Social physics

What Hacker News says

1. Barrin92Dec 2021
   I think you can take it up a level from the individual to culture to see it even more clearly. I think one of the most glaring examples of tacit knowledge is simply physical agglomeration. If tacit knowledge wasn't that important, why is it that people pay thousands of dollars of rent just to be in the right spot while 'everything is available' on the net? Why does half of all VC money go into a bunch of zipcodes? Why do so few key professionals network like we're in 15th century Venice?

   Physicality and proximity are incredibly important, ironically maybe more so in the world of 'knowledge work' than when it comes to physical activity. An incredible amount of knowledge work happens implicitly when people organize spontaneously without them even being aware. Alex Pentland wrote an interesting book on it called Social Physics where he tried to empirically measure how much more effective in-person exchange of information is.

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2. patconDec 2019
   Yay! Social physics :) There's a great Authors at Google talk by Sandy Pentland, about his book of the same name. Gives a good overview of the book, but 100% still worth a read after watching, esp if you are someone who works with (or would like to work with) large groups of people -- event organizing, companies, community, group facilitation, etc.

   https://youtu.be/HMBl0ttu-Ow

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3. slugggNov 2016
   I urge everyone to read Social Physics by Alex Pentland, it addresses some of the topics in the article and provides a more holistic mental framework for big data. It's a good read. https://www.amazon.com/Social-Physics-Networks-Make-Smarter/...
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4. patconJan 2025
   Biochemist and complexity science fan here.

   We assimilate into ourselves different forms of structure from each, whether biological or semiotic. Each structure, biomolecules or language, equip us to model and navigate our environment, and persist a bit longer.

   Life thrives when its cellular membranes (and bodily boundaries to an extent) are awash in structural microdiversity of friendly chemicals (aka nutrients). More access to structural microdiversity means more ability to navigate complex environments, more ability to choose from the surrounding otherness and decide what gets to cross inside your boundary and become tomorrow's you, tomorrows self.

   Minds thrive similarly when immersed in diversity of thought and experience. (See Alex Pentland's Social Physics book) These things aren't as different as they might seem, if you cross your eyes and look at it abstractly like a universe might.

   The universe doesn't really quibble between the information that my body "knows" through its structure, and the information my mind "knows" through language. Everything is made of information, and the structures of information that best prepare us for futures will persist :)

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5. ziggyzecatJul 2024
   I'm finally getting close to the next milestone on my code journey and I like to have something complicated (that I can barely grasp) to crunch in the back of my head while doing autopilot work in on construction sites (mostly solo, not endangering anyone or anything) and calculating shares recursively in networks/sequences/chains fits some ideas. Something like reverse incentive mechanism proposed in the book 'Social Physics' by Alex Pentland.

   Blockhains do something similar/exactly that, don't they?

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6. Barrin92Apr 2024
   Alex Pentland wrote a book about a decade ago, Social Physics[1], where he empirically studied how ideas spread in firms. Comparing remote and office workers was one part of it, and he found a strong advantage for in-office work. The reason is pretty straight forward, there is virtually no spontaneous social interaction ("watercooler conversations") in remote work, and teams who worked in person were significantly more dynamic, ideas are generated more often and spread more easily.

   Other than routine labor like doing paperwork for the municipal office aside, in person companies are going to have an extreme edge, Musk is right on this point, it's also an explanation for the geographic concentration of say, the tech sector, people don't pay those horrendous SF rents for nothing.

   [1]https://news.mit.edu/2014/social-physics-0304

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