Summary of Social Physics by Alex Pentland

📖 The Scoop

How Good Ideas Spread: The Lessons from New Science.

Each time you use your cell phone to call someone, scroll social media, download an app, use the GPS, or make an online purchase, you are creating data. This data is more useful than you might realize, and when it is collected and analyzed, this data can teach us how humanity behaves and how social learning occurs. Today, social scientists are relying on such data to study the patterns of how information exchanges in a social network and to predict how productive that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. We can also use this data to its fullest potential by maximizing the collective intelligence of a group to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations. These social networks, from small groups to large cities, can then be fine-tuned to increase exploration and engagement, resulting in an improvement in the flow of ideas and creating an overall more innovative, efficient society. As you read, you’ll learn why Zurich is the model of the perfect city, how data is the new oil, and how that data can be used to create the perfect society. 

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Genre: Study Aids / Book Notes (fancy, right?)