Sociophysics and Econophysics, the Future of Social Science?

It’s cool to have some mathematical rules of thumb to describe crowds and so on if it is backed up by experimental data.

I did an economics undergrad. One thing that really frustrated me about the whole subject was how they kept calling it a social “science” and yet there was no experiment or predictions. Everything was a retroactive explanation for something, e.g. the financial crash or the affect of a minimum wage. Where’s the predictions? Another thing that bothered me was that often it felt like they were introducing maths to make it all seem a bit more legit: like solving integrals for second-price bid auctions or describing utility functions and so on. But that was always just a cute model with no experimental evidence to back it up.

Basically, I think social sciences should stop calling itself a science unless they start making predictions. And they should make it more like statistics and psychology classes. Evidence is king.

Applying physics to understand human behavior is same as applying human intuition to explain physics. Any correlations found, which are anyway "fitted", are bound to breakdown.

Firstly we don't understand physics fully. We have only more breadcrumbs but no answer to the ultimate "why", and are basically unable to answer a pesky kid who keeps repeating that. Now, we are applying this to explain another equally intractable problem, that of understanding human behavior. It is a strange case of reductionism. I wonder why people engage in such futile activities. May be this line in the article is the answer.

> Results like these have obvious value for corporate marketers.

A bunch of maths equations and charts presented in the form of a paper that promises to crack the human behavior with further research is too good for the corporates to let go. Ergo funding. Well done. I won't be surprised if all this started out as a joke that the corporates lapped up.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with trying to quantify an observation or a phenomenon, and in fact is always welcome, but bringing in incongruent things into the mix reduces the gravity.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate, but so is F.A. Hayek:

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

The work described in the article can be interesting as far as it goes, but it seems to me that a lack of humility coupled with insufficiently accurate models can be a dangerous combination.

We've had econophysics for quite a while. It has yet to provide substantial insights.

The issue is twofold. As others have remarked, human beings react to each other and the intervention you do strategically. Econophysics models often use things like particle behavior based on probabilistic choice rules to predict behavior. This may describe a situation if fitted, but it also tends to break down with interaction and intervention. Furthermore, we know that in such interdependent situations, it can be highly misleading and wrong to use aggregate functions and non-behavioral approaches. For example, if networks of externalities influence choices. In many areas, such as auction behavior or anonymous trade, the game-theory based models fit empirical behavior extremely well. In other situations, it seems we start to understand better why people react differently. Econophysics feels like a step back to old style economics. I believe the current research agenda, ie. giving people strategic agency and trying to understand their bounds to understanding and rationality, seems to be more useful to me.

Secondly, econophysics claim to fame is also party based on mathematical tools. I think this is misguided. While the math is different, and new tools are always useful, the economic models are actually based on quite deep foundations. Those reaction curves you learn in Game-Theory 101 seem simple, but that is more a matter of representation. They can also be derived in much more general mathematical spaces. For example, instead of simply finding optimal functions in continous spaces, the same can be done in lattices based purely on orderings... Economic theory has always been dominated by pure mathematicians.

and for sociology - I mean seriously. Some of the biggest names in formal sociological theory are physicians, such as White.

In my research I have personally found that physics style models, which are not based on strategic behavior, can be highly misleading as they allow, for example, for aggregation and inference that would not actually correspond to strategic agents making individual interdependent decisions.

I think the Black-Scholes model and its history in the financial world shows how fragile physics-inspired models are in explaining social behaviour.

These guys should take some clues from quantum mechanics, where observing or trying to control the system observed screws it up.

“Physics found we can take advantage of Facebook to spread opinions and control people’s minds” - “oh shit, we polarized the people, and now we’re on the verge of WWIII”

Mostly, this is a failed research program and not at all the direction the social sciences are going. Economists at least will draw one lesson from physics and respond to econophysics, by following the "shut-up and calculate approach" - the result, econophysics will be ignored.

Fun fact: If they cut you open to remove your appendix and find out that it isn't inflamed or infected then they still remove it since the scar left after surgery is universally known that you already had an appendectomy and so doctors, on seeing the scar, will rule out anything to do with the appendix as a possible cause for your harrowing abdominal pain.

So to eliminate this possible confusion surgeons - all around the world - always follow this unwritten rule.

Humans adapt their behavior by observing it. Looking at sth. doesn't affect the outcome, but instead the observation adds to the set of exogenous variables that will determine future behavior. We're not an ant colony that acts in an entirely exogenous setting, we change the setting both through the (un)intended consequences of the observed behavior and our attitudes toward them.

The allocation of scarce ressources did neither begin with capitalism nor economics. Many formal descriptions of foundational economic principles can (edit: be traced back to) ancient Mythology [1]. How societies applied these principles has differed greatly. Trade has been an important factor of human behavior since the dawns of civilization. In a framework of linear progress one might be tempted to search for deterministic laws in human behavior, but it might make more sense to just interpret phenomena case-by-case with a rather loose set of theoretical beliefs.

[1] Tomas Sedlacek - Economics of Good and Evil

Glad to see a Hari Seldon (Asimov's Foundation) reference.

The "phase transition" around a level of extreme opinion in a population is interesting, and I'd certainly like to find out more about this research

I read that first one as sociopaths