Today’s Limerick:
There was a man seeking Truth
A Journey today thought Uncouth.
The Truth still exists
Though commonly dissed
He’s long dead, his Lamp yearns for more use.
– Ligon Law
“The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious.” – Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Dorn, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.
You don’t have to be a beaver counting math geek thrashing about in a cubicle seeking social relevance at tax payer expense to glean the ominous implications from Alex Pentland’s Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Pentland tellingly invokes the Greek god Prometheus as an analogy for his theory. “Prometheus is a Titan god of fire credited with the creation of humanity…who defies the gods by stealing fire – a divine spark in the possession of the gods alone.”- wikipedia. In fact, Pentland compares his “Big Data” to “god’s eye”. The only commonalities between Pentland and Prometheus is hubris and, perhaps, theft. His ad nauseum use of the first person pronoun, his failure to list Tracy Heibeck as co-author due to “the vagaries of the publishing world” (sounding like masked chauvinism), and his lackadaisical acknowledgement of contributors make reading Pentland barely tolerable. You don’t see any of these egoisms in Socrates, Einstein, Asimov or Adler. In fact, Adler, in a brilliant literary riddle, has a tiny, barely discernible image of Daedelus (or is it Icarus?) on the blank page of How to Read a Book.
What’s insidious about the title is his concept doesn’t make “us” smarter. It only encourages plagiaristic behavior – something that has been occurring on every college campus for fifty years. The “Us” that gets smarter is the owners of “Big Data” who use their invasive information to manipulate the flow of information so the population follows the desired path. Philosophers, social “scientists” and mathematicians have been trying to quantify mankind’s behavior for millennia. In the 19th century it was called Marxism. In 20th century it was called eugenics, Socialism – The Final Solution. Pentland’s Social Physics is merely the 21st century’s social media version of its’ predecessors – they all have us look to the State for the “better way” of behaving…of thinking. One can’t help wonder if the ideal end result of Pentland’s theory is Soylent Green.
“If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldly in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulas. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest – nor should they– in describing an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail.” – James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 2020; p. 22
Pentland’s bibliography is broad but shallow. It shows two things: Pentland is not widely read (if the objective is to explain how humans make choices), and Social Physics is not new – not even in applying math to social issues. Pentland succumbs to Maslow’s Hammer: a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool – more commonly known as “If the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to treat every problem as if it were a nail.” There are less invasive approaches to raising a person’s decision making abilities: 1. restore Classical education (including Western Civilization) to education; 2. Management by Objective, Organizational Behavior (I had a semester taught by Steven Covey in 1975 – as inspirational as Adler!); 3. avoid drugs and alcohol – America has become an inebriated and addicted society; 4. watch less TV and read more good books. This would require reversing the popular trend toward seeking solutions from the government for our problems and restoring personal responsibility. Not looking good.
The fawning reviews proves Adler: “Books win the plaudits of the critics and gain widespread popular attention almost to the extent they flout the truth – the more outrageously they do so, the better. Many readers, and most particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards for judging, and praising or condemning, the books they read – their novelty, their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their Truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten. They have, perhaps, been brought to this pass by the fact that so much of current writing outside the sphere of the exact sciences manifests so little concern with Truth.”
Pentland’s secular Socialism is subtly weaved throughout his book:
- “We can no longer think of ourselves as only individuals reaching carefully considered decisions; we must include (I MUST OBEY) the dynamic social effects that influence our individual decisions and drive economic bubbles, political revolutions, ….”
- He counters the tendency to “GroupThink” by offering “incentives” for the recalcitrant to “get on board”. Kind of like COVID-19 payments.
- “Sociometric badges” monitoring our every move, reflex, utterance. The State Department actually considered implanting tracking chips in American travelers (and the military) overseas back in the ’80s / ’90s. Apple watches do the same today.
- Multiple references to “collective thinking” and “collective learning” sound eerily like Hillary Clinton’s (a reluctant mother) It Takes a Village to Raise a Child – you know, like the Soviets did with their children.
- Pentland actually cites circumstances in which capitalism becomes “as dehumanizing” as Marxism or communism.” If nothing else, this proves Pentland is looking at the world through a very small straw. If he believes capitalism has EVER been remotely as dehumanizing as Communism he is severely brain damaged from repeated blows by Maslow’s Hammer.
- His “New Deal on Data” is wrong for the same reason FDR’s New Deal was overthrown by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1932 – it overreached its’ authority.
- “The Social Evolution and Friends and Family Studies …binds us together into a sort of collective intelligence.” This is a subtle reference to Darwin’s Origin of Species a theory that keeps raising its head despite the massive science that has disproven it (see Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer)
- Social Physics is just another attempt at adding another floor to the Tower of Babel. I recommend reading The Five Foot Bookshelf instead. By doing so, one may maintain privacy and freedom as well as experience exhilarating enlightenment. This will elevate you and society. This is the strategy our Founding Fathers had in mind.
- Pentland’s “Lab of Life” sounds more like East German Stazi surveillance on steroids.
- Though Pentland disparages History, Adler says “History is the story of what led up to now. Read a history not only to learn what happened at a particular time and place in the past but also to learn the way men act at all times and places.” -Adler, How to Read a Book, p. 236.
“The elite’s attempts to reach Utopia through Social engineering has never bode well for the common man. In fact, they have always created the “greatest Hells” – Barry Goldwater.
“I am frankly skeptical when people working on the study of societies begin arming themselves with scalpels, slide-rules and test-tubes. For they are promising more than they can possibly fulfill. The protestations of complete objectivity that we have been hearing from students of society in the past quarter century take on a religious note: it is as if they were washing themselves in the blood of the scientific lamb.” – Max Lerner
“The brain’s fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has the wonder of it will remain – that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight, and sound, and touch. Could it ever be explained how matter becomes conscious?” – Hugh McKuen, Saturday (from NetFlix Words and Pictures)
“In it’s second century the effort of American democracy – from the progressive reforms of the 19th century to the New Deal- was directed towards limiting and controlling the excessive power of financial and industrial capitalism. In the third century this objective is joined by the desire to control the excessive power of the new technocratic, bureaucratic, and intellectual elites. This is one of the most important themes in the American debate today.” – Ugo Stilla, Corriere Della Sera, Milan, Italy, 1976
One can only hope Pentland shares the same fate as Prometheus.
See Also:
- Social Dilemma, NetFlix; written by Orlowski, Davis Coombs, and Vickie Curtis, 2020
- The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon, 1938
- The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer, 1951
- Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Propaganda by Serge Chakotin, 1939
- Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928
