> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Marvin Long, Jr.
> Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 11:53 AM
> To: BRIN-L Mailing list
> Subject: SCOUTED: psychohistory
>
>
>
> Ok, this one's kind of a cheap shot, I admit.
Naah. But of course I would say that.
> I recently began reading Benford's _Foudation's Fear_. Reading about
> Nick's Arnet's career projects and watching all the commercials during the
> Superbowl yesterday brought me to a conclusion. Psychohistory, or some
> form of predictive sociology, will be developed by advertisers and
> lobbyists who are constantly looking for ways to change mass behaviors to
> their own advantage. That's because advertising gets all the big bucks,
> and because to reliably change future behavior you have to be able to
> predict responses to stimuli.
I hope and expect that the influence of advertising and mass media will be
diminished by development of automated ways to identify influential people.
For most people today, there are very few opinion leaders on subjects of
national and world importance. But I'm sure the Internet is already
changing that.
> These disciplines leave out much of the question of how we arrived at a
> given state, however, which also must be taken into account by any decent
> science. Also, I'm wondering if email groups might make a fertile ground
> for basic psychohistorical research simply because here is a place where
> personalities interact, laden with the baggage of ego but not with the
> baggage of having to survive. (I.e., we don't argue with each other as a
> way to compete for resources, which might simplify observations and
> analysis.) After all, predicting that two tribes will come into conflict
> once they start competing for resources isn't terribly hard work. The
> trick would be looking at the ideas at work and predicting how the
> conflict would come out, which would imply some kind of analysis of memes
> and the sorts of egos a society tends to produce.
The thing that really struck me as we created Opion was that never before in
history has there been a data set like the one available in the behavior of
on-line communities. It was never practical to analyze public discussions
because they weren't captured anywhere. They are full of ambiguities and
technical challenges, there are significant privacy issues and the scale of
the opportunity is staggering (*millions* of public postings per day). If
there was one big take-away for me, it was that the Internet will evolve one
or more reputation infrastructures. It will have to, as the information
being exchanged becomes increasingly valuable -- just as reputation is
essential to E-Bay's model.
Nick
