Feb 01
