Social Physics

By Alex Pentland,

Book cover of Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

Book description

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence

If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments,…


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Why read it?

1 author picked Social Physics as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

We operate in networked collectives—social groups to which we subscribe our identities, like families, teams, congregations, etc.

And these groups operate the way they do not only because of the cultural operating system that governs expectations of the group and its members but also because of how the group is structured.

Social Physics unpacks how the dynamics of these networks dictate the way in which information is disseminated, ideas are adopted, and people decide what they accept and what they reject.

This book helped make the abstract nature of social networks tangible and provided concrete language to help make this…

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