Group items tagged

he authors disagree with Lever-Tracy's observation that the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists is driven by a widespread suspicion of naturalistic explanations, teleological arguments and environmental determinism.

While conceding that Lever-Tracy's observation may be partially true, the authors argue that more important processes are at play, including cautiousness on the part of sociologists to step into a heavily politicized debate; methodological differences with the natural sciences; and sensitivity about locating climate change in the longue durée.

Secondly, while Lever-Tracy argues that "natural and social change are now in lockstep with each other, operating on the same scales," and that therefore a multidisciplinary approach is needed, Grundmann and Stehr suggest that the true challenge is interdisciplinarity, as opposed to multidisciplinarity.

Thirdly, and this possibly the most striking observation of the article, Grundmann and Stehr challenge Lever-Tracy's argument that natural scientists have successfully made the case for anthropogenic climate change, and that therefore social scientists should cease to endlessly question this scientific consensus on the basis of a skeptical postmodern 'deconstructionism'.

As opposed to both Lever-Tracy's positivist view and the radical postmodern deconstructionist view, Grundmann and Stehr take the social constructivist view, which argues that that every idea is socially constructed and therefore the product of human interpretation and communication. This raises the 'intractable' specters of discourse and framing, to which we will return in a second.

Finally, Lever-Tracy holds that climate change needs to be posited "firmly at the heart of the discipline." Grundmann and Stehr, however, emphasize that "if this is going to [be] more than wishful thinking, we need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise."

The importance of framing climate change in a way that allows it to resonate with the concerns of the average citizen is an issue that the Breakthrough Institute has long emphasized. Especially the apocalyptic politics of fear that is often associated with climate change tends to have a counterproductive effect on public opinion. Realizing this, Grundmann and Stehr make an important warning to sociologists: "the inherent alarmism in many social science contributions on climate change merely repeats the central message provided by mainstream media." In other words, it fails to provide the kind of distantiated observation needed to approach the issue with at least a mild degree of objectivity or impartiality.

While this tension is symptomatic of many social scientific attempts to get involved, we propose to study these very underlying assumptions. For example, we should ask: Does the dramatization of events lead to effective political responses? Do we need a politics of fear? Is scientific consensus instrumental for sound policies? And more generally, what are the relations between a changing technological infrastructure, social shifts and belief systems? What contribution can bottom-up initiatives have in fighting climate change? What roles are there for markets, hierarchies and voluntary action? How was it possible that the 'fight against climate change' rose from a marginal discourse to a hegemonic one (from heresy to dogma)? And will the discourse remain hegemonic or will too much pub¬lic debate about climate change lead to 'climate change fatigue'?

In this respect, Grundmann and Stehr make another crucial observation: "the severity of a problem does not mean that we as sociologists should forget about our analytical apparatus." Bringing the analytical apparatus of sociology back in, the hunting season for positivist approaches to knowledge and nature is opened. Grundmann and Stehr consequently criticize not only Lever-Tracy's unspoken adherence to a positivist nature-society duality, taking instead a more dialectical Marxian approach to the relationship between man and his environment, but they also criticize her idea that incremental increases in our scientific knowledge of climate change and its impacts will automatically coalesce into successful and meaningful policy responses.

Political decisions about climate change are made on the basis of scientific research and a host of other (economic, political, cultural) considerations. Regarding the scientific dimension, it is a common perception (one that Lever-Tracy seems to share) that the more knowledge we have, the better the political response will be. This is the assumption of the linear model of policy-making that has been dominant in the past but debunked time and again (Godin, 2006). What we increasingly realize is that knowl¬edge creation leads to an excess of information and 'objectivity' (Sarewitz, 2000). Even the consensual mechanisms of the IPCC lead to an increase in options because knowledge about climate change increases.

Instead, Grundmann and Stehr propose to look carefully at how we frame climate change socially and whether the hegemonic climate discourse is actually contributing to successful political action or hampering it. Defending this social constructivist approach from the unfounded allegation that it would play into the hands of the climate skeptics, the authors note that defining climate change as a social construction ... is not to diminish its importance, relevance, or reality. It simply means that sociologists study the process whereby something (like anthropogenic climate change) is transformed from a conjecture into an accepted fact. With regard to policy, we observe a near exclusive focus on carbon dioxide emissions. This framing has proven counter productive, as the Hartwell paper and other sources demonstrate (see Eastin et al., 2010; Prins et al., 2010). Reducing carbon emissions in the short term is among the most difficult tasks. More progress could be made by a re-framing of the issue, not as an issue of human sinfulness, but of human dignity. [emphasis added]

These observations allow the authors to come full circle, arriving right back at their first observation about the real reasons why sociologists have so far kept silent on climate change. Somehow, "there seems to be the curious conviction that lest you want to be accused of helping the fossil fuel lobbies and the climate skeptics, you better keep quiet."

I tweeted out another link to the post around 2pm, and then at 2:30pm, it moved a bit further up the results on the 3rd page:

The Latest results factors in real-time linking behavior, so it is picking up all the tweets where my post was being RTed, and as a result, the top half of the Latest results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management” were completely devoted to MY post.

That’s a perfect example of how Twitter and Facebook sharing is now impacting Google results.  And it’s also a wonderful illustration of the value of being active on Twitter.  I tweeted a link to that post several times yesterday and this morning, which was a big reason why it moved up the Google results so quickly, and a big reason why it dominated the Latest results for that term.

there are two things I want you to take away from this: 1 – This was very basic SEO stuff that any of you can do.  It was simply a case of targeting a specific phrase, and inserting it in the post.  Now as far as my having a large and engaged Twitter network and readership here (thanks guys!), that definitely played a big factor in the post moving up the results so quickly.  But at a basic level, everything I did from a SEO perspective is what you can do with every post.  And you should.

2 – You can best learn by breaking stuff.  There are a gazillion ‘How to’ and ’10 Steps to…’ articles about using social media, and I have certainly written my fair share of these.  But the best way *I* learn is if you can show me the first 1 or 2 steps, then leave me alone and let me figure out the remaining 8 or 9 steps for myself.  Don’t just blindly follow my social media advice or anyone else’s.  Use the advice as a guide for how you can get started.  But there is no one RIGHT way to use social media.  Never forget that.  I can tell you what works for me and my clients, but you still need to tweak any advice so that it is perfect for you.  SEO geeks will no doubt see a ton of things that I could have done or altered in this experiment to get even better results.  And moving forward, I am going to continue to tweak and ‘break stuff’ in order to better figure out how all the moving parts work together.

systems that allow crowdsourced judgment to be tweaked, not to the taste of the general mass, which produces lowest common denominator effects, but to people and experts that you can trust for their judgment.

these systems are now implemented by Buzz and Digg 4

Important for me though, is that they don’t just take your social graph as is, because that mixes many different people for different reasons, but that you can tweak the groups.

“This is the problem with the internet! It’s full of crap!” Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, and the natural scarcity that we became accustomed to, there’s a flood of low-quality material that we can’t possible sift through on our own. From blogs to music to software to journalism, one of the biggest fears of the established order is how to handle the oncoming glut of mediocrity. Who shall tell us The Good from The Bad? “We need gatekeepers, and they need to be paid!”

The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper. The better that these systems for crowdsourcing the curation of content become, the more accurate the results will be.

This social-graph-as-curation is still relatively new, even by Internet standards. However, with tools like Buzz and Digg 4 (which allows you to see the aggregate ratings for content based on your social graph, and not the whole wide world) this technique is catching up to human publishers fast. For those areas where we don’t have strong social ties, we can count on reputation systems to help us “rate the raters”. These systems allow strangers to rate each other’s content, giving users some idea of who to trust, without having to know them personally. Yelp has a fairly mature reputation system, where locations are rated by users, but the users are rated, in turn, by each other.

Reputation systems and the social graph allow us to crowdsource curation.

Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on Youtube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded? There’s no way humans could keep up! The traditional forms of curation and gatekeeping simply can not scale to meet the increase in production and transmission that the Internet allows. Crowdsourcing is the only curatorial/editorial mechanism that can scale to match the increased ability to produce that the Internet has given us.

The problems with reliable access to analytics and measurement information is by no means limited to Twitter. Facebook data is also tightly controlled. With Facebook, privacy controls built into the API are designed to prevent mass data scraping. This is absolutely the right decision. However, a reality of social media measurement is that Facebook Insights isn’t always reachable and the data collected from the tool is sometimes inaccurate.It’s no surprise there’s a disconnect between the data that marketers and community managers want and the data that can be reliably accessed. Twitter and Facebook were both designed as tools for consumers. It’s only been in the last two years that the platform ecosystem aimed at serving large brands and companies

The data that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare collect are some of their most valuable assets. It isn’t fair to expect a free ride or first-class access to the data by anyone who wants it.Having said that, more transparency about what data is available to services and brands is needed and necessary.We’re just scraping the service of what social media monitoring, measurement and management tools can do. To get to the next level, it’s important that we all question who has access to the firehose.

We Need More Transparency for How to Access and Connect with Data

So when I hear scientists say, “The data speak for themselves,” I cringe. Data never speak. And data generally and most often are politically and socially inflected. They have import for people’s lives. To ignore that is to ignore the social and cultural dimensions within which this science is taking place.

I do think that there is a process by which, for example, the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer for decades had a scientific consensus that this was an issue, then a social process begins, and then it becomes accepted.

The interesting thing with climate change, I find, is that positioning on climate change is strikingly predictable based on someone’s political leanings. One-third of Republicans and three-quarters of Democrats think that climate change is real. That to me speaks to the political, ideological and cultural dimensions of this debate.

It’s interesting because it wasn’t always so. In 1997 with the Kyoto treaty, with the development of regulations that would impact economic and political interests, sides started to be drawn. We’ve reached the stage today that climate change has become part of the culture wars, the same as health care, abortion, gun control and evolution.

There are many who distrust the peer-review process and distrust scientists. So that can be step one. I think a lot of people will be uncomfortable accepting a scientific conclusion if it necessarily leads to outcomes they find objectionable. People will be hesitant to accept the notion of climate change if that leads directly towards ideas that are at variance with values that they hold dear.

do you trust the scientific process? Do you trust scientists? The faith-and-reason debate has been around for centuries. I just read a book that I thought was prescient, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” about this suspicion people have about intellectuals who are working on issues that are inaccessible, opaque to them, yielding conclusions that alter the way we structure our society, the way we live our lives.

There’s a certain helpless frustration people have: Who are these cultural elites, these intellectual elites who can make these conclusions in the ivory tower of academia or other scientific institutions and tell me how to live my life?

And we can’t leave out power. There are certain powerful interests out there that will not accept the conclusions this will yield to, therefore they will not accept the definition of the problem if they are not going to accept the solutions that follow it. I’m speaking of certain industry sectors that stand to lose in a carbon-constrained world.

Also, if you can’t define solutions on climate change and you’re asking me to accept it, you’re asking me to accept basically a pretty dismal reality that I refuse to accept. And many climate proponents fall into this when they give these horrific, apocalyptic predictions of cities under water and ice ages and things like that. That tends to get people to dig their heels in even harder.

Some people look at this as just a move for more government, more government bureaucracy. And I think importantly fear or resist the idea of world government. Carbon dioxide is part of the economy of every country on earth. This is a global cooperation challenge the likes of which we have never seen before.

Do you trust the message and do you trust the messenger? If I am inclined to resist the notion of global cooperation — which is a nice way to put what others may see as a one-world government — and if the scientific body that came to that conclusion represents that entity, I will be less inclined to believe it. People will accept a message from someone that they think shares their values and beliefs. And for a lot of people, environmentalists are not that kind of person. There’s a segment of the population that sees environmentalists as socialists, trying to control people’s lives.

In our society today, I think people have more faith in economic institutions than they do in scientific institutions. Scientists can talk until they are blue in the face about climate change. But if businesses are paying money to address this issue, then people will say: It must be true, because they wouldn’t be throwing their money away.

what I’m laying out is that this is very much a value- and culture-based debate. And to ignore that – you will never resolve it and you will end up in what I have described a logic schism, where the two sides talk about completely different things, completely different issues, demonizing the other, only looking for things that confirm their opinion. And we get nowhere.

For the positive responses it's mainly people who understood that rep.licants is not about giving performant bots but is more like an experiment (and also a kind of critics about how most of the users are using social networks) where users can mix themselves with a bot and see what is happening. Because even if my bots are crap they can be, sometimes, surprising.

But I was kind of surprised that so many people would really expect to have a real bot to manage their social networks account. Twitter never responded and Facebook responded by banning, three times already, my Facebook applications which is managing and running all the Facebook's bots.

some people use the bot: a. Just as an experiment, they want to see what the bot can do and if the bot can really improve their virtual social influences. Or users experimenting how long they could keep a bot on their account without their friends noticing it's runt by a bot. b. I saw few time inside my database which stores informations about the users that some of them have a twitter name like "renthouseUSA", so I guess they are using rep.licants for getting a presence on social networks without managing anything and as a commercial goal. c. This is a feedback that I had a lot of time and it is the reason why I am using rep.licants on my own twitter account: If you are precise with the keywords that you give to the bot, it will sometimes find very interesting content related to your interest. My bot made me discover a lot of interesting things, by posting them on Twitter, that I wouldn't never find without him. New informations are coming so fast and in so big quantities that it becomes really difficult to deal with that. For example just on Twitter I follow 80 persons (which is not a lot) all of those persons that I follow is because I know that they might tweet interesting stuffs related to my interests. But I have maybe 10 of those 80 followers who are tweeting quiet a lot (maybe 1-2 tweet per hour) and as I check my twitter feed only one time per day I sometimes loose more than one hour to find interesting tweets in the amount of tweets that my 80 persons posted. And this is only for Twitter ! I really think that we need more and more personal robots for filtering information for us. And this is a very positive point I found about having a bot that I could never imagine when I was beginning my project.

One surprising bugs was when the Twitter's bots began to speak to themselves. It's maybe boring for some users to see their own account speak to itself one time per day but when I discovered the bug I found it very funny. So I decided to keep that bug !

The questions that rep.licants poses are deep human and social ones – laced with uncertainties about the kinds of interactions we count as normal and the responsibilities we owe to ourselves and each other.  Seeing these bots carry out conversations with themselves and with human counterparts (much less other non-human counterparts) allows us to take tradition social and technological research into a different territory – asking not only what it means to be human – but also what it means to be non-human.

The success suggests that socialbots could manipulate social networks on a larger scale, for good or ill. "We could use these bots in the future to encourage social participation or support for humanitarian causes," Hwang claims. He also acknowledges that there is a flip side, if bots were also used to inhibit activism.

The military may already be onto the idea. Officials at US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees military activities in the Middle East and central Asia, issued a request last June for an "online persona management service". The details of the request suggest that the military want to create and control 50 fictitious online identities who appear to be real people from Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is not clear, however, if any of the management of the fake identities would be delegated to software. A Centcom spokesperson told New Scientist that the contract supports "classified blogging activities on foreign language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US".

Hwang has ambitious plans for the next stage of the socialbot project: "We're going to survey and identify two sites of 5000-person unconnected Twitter communities, and over a six-to-12-month period use waves of bots to thread and rivet those clusters together into a directly connected social bridge between those two formerly independent groups," he wrote in a blog post on 3 March. "The bot-driven social 'scaffolding' will then be dropped away, completing the bridge, with swarms of bots being launched to maintain the superstructure as needed," he adds.

This is why, for example, large numbers of Americans oppose the idea of an estate tax even though the current form of the tax, slated to return in 2011, is very unlikely to affect them or their estates. In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor. There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally. The bailout for General Motors’ labor unions wasn’t so popular either—again, obviously not because of any bias against the wealthy but because a basic sense of fairness was violated. As of November 2010, congressional Democrats are of a mixed mind as to whether the Bush tax cuts should expire for those whose annual income exceeds $250,000; that is in large part because their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.

envy is usually local. At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It’s directed at the husband of your wife’s sister, because the brand of beer he stocks costs $3 a case more than yours, and so on. That’s another reason why a lot of people aren’t so bothered by income or wealth inequality at the macro level. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to billionaires. Gore Vidal put it honestly: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

Occasionally the cynic in me wonders why so many relatively well-off intellectuals lead the egalitarian charge against the privileges of the wealthy. One group has the status currency of money and the other has the status currency of intellect, so might they be competing for overall social regard? The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however, so the upshot is that growing income inequality won’t necessarily have major political implications at the macro level.

All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.

The numbers are clear: Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top. The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues, namely income growth at the very top of the distribution and greater inequality throughout the distribution. The first trend is much more pronounced than the second, although the two are often confused.

When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1

At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973. But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.

The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary. Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat. Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2

Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all. Robert J. Gordon, an economist from Northwestern University who is hardly known as a right-wing apologist, wrote in a recent paper that “there was no increase of inequality after 1993 in the bottom 99 percent of the population”, and that whatever overall change there was “can be entirely explained by the behavior of income in the top 1 percent.”4

And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data. It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there. It also seems that most of the income gains of the top earners were related to performance pay—bonuses, in other words—and not wildly out-of-whack yearly salaries.5

It is also the case that any society with a lot of “threshold earners” is likely to experience growing income inequality. A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.

The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice. Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness. What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality. Not only is high inequality an inevitable concomitant of human diversity, but growing income inequality may be, too, if lots of us take the kind of advice that will make us happier.

Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?

Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh have recently provided a detailed estimation of particular American incomes.6 Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top. For instance, for 2004, nonfinancial executives of publicly traded companies accounted for less than 6 percent of the top 0.01 percent income bracket. In that same year, the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500. The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount. The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.

Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance. After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top. Yet many high-earning lawyers are doing financial deals, so a lot of the income generated through legal activity is rooted in finance. Other lawyers are defending corporations against lawsuits, filing lawsuits or helping corporations deal with complex regulations. The returns to these activities are an artifact of the growing complexity of the law and government growth rather than a tale of markets per se. Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.

When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened. Tiger Woods earns much more, even adjusting for inflation, than Arnold Palmer ever did. J.K. Rowling, the first billionaire author, earns much more than did Charles Dickens. These high incomes come, on balance, from the greater reach of modern communications and marketing. Kids all over the world read about Harry Potter. There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable. Cultural critics can complain that good schoolteachers earn too little, and they may be right, but that does not make celebrities into political targets. They’re too popular. It’s also pretty clear that most of them work hard to earn their money, by persuading fans to buy or otherwise support their product. Most of these individuals do not come from elite or extremely privileged backgrounds, either. They worked their way to the top, and even if Rowling is not an author for the ages, her books tapped into the spirit of their time in a special way. We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.

to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.

The first factor driving high returns is sometimes called by practitioners “going short on volatility.” Sometimes it is called “negative skewness.” In plain English, this means that some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices. Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.

if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad. Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs.

To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money. If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses. And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton. For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early. Furthermore, if everyone else made more or less the same mistake (very surprising major events, such as a busted housing market, affect virtually everybody), you’re hardly disgraced. You might even get rehired at another investment bank, or maybe a hedge fund, within months or even weeks.

Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles. They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors. And will the bondholders object? Well, they might have a difficult time monitoring the internal trading operations of financial institutions. Of course, the firm’s trading book cannot be open to competitors, and that means it cannot be open to bondholders (or even most shareholders) either. So what, exactly, will they have in hand to object to?

Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside. Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly. Guaranteeing the debt also encourages equity holders to take more risk. While current bailouts have not in general maintained equity values, and while share prices have often fallen to near zero following the bust of a major bank, the bailouts still give the bank a lifeline. Instead of the bank being destroyed, sometimes those equity prices do climb back out of the hole. This is true of the major surviving banks in the United States, and even AIG is paying back its bailout. For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.

there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.

And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve System has recapitalized major U.S. banks by paying interest on bank reserves and by keeping an unusually high interest rate spread, which allows banks to borrow short from Treasury at near-zero rates and invest in other higher-yielding assets and earn back lots of money rather quickly. In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.

the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance. Simon Johnson tabulates the numbers nicely: From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.7

There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue. Let’s say that some news hits the market and that traders interpret this news at different speeds. One trader figures out what the news means in a second, while the other traders require five seconds. Still other traders require an entire day or maybe even a month to figure things out. The early traders earn the extra money. They buy the proper assets early, at the lower prices, and reap most of the gains when the other, later traders pile on. Similarly, if you buy into a successful tech company in the early stages, you are “moving first” in a very effective manner, and you will capture most of the gains if that company hits it big.

The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth. This difference will persist, even if those who are fourth come pretty close to competing with those who are first. In this context, first is first and it doesn’t matter much whether those who come in fourth pile on a month, a minute or a fraction of a second later. Those who bought (or sold, as the case may be) first have captured and locked in most of the available gains. Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.

These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related. Let’s say that Goldman Sachs regularly secures a lot of the best and quickest trades, whether because of its quality analysis, inside connections or high-frequency trading apparatus (it has all three). It builds up a treasure chest of profits and continues to hire very sharp traders and to receive valuable information. Those profits allow it to make “short on volatility” bets faster than anyone else, because if it messes up, it still has a large enough buffer to pad losses. This increases the odds that Goldman will repeatedly pull in spectacular profits.

Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have. It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw. In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades? Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it. And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.

What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control; it just isn’t that easy to oversee a balance sheet with hundreds of billions of dollars on it, especially when short-term positions are wound down before quarterly inspections. It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets. Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies. Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.

For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism. It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem. The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.

Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice. Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions. Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty. Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).

We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are. Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe. They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.

Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.

For instance, slide 23 shows a Google search for “liberal social psychologist,” highlighting the fact that one gets a whopping 2,740 results (which, actually, by Google standards is puny; a search under my own name yields 145,000, and I ain’t no Lady Gaga). You then compared this search to one for “conservative social psychologist” and get only three entries.

First of all, if Google searches are the main tool of social psychology these days, I fear for the entire field. Second, I actually re-did your searches — at the prompting of one of my readers — and came up with quite different results. As the photo here shows, if you actually bother to scroll through the initial Google search for “liberal social psychologist” you will find that there are in fact only 24 results, to be compared to 10 (not 3) if you search for “conservative social psychologist.” Oops. From this scant data I would simply conclude that political orientation isn’t a big deal in social psychology.

Your talk continues with some pretty vigorous hand-waving: “We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values.” Right, except that I would like to see a systematic survey of exactly how the lack of conservative peer review has affected the quality of academic publications. Oh, wait, it hasn’t, at least according to what you yourself say in the next sentence: “The great majority of work in social psychology is excellent, and is unaffected by these problems.” I wonder how you know this, and why — if true — you then think that there is a problem. Philosophers call this an inherent contradiction, it’s a common example of bad argument.

Finally, let me get to your outrage at the fact that I have allegedly accused you of academic misconduct and lying. I have done no such thing, and you really ought (in the ethical sense) to be careful when throwing those words around. I have simply raised the logical possibility that you (and Tierney) have an agenda, a possibility based on reading several of the things both you and Tierney have written of late. As a psychologist, I’m sure you are aware that biases can be unconscious, and therefore need not imply that the person in question is lying or engaging in any form of purposeful misconduct. Or were you implying in your own talk that your colleagues’ bias was conscious? Because if so, you have just accused an entire profession of misconduct.

all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters  and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.

CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients: To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter,‭ ‬blogs,‭ ‬forums,‭ ‬buzz,‭ ‬and myspace under created names that fit the profile‭ (‬satellitejockey,‭ ‬hack3rman,‭ ‬etc‭)‬.‭  ‬These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds,‭ ‬retweets,‭ ‬and linking together social media commenting between platforms.‭  ‬With a pool of these accounts to choose from,‭ ‬once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name,‭ ‬lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected‭ ‬#‭ ‬of previously created social media accounts,‭ ‬automatically pre-aging the real accounts.

one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas: Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona.  In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags.  In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example.  There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas

It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating  the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference.

UPDATE: From another email, I found a  government solicitation for this "Persona Management Software". This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can't imagine why this is posted on an open site. And whenthis was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren't too happy about it either:

Mashable always give misleading news with misleading titles and ridiculous analysis. In France, you cannot do neither good nor bad ad for any brand or company in a TV program (unless you pay your ad slot of course). With the coming of social networks, people advertise their page and by the way facebook and twitter. That’s why the ban comes to say that facebook and twitter are also brands and companies like others. Actually, you can say “Facebook” and “twitter” and whatever you want… in any TV program in France, but you cannot advertise for them. So please be less simplistic and a little more percise in you articles.

By this logic no personal brand (i.e. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and so on) could be mentioned without them paying for it. And by this logic, public relations could not exist as a profession in France.

Ruse’s somewhat surprising yet intriguing claim is that “before Charles Darwin, evolution was an epiphenomenon of the ideology of [social] progress, a pseudoscience and seen as such. Liked by some for that very reason, despised by others for that very reason.”

Indeed, the link between evolution and the idea of human social-cultural progress was very strong before Darwin, and was one of the main things Darwin got rid of.

The encyclopedist Denis Diderot was typical in this respect: “The Tahitian is at a primary stage in the development of the world, the European is at its old age. The interval separating us is greater than that between the new-born child and the decrepit old man.” Similar nonsensical views can be found in Lamarck, Erasmus, and Chambers, the anonymous author of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, usually considered the last protoscientific book on evolution to precede the Origin.

On the other side of the divide were social conservatives like the great anatomist George Cuvier, who rejected the idea of evolution — according to Ruse — not as much on scientific grounds as on political and ideological ones. Indeed, books like Erasmus’ Zoonomia and Chambers’ Vestiges were simply not much better than pseudoscientific treatises on, say, alchemy before the advent of modern chemistry.

people were well aware of this sorry situation, so much so that astronomer John Herschel referred to the question of the history of life as “the mystery of mysteries,” a phrase consciously adopted by Darwin in the Origin. Darwin set out to solve that mystery under the influence of three great thinkers: Newton, the above mentioned Herschel, and the philosopher William Whewell (whom Darwin knew and assiduously frequented in his youth)

Darwin was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, which had also been Newton’s home. Chuck got drilled early on during his Cambridge education with the idea that good science is about finding mechanisms (vera causa), something like the idea of gravitational attraction underpinning Newtonian mechanics. He reflected that all the talk of evolution up to then — including his grandfather’s — was empty, without a mechanism that could turn the idea into a scientific research program.

The second important influence was Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, published in 1831 and read by Darwin shortly thereafter, in which Herschel sets out to give his own take on what today we would call the demarcation problem, i.e. what methodology is distinctive of good science. One of Herschel’s points was to stress the usefulness of analogical reasoning

Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Darwin also read (twice!) Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, which appeared in 1837. In it, Whewell sets out his notion that good scientific inductive reasoning proceeds by a consilience of ideas, a situation in which multiple independent lines of evidence point to the same conclusion.

the first part of the Origin, where Darwin introduces the concept of natural selection by way of analogy with artificial selection can be read as the result of Herschel’s influence (natural selection is the vera causa of evolution)

the second part of the book, constituting Darwin's famous “long argument,” applies Whewell’s method of consilience by bringing in evidence from a number of disparate fields, from embryology to paleontology to biogeography.

What, then, happened to the strict coupling of the ideas of social and biological progress that had preceded Darwin? While he still believed in the former, the latter was no longer an integral part of evolution, because natural selection makes things “better” only in a relative fashion. There is no meaningful sense in which, say, a large brain is better than very fast legs or sharp claws, as long as you still manage to have dinner and avoid being dinner by the end of the day (or, more precisely, by the time you reproduce).

Ruse’s claim that evolution transitioned not from protoscience to science, but from pseudoscience, makes sense to me given the historical and philosophical developments. It wasn’t the first time either. Just think about the already mentioned shift from alchemy to chemistry

Of course, the distinction between pseudoscience and protoscience is itself fuzzy, but we do have what I think are clear examples of the latter that cannot reasonably be confused with the former, SETI for one, and arguably Ptolemaic astronomy. We also have pretty obvious instances of pseudoscience (the usual suspects: astrology, ufology, etc.), so the distinction — as long as it is not stretched beyond usefulness — is interesting and defensible.

It is amusing to speculate which, if any, of the modern pseudosciences (cryonics, singularitarianism) might turn out to be able to transition in one form or another to actual sciences. To do so, they may need to find their philosophically and scientifically savvy Darwin, and a likely bet — if history teaches us anything — is that, should they succeed in this transition, their mature form will look as different from the original as chemistry and alchemy. Or as Darwinism and pre-Darwinian evolutionism.

Darwin called the Origin "one long argument," but I really do think that recognizing that the book contains (at least) two arguments could help to dispel that whole "just a theory" canard. The first half of the book is devoted to demonstrating that natural selection is the true cause of evolution; vera causa arguments require proof that the cause's effect be demonstrated as fact, so the second half of the book is devoted to a demonstration that evolution has really happened. In other words, evolution is a demonstrable fact and natural selection is the theory that explains that fact, just as the motion of the planets is a fact and gravity is a theory that explains it.

Cryogenics is the study of the production of low temperatures and the behavior of materials at those temperatures. It is a legitimate branch of physics and has been for a long time. I think you meant 'cryonics'.

The Singularity means different things to different people. It is uncharitable to dismiss all "singularitarians" by debunking Kurzweil. He is low hanging fruit. Reach for something higher.

religion becomes its own secular catalyst, or, rather, secularization itself is the result of religion. This approach will mature in the most elaborate formulation of what Habermas calls the “linguistification of the sacred,” in volume two of The Theory of Communicative Action. There, basing himself on Durkheim and Mead, Habermas shows how ritual practices and religious worldviews release rational imperatives through the establishment of a communicative grammar that conditions how believers can and should interact with each other, and how they relate to the idea of a supreme being. Habermas writes: worldviews function as a kind of drive belt that transforms the basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity and passes it on to social institutions, thus giving them a moral authority. [. . .] Whereas ritual actions take place at a pregrammatical level, religious worldviews are connected with full-fledged communicative actions.

The thrust of Habermas’s argumentation in this section of The Theory of Communicative Action is to show that religion is the source of the normative binding power of ethical and moral commandments. Yet there is an ambiguity here. While the contents of worldviews may be sublimated into the normative, binding of social systems, it is not entirely clear that the structure, or the grammar, of religious worldviews is itself exhausted. Indeed, in “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality,” Habermas resolves this ambiguity by claiming that the horizontal relationship among believers and the vertical relationship between each believer and God shape the structure of our moral relationship to our neighbour, but now under two corresponding aspects: that of solidarity and that of justice. Here, the grammar of one’s religious relationship to God and the corresponding community of believers are like the exoskeleton of a magnificent species, which, once the religious worldviews contained in them have desiccated under the impact of the forces of secularization, leave behind a casing to be used as a structuring shape for other contents.

Metaphysical thinking, which for Habermas has become untenable by the very logic of philosophical development, is characterized by three aspects: identity thinking, or the philosophy of origins that postulates the correspondence between being and thought; the doctrine of ideas, which becomes the foundation for idealism, which in turn postulates a tension between what is perceived and what can be conceptualized; and a concomitant strong concept of theory, where the bios theoretikos takes on a quasi-sacred character, and where philosophy becomes the path to salvation through dedication to a life of contemplation. By “postmetaphysical” Habermas means the new self-understanding of reason that we are able to obtain after the collapse of the Hegelian idealist system—the historicization of reason, or the de-substantivation that turns it into a procedural rationality, and, above all, its humbling. It is noteworthy that one of the main aspects of the new postmetaphysical constellation is that in the wake of the collapse of metaphysics, philosophy is forced to recognize that it must co-exist with religious practices and language: Philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.

metaphysical thinking either surrendered philosophy to religion or sought to eliminate religion altogether. In contrast, postmetaphysical thinking recognizes that philosophy can neither replace nor dismissively reject religion, for religion continues to articulate a language whose syntax and content elude philosophy, but from which philosophy continues to derive insights into the universal dimensions of human existence.

Habermas claims that even moral discourse cannot translate religious language without something being lost: “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offence against human laws, something was lost.” Still, Habermas’s concern with religion is no longer solely philosophical, nor merely socio-theoretical, but has taken on political urgency. Indeed, he now asks whether modern rule of law and constitutional democracies can generate the motivational resources that nourish them and make them durable. In a series of essays, now gathered in Between Naturalism and Religion, as well as in his Europe: The Faltering Project, Habermas argues that as we have become members of a world society (Weltgesellschaft), we have also been forced to adopt a societal “post-secular self-consciousness.” By this term Habermas does not mean that secularization has come to an end, and even less that it has to be reversed. Instead, he now clarifies that secularization refers very specifically to the secularization of state power and to the general dissolution of metaphysical, overarching worldviews (among which religious views are to be counted). Additionally, as members of a world society that has, if not a fully operational, at least an incipient global public sphere, we have been forced to witness the endurance and vitality of religion. As members of this emergent global public sphere, we are also forced to recognize the plurality of forms of secularization. Secularization did not occur in one form, but in a variety of forms and according to different chronologies.

through a critical reading of Rawls, Habermas has begun to translate the postmetaphysical orientation of modern philosophy into a postsecular self-understanding of modern rule of law societies in such a way that religious citizens as well as secular citizens can co-exist, not just by force of a modus vivendi, but out of a sincere mutual respect. “Mutual recognition implies, among other things, that religious and secular citizens are willing to listen and to learn from each other in public debates. The political virtue of treating each other civilly is an expression of distinctive cognitive attitudes.” The cognitive attitudes Habermas is referring to here are the very cognitive competencies that are distinctive of modern, postconventional social agents. Habermas’s recent work on religion, then, is primarily concerned with rescuing for the modern liberal state those motivational and moral resources that it cannot generate or provide itself. At the same time, his recent work is concerned with foregrounding the kind of ethical and moral concerns, preoccupations, and values that can guide us between the Scylla of a society administered from above by the system imperatives of a global economy and political power and the Charybdis of a technological frenzy that places us on the slippery slope of a liberally sanctioned eugenics.

The MIT researchers’ paper, however, suggests that the danger of information cascades may not be as dire as it previously seemed.

a mathematical model that describes attempts by members of a social network to make binary decisions — such as which of two brands of cell phone to buy — on the basis of decisions made by their neighbors. The model assumes that for all members of the population, there is a single right decision: one of the cell phones is intrinsically better than the other. But some members of the network have bad information about which is which.

The MIT researchers analyzed the propagation of information under two different conditions. In one case, there’s a cap on how much any one person can know about the state of the world: even if one cell phone is intrinsically better than the other, no one can determine that with 100 percent certainty. In the other case, there’s no such cap. There’s debate among economists and information theorists about which of these two conditions better reflects reality, and Kleinberg suggests that the answer may vary depending on the type of information propagating through the network. But previous models had suggested that, if there is a cap, information cascades are almost inevitable.

if there’s no cap on certainty, an expanding social network will eventually converge on an accurate representation of the state of the world; that wasn’t a big surprise. But they also showed that in many common types of networks, even if there is a cap on certainty, convergence will still occur.

people in the past have looked at it using more myopic models,” says Acemoglu. “They would be averaging type of models: so my opinion is an average of the opinions of my neighbors’.” In such a model, Acemoglu says, the views of people who are “oversampled” — who are connected with a large enough number of other people — will end up distorting the conclusions of the group as a whole.

What we’re doing is looking at it in a much more game-theoretic manner, where individuals are realizing where the information comes from. So there will be some correction factor,” Acemoglu says. “If I’m seeing you, your action, and I’m seeing Munzer’s action, and I also know that there is some probability that you might have observed Munzer, then I discount his opinion appropriately, because I know that I don’t want to overweight it. And that’s the reason why, even though you have these influential agents — it might be that Munzer is everywhere, and everybody observes him — that still doesn’t create a herd on his opinion.”

the new paper leaves a few salient questions unanswered, such as how quickly the network will converge on the correct answer, and what happens when the model of agents’ knowledge becomes more complex.

the MIT researchers begin to address both questions. One paper examines rate of convergence, although Dahleh and Acemoglu note that that its results are “somewhat weaker” than those about the conditions for convergence. Another paper examines cases in which different agents make different decisions given the same information: some people might prefer one type of cell phone, others another. In such cases, “if you know the percentage of people that are of one type, it’s enough — at least in certain networks — to guarantee learning,” Dahleh says. “I don’t need to know, for every individual, whether they’re for it or against it; I just need to know that one-third of the people are for it, and two-thirds are against it.” For instance, he says, if you notice that a Chinese restaurant in your neighborhood is always half-empty, and a nearby Indian restaurant is always crowded, then information about what percentages of people prefer Chinese or Indian food will tell you which restaurant, if either, is of above-average or below-average quality.

Weibo won't be turning into Facebook, Mr. Chao said, but will have more Facebook-like features to allow for "stronger social relationships based on our new applications."