Steve Steinberg on "Crowd Dynamics"
Wall Street hacker Steve Steinberg, a former BB guest-blogger, has finally started a blog. From his teenage days with legendary hacker gang Legion of Doom, to his influential Worm and Intertek zines, to his years at Wired, Steve has always managed to grok complex technologies and illuminate them for the lay-person. He really gets what's going on under the hood of the tech itself but also how it may intersect with culture and business. He is a master at showing why most conventional wisdom is anything but wise, and he does it without the typical snarkiness of most tech trendspotters. Steve's new blog is called .csv, for "comma separated values." From his latest post, on the buzz around "crowd dynamics":
The tools and theories needed to analyze social interactions are just now reaching the level of sophistication — in accuracy, in robustness – necessary to leave the lab and enter commercial duty. We are in a period analogous to the early 1970s, when developments like the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes equation transformed finance, changing it from an art to a science, and opening enormous new markets in the process. Now, new equations describing “crowd dynamics” are about to change our lives. And not always for the better. This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious....Link
It wasn’t long after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that US military theorists began to realize that our soldiers were completely lost amidst the country’s byzantine tribal structures, religious factions, and internecine feuds. They needed tools to help navigate these social structures that were as effective as their GPS devices and laser-designators were at guiding them through the local geography. DARPA moved quickly, creating a half-dozen social science programs, all of them focused on near-term research with mostly tangible deliverables. The mission became known as “human terrain mapping”, sure to be one of the most important neologisms of this decade.
It’s interesting, if unsurprising, that DARPA had focused on the social sciences only once before: in 1962, during the Vietnam War.
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I wonder if "human terrain mapping" is used by police locally to chart organized crime activities in the States.
interesting. I don't fear misuse though. If used for oppression by predicting actions, new actions will evolve.
Wow, "grok", how about some water sharing? Bringing it back to the old skool.
Oh sure, he can "grok complex technologies", BUT, can he "smurf" them?
@Nelsnelson and @Ill Lich, Ha! I think I've been hanging out with John Battelle too long! He's the only person I know who still uses the word "grok" and makes it work. It's an oldie, but a goodie.
If FM 3-19.15 is any clue, the section of crowd dynamics shows some corrections, but the sections on crowd types and crowd tactics stick with the discredited Le Bon model and are only suitable for fertilizer. I expect the same ideological filters which blinded the DoD to mainstream social science will blind the DoD to DARPA's research.
@ #5: I thought Steve Jobs was known to grok every now and then.
What is funny is that the Black-Scholes equation is nothing more than a thermodynamic equation of how heat dissapates. Undergraduate engineering students have been learning the exact same equation for close to 100 years and yet some U of C finance PhD student uses it in the 1960's and wins the Nobel Prize. CAPM is the same, just a statistical model used by engineers for years that someone slaped on finance.
oh dear. now we'll have to kill you.
I'm all for hearing someone's groked views on this world. What's one more model of reality running on my brain?