The Social AtomPeople are atoms and life is physicsThis is important...- August 31, 2007 I'm totally bogged down in an article in quantum non-locality, which is one of my most long-standing pet interests. I'll say more next week, after finishing the article, but I'm beginning to believe that social dynamics have actually had quite a lot to do with this area of physics over the past 50 years. For many years, in effect, people were unable to get jobs at good institutions if they wished to work in unorthodox areas, especially if they questioned the prevailing orthodoxy on the...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/this-is-important.html Who's the real enemy- August 29, 2007 In an Op-Ed last weekend, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman asked some curious questions, questions with answers that I think ought to be all-too-obvious. He wrote:One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush teams war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroadHow could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry and Max Cleland ...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/whos-real-enemy.html Property values NEVER go down...- August 28, 2007 Apparently some people, even many people, really believe this. Indeed, a friend of mine said as much to me a couple years ago. "House prices always goes up." He meant even more than that, believing that house prices always rise faster than inflation. Which may be true if you take only the past ten years as evidence. Go a little further back, of course, and you see that house prices flop up and down just like anything else, sometimes very rapidly, often driven by collective waves of behavior...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/property-values-never-go-down.html Fickle preferences...- August 23, 2007 I still haven't yet finished that old paper by Gary Becker, but I hope to get back to it soon, and see whether or not I treated his ideas fairly in The Social Atom. In the paper, he's trying to argue that economists can make much weaker assumptions about the rationality of people, and still derive some of the key theorems of economic theory. I have my doubts, but I'm not quite ready yet to lay out why in detail.One of the problems, I suspect, may hinge on the notion of fixed preferences....http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/fickle-preferences.html Our hapless media...- August 23, 2007 The ever-active Glenn Greenwald cites yet another example of the sad failing of our media's "finest" to render poltical events in anything like a "fair and balanced" manner. As I tentatively suggested last week, our media figures could do a great service to our democracy -- not to mention to the standing of journalism itself --if they tried a bit harder to act as intelligent and independent minds in their own right, and to peer behind the themes and images given them by political figures and...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/our-hapless-media.html Rational or irrational- August 21, 2007 A few weeks ago, Dr James B. Burnham of the Donahue Graduate School of Business at Duquesne University sent me a polite email chiding me for my discussion, in The Social Atom, of the work of economist Gary Becker. Becker is famous for his association with the so-called Rational Choice school of economic thinking, which tries to model a great deal of human behaviour -- including things like crime, individuals' choices to have children and so on -- in terms of people making fully rational...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/rational-or-irrational.html Rove's legacy- August 20, 2007 I couldn't agree more with this assessment of the legacy of Karl Rove by Juan Cole. If there was ever a time when the rift between the left and right in the US could have been temporarily healed, and our collective energy harnessed for genuine improvement of our nation and the world, it was in the immediate aftermath of 911. Instead, Rove casually sacrificed that historic opportunity on the alter of momentary political gain. As Cole puts it, ... his most tragic legacy lay in taking something...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/roves-legacy.html Torturing light...- August 17, 2007 This post really has little to do with The Social Atom, but I've had no time to blog anything today, as I've been occupied with a last-minute article on some recent physics research. Physicists are getting ever closer to building material systems that will coax photons, the quantum particles of light, to interact with one another. Ordinarily, that never happens; flashlight beams, for example, just pass through one another. But it turns out that with some really tricky quantum optics, it should..http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/torturing-light.html The higher (or lower) language- August 16, 2007 It's quite clear by now that much of our national discourse on topics ranging from gay marriage to Iraq to global warming takes place not in terms of facts but in the more powerful language of emotional associations, in terms of ideology. Framing counts for more than facts (as Republicans seem to understand better than Democrats, for some reason), in part because of the power of modern media to spread simple messages and sound bites far and wide, and their inability or unwillingness to act as...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/higher-language.html Sex by numbers- August 15, 2007 Basic biology in many species pushes males and females toward different reproductive strategies, with males in some cases tending to seek as many partners as possible, and females -- because they invest so much more physically in producing offspring, and could even die in the process -- seeking one stable partner. The folklore in humans is that men tend to be more promiscuous than women, and its the biology that makes them do it. In surveys, sure enough, this is what you find -- men report...http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/2007/08/sex-by-numbers.html |