This is the title of an interview on the Edge web site with Nicholas
Christakis, a “Physician and Social Scientists” at Harvard. He hails the “biological
hurricane approaching the social sciences” and “the era of computational social
science.” He believes that by pooling all the relevant data “we” (or, rather,
clear-sighted scientists like him) will soon achieve a clear understanding of previously
murky aspects of human behavior – for example, of how “humans aggregate to form
collective entities.” These new causal models will then allow for effective “interventions”
at different societal levels.
To illustrate this new approach, Christakis points to a study he and
others did on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population spread thinly on the
Kenyan savannah. They created “a kind of Facebook for the Hadza” mapping the
totality of their social connections. The result was quite surprising. As it it turned out, modern telecommunications and urbanization have absolutely no effect
on the “structure of human social networks.“ In Christakis’s words, “Hadza social networks
look just like ours. In every kind of way we could study these networks,
mathematically, they didn't differ from ours.”
Now
you may think that there must be noteworthy differences between the social
networks pervading a hunter-gatherer community and a modern society – even if
these have no clear mathematical manifestation or fail the common test for statistical
“significance.” This would only demonstrate that you are a semi-retarded reactionary
calling out for some kind of cognitive intervention.
I
have to say, though, Prof. Christakis and others of his ilk (for example, David
Bornstein, the former systems analysts who recently proclaimed on his New-York-Times-hosted
blog the coming of a new “age of enlightenment” in efforts to find “fixes” for
all sorts of social problems) remind me of a different kind of “engineers of
the human soul” – the Soviet central planners interviewed in Adam Curtis’s
documentary, Pandora’s Box. Who
knows, iff those undeniably intelligent cadres had had at their fingertips all
that computational power back in the 1980s, the Soviet
Union might have survived and prospered? This question is now
moot, but it’s curious that the same intellectual species has remained at the
center of Curtis’s oeuvre – up to and including his All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
