topics: |  psychology | sociology | physics | science | history | philosophy | consilience

Can there be a quantitative, "scientific" approach to social issues? Is human behaviour just "a milliard particles playing billiards"? [Piet Hein]

The very asking of such a question will make many humanists will feel uncomfortable... However, there is no doubt that one by one many of the realms of the humanities is being invaded by elements of quantitativeness...

Once upon a time, philosophy meant all of knowledge, (Aristotle was as much a biologist as an abstract thinker); today, even grammar seems to be subject to formal rules, leading some like E.O. Wilson to talk of Consilience, a fusion of the humanities and the sciences.

Here Philip Ball takes the tale further, by showing how many scientists are already attempting it.

Can we determine the ideal form of societal structures (e.g. government, stock markets) based on rules as quantitative as, e.g., the laws govering the pressure of a gas as temperature rises? It turns out that both of these questions may hinge on realizing how a group of individuals cohere to form a whole. While the behaviour of each individual remains unclear, it may be possible to determine patterns of behaviour for the group as a whole. This behaviour is not entirely determined, but outcomes (as with gas) can be identified with very high probabilies indeed. On the way, Ball stops at several intellectual junctures, beginning with Hobbes, and then Condorcet (who also figures in Wilson's account), moving onto how the social sciences took an early lead in developing statistics, and how Maxwell learned about distributions from a now-forgotten book on social policies.

Ball's book is an important narrative chronicling the history of this idea, and particularly its progress in recent times, via fields such as Game theory (ch. 17) and its applications in defining social interactions based on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (ch.18), where the interactions are also modeled in terms of the Game of Life.

Also traces a number of interesting developments of statistical theories in gas theory and molecular theories of crystals and how these were applied to the stock market (ch.8-9) and in Economics in general, and how opimization analysis can help determine history - e.g. the configuration of nations in WW2 are local minima in a matrix of possible configurations (ch.12)

But unlike world-changing books like Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, the broad
canvas is not matched by a coherent narrative that keeps the reader
focused.  Despite such shortcomings, an important book for me, full of
interesting insights.

Besides its thought-provoking content, the yellow spine makes for a spot of
colour on your shelf which is easy to spot from across a large office!

Introduction: Political Arithmetick

On the seventh of November 1690 a manuscript [of William Petty's Political
Arithmetick] was delivered to  England's new king, William III.  William
Petty 1623-1687, was professor of anatomy at Oxford... Petty claimed to
prove:

 - That a small Country, and few People, may by their Situation, Trade, and
   Policy, be equivalent in Wealth and Strength, to afar greater People, and
   Territory. And particularly, How conveniences for Shipping, and Water
   Carriage, do most Eminently, and Fundamentally, conduce thereunto.
 - That France cannot by reason of Natural and Perpetual Impediments, be more
   powerful at Sea, than the English, or Hollanders.
 - That the People, and Territories of the King of England, are Naturally
   near as considerable, for Wealth, and Strength, as those of France.
 - That the Impediments of Englands Greatness, are but contingent and
   removeable.
 - That one tenth part, of the whole Expence, of the King of England's
   Subjects; is sufficient to maintain one hundred thousand Foot, thirty
   thousand Horse, and forty thousand Men at Sea, and to defray all other
   Charges, of the Government: both Ordinary and Extraordinary, if the same
   were regularly Taxed and Raised.
 - That there are spare Hands enough among the King of England's Subjects, to
   earn two Millions per annum, more than they now do, and there are
   Employments, ready, proper, and sufficient, for that purpose.
 - That there is Mony sufficient to drive the Trade of the Nation.
 - That the King of England's Subjects, have Stock, competent, and convenient
   to drive the Trade of the whole Commercial World.
		(see original text at marxists.org)

[Petty claimed to use numbers to derive these proofs:]
    The Method that I take...is not yet very usual; for instead of using only
    comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have
    taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have long
    aimed at) to express my self in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to
    use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have
    visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable
    Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the
    Consideration of others: Really professing my self...unable to speak
    satisfactorily upon those Grounds (if they may be call'd Grounds). p.3-4

How dismayed Petty would have been to find that three hundred years later,
political scientists are still lamenting the fact that human affairs
dominated by whim and prejudice rather than led by reason and logic. 4

[Note: Petty was also a major player in the English colonization of
Ireland in the late seventeenth century; his "political arithmetick" was
coupled with what he called "political anatomy"; it led to a prescription,
in his words, of "political medicine" for Ireland. In short, Petty's
"economics" began as a colonial political strategy that drew on his
background in medicine and experimental natural philosophy.
 	  - see article by Ted McCormick

[A few decades before Petty, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), then a royalist exile
in France after Charles I's defeat and consequent execution in the English
civil war, sought to find a principled solution to the problems of humankind.]
After
     centuries of monarchical rule upheld by divine and moral imperatives had
     been graphically dismembered with the fall of the ax on Jan 30, 1649
     [when Charles I beheaded, but Ball says nothing more than the above
     sentence, and leaves the reader to founder for details.]

About Thomas Hobbes, the classicist, becoming enamoured of logic, from the
gossipy biography by John Aubrey (1626-1697, a contemporary, in Brief Lives):

   [He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened
   accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open,
   and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. ]
   He read the proposition . "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he
   reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a
   proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another,
   which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively
   convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry. p.15

Hobbes used Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from
physical first principles.  Motion is the natural state of all things.
The mind is like a calculating machine (Napier had invented one in 1617;
then Pascal, 1645):

	When a man Reasoneth, hee does nothing else but conceive a summe
	total; from Addition of parcels; or conceive a Remainder, from
	Subtraction of one summe from another... For REASON ... is nothing
	but Reckoning. p.17

[In Hobbes' view]. The body is merely a system of jointed limbs moved by the
strings and pulleys of muscles and nerves.  Man is an automaton.

Death is immobility, and as part of his inner compulsion, man
"shuns... death, and this he doth, by  a certain impulsion of nature, no less
than that whereby a stone moves downward."

If men behave in an animalistic manner, showing "a perpetuall and restlesse
desire of Power after power, [ceasing] only in Death," then he will always
seek greater power leading to Hobbes' own frightening vision of a State of
Nature: "continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short".

Thus men will eventually need to cooperate and give up some power to some
authority - it didn't matter much who - he believes in a high degree of
equality among men (rarely voiced in 177th c. Europe p.25).  But the
community elects an individual and confers on him absolute power.  They
will thenceforth defer to him without question.  The ruler could also be a
group (e.g. a parliament) but here power struggles will inevitably arise
within this body.

In this world, a ruler rules a people who are bound by contract to obey their
sovereign.  [A completely different interpretation of "social contract" from
Locke (1623-1704 or Rousseau (1712-1778).]  The sovereign enfoces unit
through the sword if needed.

A calculus of society p. 28

While from a sociological perspective, Hobbes' ultimate answer - a rigid
dictatorial monarchy - seems anachronistic today, much of his motivation -
particularly his impulse to seek physicalist explanation for social questions
- appears to resonate even today, and contemporary physcists are
beginning to adapt their methods to answer these questions.  One
    could chart te trajectory of Hobbes's thought via Locke to later thinkers
    who believed there could be such a thing as a "calculus of society"

The path passes through Bentham's utilitarianism (leading, unlike Hobbes, to
a democracy).  This line of thinking paved the way for the socialism of Marx,
who in his own way, sought a "scientific" political theory, one that was
strongly (and misguidedly) influenced by Darwinism.

Carolyn Merchant, in The death of Nature (1983), argues that the rise of
mechanistic, atomistic philosophy in the 17th c. sanctioned the
manipulations and violations of nature that continue to blight the world
today. -31

[a similar view is espoused in J.D. Bernal and other left-leaning historians
of science; Bernal was himself influenced by Nikolai Bukharin and Boris
Hessen, who gave an influential Marxist account of the work of Isaac Newton
(at the famous 1931 meeting on History of Science).

In 1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science,
probably the earliest text on the sociology of science.

	This chapter develops thermodynamics, second law, Maxwells kinetic
	theory of gases; detours through various models for molecular
	explanation of gas behaviour, including Brownian motion, discovered
	by John Brown, who, as a botanist, first observed pollen grains
	dancing wildly under the microscope, and attributed it to some
	"active force" of life. But even "dead" grains danced, and also
	fragments of the Egyptian sphinx.  Einstein supposed that the tiny
	grains were small enough to be deflected by (imbalanced) collisions w
	individual molecules of water, and his paper was the first thorough
	treatment of diffusion, and several predictions were verified in a
	series of very precise expts by Jean Perrin in 1908 [won NP
	1926]. (p. 43-44)

Opening quotes

				Nature, it seems, is the popular name for
				milliards and milliards and milliards of
				particles playing their infinite game of
				billiards and billiards and billiards.
					- Atomyriades, a "grook" by Piet Hein

    [Piet Hein philosopher, mathematician, designer, scientist, game
     inventor, author - was a Danish polymath (1905-1996) and inventor of a
     form of poetry called 'Grook' ("gruk" in Danish) - small aphoristic
     verses revealing in a minimum of words and with a minimum of lines some
     basic truth about the human condition. [started appearing in the daily
     paper "Politiken" starting 1940.]
     Piet defined art as a way of thinking about all subjects... He asserted
     in his philosophical writings that the great cultural divide was not
     between the haves and the have-nots, but between the knows and the
     know-nots. - see http://www.archimedes-lab.org/grooks.html  ]

The Boltzmann is magnificient. I have almost finished it.  He is a
masterly expounder. I am convinced that the principles of the theory are
right, which means that I am convinced that in the case of gases we are
really dealing with discrete point masses of definite size...  - Einstein,
1900.  p. 33

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics - makes Maxwell's theory watertight, and
also explains why certain processes may be irreversible, as in the second
law. p.45

[Ball's language here is despairingly non-technical: the probability that
all the particles in an inflated baloon would go to one half of it, thus
deflating the other half - is possible in physics, but the probability os
"so tiny that it is hard to distinguish from zero."  Carl Sagan would have
used "billions and billions here, but perhaps we deserve some numbers,
some time. - AM]

	It can be stated without exaggeration that more psychology can be
	learned from statistical averages than from all philosophers, except
	Aristotle. - Wilhelm Wundt (1862)

	Taken in the mass, and in reference both to the physical and moral
	laws of his existence, the boasted freedom of man disappears ; and
	hardly an action of his life can be named which usages, conventions,
	and the stern necessities of his being, do not appear to enjoin on
	him as inevitable, rather than, to leave him to the free
	determination of his choice. - John Herschel 1850

Marquis de Condorcet (b.1743, guillotined 1794) : If there is indeed a
science of human affairs, with its own axioms and laws, then it must be a
statistical science. 54

Thomas Paine was exiled to France after publishing The Rights of Man. 55
[in yet another loose end, you don't find why in Ball - the book opposed the
idea of hereditary rule - and hence the legitimacy of kings, a topic then
much exercising Britain, after the French revolution. ]

Statistical science: Born in the humanities

Maxwell, after reading Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in
England, which used statistical analysis of group behaviour:
    Those uniformities which we observe in our experiments with quantities
    of matter containing millions and millions of molecules are uniformities
    of the same kind as those explained by Laplace and wondered at by Buckle
    arising from the slumping together of multitudes of causes each of which
    is by no means uniform with the others.

The very name, statistics originated from the attempt to apply
quantitative studies to social phenomena. In 1749, Gottfried Achenwall of
Germany suggested the word referring to quantitative study societal states.
That was when summaries like death rates, birth rates and other population
measures were coming about.

What causes nation A to align with nation B against nation C? 

Second World War is often portrayed as an inevitable consequence of the
First. An embittered Germany, resentful of the indignity of enormous
reparation debts, was primed for a leader who would restore Teutonic power
and pride. There is surely truth in that; but Germany did not fight
alone. Italy, Hungary, and Romania joined Hitler in the Axis alliance, which
for a short but dangerous time seemed poised to overwhelm the Allies. 

Why did Europe split this way and not some other? 

Seventeen nations were involved; there are 65,536 ways of dividing them
between two camps. 

[17 items, two envelopes - 217; labels interchangeable : divide by 2]

Quantifying geopolitics

	conflicts = repulsions 
	commonalities = attractions

Axelrod and Bennett classified the interactions between each
pair of states on the basis of six factors: ethnicity, religion, territorial
disputes, ideology, economy, and past history. 

For example, some states were predominantly Catholic in 1936, others Eastern
Orthodox, others atheist. In terms of ideology, some had democratic
governments, others fascist, and so forth. The researchers considered that
the existence of border disputes (like that between France and Germany)
contributed to repulsion, as did a recent history of armed conflict between
two states.

+1 if there was commonality, and -1 if there was difference or antagonism.

Weight of each nation:  used the “national capabilities index” assigned to
each nation by the Correlates of War project conducted by U.S. political
scientists since the 1960s. This index attributes a degree of “power” to each
nation based on six measures of demography and military and industrial
strength. 

* Axelrod, Robert and Bennett, D Scott; 
  A landscape theory of aggregation,
  British journal of political science, v.2(03), 1993. 

	
   	Two “energy” minimas emerge in the landscape of alliance formation
	before WW 2.
	deepest minima: v. similar to the split into Allied and Axis powers -
	only Portugal and Poland placed in the “wrong” camp. The other basin
	predicts a very different history, with Europe united against the
	Soviet Union.

	[The dimensionality of the decision space is six, and not two as
	shown here.  The space is not so nicely continuous.  This figure
	is based on a hypothetical figure in axelrod & bennett 93] 

Modifications on the model by Serge Galam

			[not in book; section added by AM]

In a re-implementation by Serge Galam, he extends the model using ideas of
statistical mechanics and introducing added factors such as 
“neutral”, “frustrated” and “risky”. 

A "risky" actor acts against his well-defined
interest (an exploration behaviour?) while a "frustrated" actor having no
well-defined interest acts randomly.

Galam says he does not get the results Axelrod did, but he produces new
results that extends the analysis to beyond the war fails to replicate these
results.  He sugegsts that the cold war re-organisation after world war II is
stable, and claims to predict the emergence of fragmentation in the eastern
blok.

* Galam, Serge. 
  Fragmentation versus stability in bimodal coalitions.
  Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 230.1 (1996): 174-188.

If noise is introduced in the tournament, Tit for Tat (TFT) strategy has
to be modified - two possibilities are:  

* Generous Tit for Tat (let a fraction of defections go unpunished)

* Contrite Tit for Tat (CTFT): does not retaliate if defection by opponent
  follows a defection of its own - accepts it as a justified retribution

gTfT outperforms all other entrants in Axelrod’s second tournament
(with 1 percent “noise”);  CTFT comes sixth. 

With higher noise CTFT outperforms gTfT. 

shows time series plots for effects of different generatgions. 

other reviews : Kirkus

Can human nature be reduced to a set of laws that can then be used to
organize society? By this intriguing account, many a physicist is now
exploring such a question.  Apply a law to individual humans, and you'll
likely end up with more exceptions than rules. 

But perhaps, suggests British science writer Ball (The Ingredients, 2003,
etc.), the terms haven't been correctly expressed: human nature is more a
collective than an individual matter, so the task is to describe the
workings of the crowd, such that "we can make predictions about society
even in the face of individual free will."  Opening his inquiry with Thomas
Hobbes, who proposed a mechanistic model of humankind in his much-despised
Leviathan, 

Ball touches on some unsettling questions: Are we merely drones in a big
hive? Is there such a thing as free will?  (Probably: Ball points to "many
examples of social behavior in which a kind of regularity and order comes
not from any predestination in the fates of the participants but from the
very limited range of their viable choices.")

Writing with his customary light hand, and drawing on very recent
developments in things like chaos and network theory, Ball looks at some of
those examples to see what scientists think about why we do the things we
do. Why, for instance, are there traffic jams? (Because the universe is
rife with anomalies and random perturbations.) Why do economic systems —
the stock market, say — resist behaving in always predictable ways? (Ditto,
and "the fluctuations are unavoidable.") Why do wars erupt, and why do some
wars stay small and manageable while others kill millions? (Ditto, and
therefore "there can be no telling how big a conflict might be sparked by
the smallest disturbance.") 

Ball's survey raises more questions than it answers, but one fascinating
constant emerges: "Regardless of what we believe about the motivations for
individual behavior, once we become part of a group we cannot be sure what
to expect."  A highly provocative work of popular science.

Article by Philip Ball, Jan '04

    from The Guardian

One of the social systems that shows the clearest signs of behaviour
analogous to a collection of inanimate particles is traffic flow. That's
probably because our choices are particularly constrained on the road - in
general, all we do is aim to go in a specific direction, in single file, at
the speed of our choosing. But we will, on the whole, reduce this speed if
necessary to avoid the risk of collision.

Physicists have devised models of traffic flow in which each vehicle is
represented by a particle programmed to move according to these rules. They
find that the resulting flow looks spookily realistic. It can seize up into
the kind of "phantom jams" that seem to have no cause. And it can develop
the recurring waves of stop-and-go congestion familiar to motorway drivers.

Some traffic physicists argue that traffic exists in three distinct states:
free flow, congested flow and jams. These are analogous to the gas, liquid
and solid states of matter, and one flow state seems to switch to another
abruptly, like the sudden "phase transitions" of melting, freezing seen in
matter. Understanding what triggers these transitions in traffic might lead
to better road designs and traffic regulations.

Similar models of mass movement have been applied to crowds of
pedestrians. Researchers in Germany have used these models to understand how
trails get trodden down spontaneously on areas of grass, which might help
park designers build more agreeable paths. Particle-pedestrian models reveal
what can go wrong when people try to flee in panic from a crowded room. The
switch from orderly movement to a panic state can again be abrupt, and can
lead to inefficient use of exits. Insights like this could improve building
safety, and researchers at University College London are using such models
to look for better crowd-management measures for the Notting Hill carnival.

Particles that attract and repel one another are also a good basis for
understanding how coalitions and alliances form. Businesses might form
conglomerates with some rivals in the hope of securing dominance for their
own products and forcing other rivals out of the market. Likewise, in times
of war countries might be prepared to band together to defeat a common
enemy. Researchers in the US have shown that, by making crude estimates of
the strength of the forces of "attraction" and "repulsion" between European
countries in 1936, they could predict how the 17 countries would split into
Axis and Allied camps in the second world war. Physicists in France have
applied a similar model to try to understand the break-up of the former
Yugoslavia and Soviet Union, and the expansion of the European Union.

Another area of social science that lends itself to a physics-based approach
is economics. Here the "particles" are market traders, and they interact
through trading transactions: buying and selling, which in turn sets
commodity prices for future transactions. In addition, the traders are
influenced by each others' decisions, which can cause herd-like behaviour
and can trigger waves of buying or selling that destabilise the market. This
"agent-based" approach to economics, which is being adopted by some leading
economists such as Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, challenges some of the
long-cherished notions about free markets, such as that they operate in
equilibrium and lead to the most efficient distribution of goods.


--
author bio: from aaron blog

Ball's background is originally in chemistry and statistical physics, and
having spent many years as an editor at Nature, he apparently now has a
broad perspective on modern science. But, what makes his writing so
enjoyable is the way he places scientific advances in their proper
historical context, showing both where the inspiration may have come from,
and how other scientists were developing similar or alternative ideas
concurrently.