{"id":3314,"date":"2012-09-17T19:48:50","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T00:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3314"},"modified":"2012-09-17T19:48:50","modified_gmt":"2012-09-18T00:48:50","slug":"phys-rev-letters-meets-homo-ideologicus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2012\/09\/17\/worldview\/phys-rev-letters-meets-homo-ideologicus\/","title":{"rendered":"Phys Rev Letters meets Homo ideologicus"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Wikipedia, Physical Review Letters’ <\/a>“focus is rapid dissemination of significant, or notable, results of fundamental research on all topics related to all fields of physics. This is accomplished by rapid publication of short reports, called ‘Letters'”. That’s what I always thought, so I was somewhat taken aback to find an article in last week’s issue entitled, “Encouraging Moderation: Clues from a Simple Model of Ideological Conflict.” Unfortunately, you can’t see the whole thing without a subscription, but here’s the abstract<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some of the most pivotal moments in intellectual history occur when a new ideology sweeps through a society, supplanting an established system of beliefs in a rapid revolution of thought. Yet in many cases the new ideology is as extreme as the old. Why is it then that moderate positions so rarely prevail? Here, in the context of a simple model of opinion spreading, we test seven plausible strategies for deradicalizing a society and find that only one of them significantly expands the moderate subpopulation without risking its extinction in the process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s physics?! Not according to any of the definitions in my ancient copy of Webster’s Dictionary<\/em>.\u00a0 Evidently some new ones have cropped up since it was published, and nobody bothered to inform me.\u00a0 In any case, tossing in\u00a0this kind of stuff doesn’t exactly enhance the integrity of the field.\u00a0 If you don’t have access to the paper, I would not encourage you to visit your local university campus to have a look.\u00a0 I doubt the effort would be worth it.<\/p>\n

Where should I start?\u00a0 In the first place, the authors simply assume that “moderate” is to be conflated with “good”, without bothering to offer a coherent definition of “moderate.”\u00a0 In the context of U.S. politics, for example, the term is practically useless.\u00a0 People with an ideological ax to grind tend to consider themselves “moderate,” and their opponents “extreme.”\u00a0 Conservatives refer to the mildest of their opponents as “extreme left wing,” and liberals refer to the most milque-toast of their opponents as “ultra right wing.”\u00a0 Consider, for example, a post about the Muhammad film flap that just appeared on a website with the moniker, “The Moderate Voice<\/a>.”\u00a0 I don’t doubt that it might be termed “moderate” in the academic milieu from which papers such as the one we are discussing usually emanate, but it wouldn’t pass the smell test<\/a> as such among mainstream conservatives, and has already been dismissed in those quarters as the fumings of the raving extremist hacks of the left.\u00a0 Back in the 30’s,\u00a0it was a commonplace and decidedly\u00a0“moderate” opinion among the authors who contributed articles to The New Republic, the American Mercury, the Atlantic, and the other prestigious intellectual journals of the day was that capitalism was breathing its last, and should be replaced with a socialist system of one stripe or another as soon as possible.\u00a0 Obviously, what passes as\u00a0“moderate” isn’t constant, even over\u00a0relatively short times.\u00a0 Is the Tea Party Movement moderate?\u00a0 Certainly not as far as most university professors are concerned, but decidedly so among mainstream conservatives.<\/p>\n

According to the authors, the types of ideological swings they refer to occur in science as well as politics.\u00a0 One wonders what “moderation” would look like in such cases.\u00a0 Perhaps the\u00a0textbooks would inform us that only half the species on earth evolved, and God created the rest, or that, while\u00a0oxygen is necessary to keep a fire burning, phlogiston is necessary to start one, or that only the most visible\u00a0stars are imbedded in a crystal ball surrounding the earth known as the “firmament,” while the other half\u00a0are actually many light years away.<\/p>\n

Undeterred by such considerations, the authors created a simple mathematical model that is supposed to reflect the dynamics of ideological change.\u00a0 Just as the economic models are all infallible for predicting the behavior of Homo economicus<\/a>, it is similarly effective at predicting the behavior of what one might call Homo ideologicus.\u00a0 As for Homo sapiens, not so much.\u00a0 There is no attempt whatsoever to incorporate even the most elementary aspects of human nature in the model.\u00a0 It is inhabited by “speakers” and “listeners,” who\u00a0are identified as\u00a0either AB, the inhabitants of the\u00a0moderate middle ground, or A and B, the extemists on either side of it.\u00a0 For good measure, there is also an Ac<\/sub>, inhabited by “committed” and intransigent followers of A.\u00a0 The subpopulations in these groups are, in turn, labeled nA<\/sub>, nB, <\/sub>nAB<\/sub>, and p. \u00a0Only moderate listeners can be converted to one of the extremes, and vice versa<\/em>, although we are reliably informed that, for example, the Nazis found some of their most fertile recruiting grounds among the Communists at the opposite extreme, and certainly not just among German moderates.\u00a0 With the assumptions noted above, and setting aside trivialities such as units of measure, the authors come up with “dynamic equations” such as,<\/p>\n

nA<\/sub> = (p + nA<\/sub>)nAB<\/sub> – nA<\/sub>nB<\/sub>
\nnB<\/sub> = nB<\/sub>nAB<\/sub> – (p + nA<\/sub>)n<\/p>\n

There are variations, complete with parameters to account for “stubbornness” and “evangelism.”\u00a0 There are any number of counterintuitive\u00a0assumptions implicit in the models, such as that all\u00a0speakers are equally effective at convincing others to change sides, opinions about given issues are held\u00a0independently of opinions about other issues, although this is\u00a0almost never the case among people who care about the issues one way or the other,\u00a0that a metric for\u00a0deciding what is the moderate “good” and what the extreme “evil” will always be available to the philosopher kings who apply the models, etc.\u00a0 The models were tested on “real social networks,” and (surprise, surprise)\u00a0the curves\u00a0derived from a judicious choice of\u00a0nA<\/sub>, nB<\/sub>, etc., were in nice agreement with predictions.<\/p>\n

According to the authors,<\/p>\n

Since we present no formal evidence that the dynamics of (the equations noted above) do actually occur in practice, our work could alternatively be viewed as posing this model and its subsequent generalizations as interesting in their own right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I heartily concur with the first part of the sentence, I suggest that the model and its subsequent generalizations might be of more enduring interest to sociologists than physicists.\u00a0 Perhaps the editors of Phys Rev Letters and their reviewers will consider that possibility the next time a similar paper is submitted, and kindly\u00a0direct the authors to a more appropriate journal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Wikipedia, Physical Review Letters’ “focus is rapid dissemination of significant, or notable, results of fundamental research on all topics related to all fields of physics. This is accomplished by rapid publication of short reports, called ‘Letters’”. That’s what I always thought, so I was somewhat taken aback to find an article in last … Continue reading “Phys Rev Letters meets Homo ideologicus”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,24,28,67,114,1],"tags":[151,150],"class_list":["post-3314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-demonization","category-human-nature","category-ideology","category-physics","category-worldview","tag-ideology-2","tag-physics-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Rs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3314"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3316,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314\/revisions\/3316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}