roundtable followup, 19.1.2012

we had a roundtable followup to the social nets discussion day -my 4 cents were

1. why don't we build more things to test our theorie?

2 . these things might be new socieities...e.g. fit-for-purpose replacements for socialism and free market capitalism

(cyber-anarcho-syndicalism)?

3. how about we have a new way to do inter-disciplinary research in this area, using social networks to do the research???

 

People need to read more - for example, when I look at The Rational OPtimist, by Matt Ridley, I discover that he seems completely unaware of the work by Marcel Mauss nearly 100 years ago on The Gift, which covers all the ideas Ridley thinks he's made up about exchange! I discover that people don't know the work by Mancur Olsen on the Logic of Collective Action from 50 years ago. Even people who've heard of Dunbar's number, don't read Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language.

 

More essential readings

Michael Kearns work on Graphs&Games

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/

 

Edward Cherry, On Human Communication (probably out of print....)

Lots of John Doyle's work on Highly Optimised Tolerant systems....

 

etc etc - maybe I should write a book about it:)

 

some people asked about our (CL work in social nets in RL and online - there are various papers from the project (some by Dunbar et al linked at

http://www.social-nets.eu/publications.html