Current music:	"People" -Boyd Rice
Entry tags:	science

Music, Molecules, Misanthropy
Most of economics is horse shit.



research byproducts (and with apologies to Boyd Rice)

Economists don't understand math. Sociologists are worse, and other pretenders to the mantle of "science" which focus on human beings (anthropologists, shrinks, political scientists, whatever) are too painful to even talk about. Economists shouldn't be so bad. They have actual numeric data. They have grand theories about how the world works. They should be able to do something. But their ideas are almost universally rubbish.

Consider, for example, utility theory. Utility theory is the underlying nonsense behind most economic nonsense. The easiest way to think about it is this:



When something costs x dollars, for example, people will buy y amount. If it costs more, people buy less. Makes sense, right? More or less, but let's look more carefully at this diagram. This picture implicitly assumes that you can buy a fractional (in fact, a real numbered) amount of something, which is nonsense. Sales is not a real number. Sales is an integer. You don't buy 7% of a doughnut. You buy a doughnut. Worse than that, price is also an integer also; smallest unit of which is a penny. This isn't some picking of mathematical hairs; this is fundamental. Math works different with integers (1,2, 3..) than with real numbers (1.1, 0.000029, 98.92834). It gets worse.


"a more realistic picture, involving individuals"


One of the fundamental assumptions of utility theory is that a function can be defined for an individual, and the sum of these functions gives the utility for a crowd. This is also wrong, both trivially and nontrivially. Let's examine a nontrivial case; the utility function of a large, orderly crowd. The crowd inside a theater.


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View the Video of people clapping here since LJ doesn't let it work

If you believe standard utility theory, every individual in the crowd has N claps worth of utility in them, and will give those N claps according to when they precious well intend to clap and stop. Same thing with standing ovations. Ever been in one of these audiences? If you have, and you paid attention (don't feel bad if you didn't; most people choose self-annihilation while in any kind of crowd), you'd notice that people mostly clap and stop clapping in total synchrony with people around them. Same thing with standing. Occasionally some brave person will stand prematurely, and the social forces in the theater will force him back down again. Then the damn fool will stand up again when the rest of the crowd tells him it is OK. Same thing with clapping, or stopping clapping. Some people will stop clapping before those around them do. They sit uncomfortably for a while, then they start clapping again, until everyone else decides not to.





"people, or spin-1/2 particles? hard to say from far enough away; everything looks small"



As it turns out, this behavior can be modeled pretty close to exactly using the ferromagnetic random field Ising model; a model which derives magnetic properties based on how microscopic spins in a substance work and interact with each other. In a ferromagnet, such spins have what amounts to peer pressure from exchange forces deriving from the Pauli exclusion principle. A random field is added to each spin location to give a "tendency" to an individual clapper (or a spin). An overall driver field is added to provide a stimulus (this field can be 0, like when there is no external magnetic field, or they turn out the lights). And you can vary the strength of the "peer pressure" forces between spins or clappers. The result of all this is that, in systems with a lot of peer pressure, you can get very abrupt drop off of clapping without a sharp change in the driver field. In fact, this is sometimes observed, generally in societies with strong peer pressures. Even when it is not abrupt, the drop off follows a pretty distinct scaling law. My friend Chuck (who goes to many performances) was kind enough to record some performances in San Francisco; while I didn't notice any particularly abrupt drop offs that didn't involve lights going out, the results were consistent with the scaling law, and totally inconsistent with any sort of no-interaction clapping theory I can think of. The details of such models are mostly in the network type, which, in the case of concert halls, is a square lattice, like the one shown below.


"+/- denotes opinion, color is tendency, and the big arrow an external driver field"


I'm not the only person to think of using spin waves to model crowd behavior; there is an entire field generally referred to as "Sociophysics" which uses them. I originally read about it years ago in a book called Synergetics by Hermann Haken (a book which has been formative in my way of looking at the world). Not only are these kinds of models pretty good at reproducing phenomenology, as J.P. Bouchaud and friends proved (before I could; damn those frenchmen with their big streaks of genius) they're even pretty good at reproducing actual numbers in more or less controlled experiments. They're good at other things too; for example, such networks can reduce to Hopfield nets in some approximations. Which rather indicates they're also useful for modeling how individuals make certain kinds of decisions as well. In other words; not only do you act like you are one of these spin-1/2 particles, in many situations, you act like your brain is made up of a scale free network of them. The same models can be used to model advertising or political campaigns, rumors, mass hysterias and fashion trends. And the numbers match up pretty well.


"The end of a clapping session. Note rapid fall off; the black curve dies off faster than the echo time of the room it happened in, meaning social pressure to stop clapping travels faster than the speed of sound"


Consider all this the next time you are in a concert hall clapping for some trained baboon who thinks he is Ludwig von Beethoven, and the dimwits next to you are going into transports over what a wonderful performance it was (of course it was wonderful; they paid $300 for the seats!). Do you find yourself clapping because you think the monkey deserves it? Or do you find yourself clapping because you're a molecule in a lattice of humanity? What does that say about you in the rest of your day to day life? How much of what you do and think you are is just because of social pressure? How many celebrated trends and movements, no more enduring and dignified than a spin-1/2 particle helplessly flopping around in response to other mindless spin-1/2 particles? Let's face it; if you know someone else who has similar opinions to yours, if you run in a crowd, if there are others who are like you: this is probably why.

All this kind of reminds me of the famous scene from the Third Man, where Harry Lime is on top of the Ferris wheel:


"Look down there... Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? ..."



"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk about the people, and the Proletariat... I talk about the suckers and the mugs... It's the same thing. They have their five-year plan, and so have I....



"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."






Thus, my misanthropic philosophy of humanity: with science. In many situations; perhaps most situations involving the mob, human beings are dots; less interesting and capable of exerting their individual wills than termites. It's all in the numbers. The terrible thing about it isn't the fact that my species as a whole is generally less individualistic and interesting than a species of bug which eats rotten wood for a living; the terrible thing is the conceit most of them have that they're any more individualistic or interesting than bugs. Whatever rationalization, whatever "ism" they come up with, in reality, 99.9% of them are doing what they are doing because people around them are.

Incidentally, most of these ideas actually originate from the fertile mind of Vilfredo Pareto, who, if you haven't heard of, you should learn about. If only for his amusing misanthropic ways.