Tim Halpin-Healy (Physics, Barnard College) spoke today at the Collective Dynamics Group on “The Dynamics of Conformity and Dissent”. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend his talk–it looked interesting–but I have to say, speaking curmudgeonly and parochially as a political scientist, that I wish physicists wouldn’t use loaded words like “conformity” and “dissent” for these mathematical simplifications. (Conversely, I don’t like it when social scientists refer sloppily to uncertainty principles and quantum effects in social interactions.)

I conveyed my vague sense of irritation to Peter Dodds and he replied,

i essentially agree—though on occasion a simple physics model
could be said to genuinely capture some essence of whatever absurdly complicated phenomenon, such as cooperation. then it’s okay, as long
as the physicists involved proceed with some humility (which is of
course extremely unlikely). on the other hand, insane notions of
people behaving in a way the quantum mechanics might explain (or ising
models, another classic) are truly riling. the wholesale transplant
of a theory that makes sense for gluons to human behaviour is not good
science. philip anderson’s science paper of 1972 (i think it was 1972, `more is different’) had the right idea i think. at every scale
there are a set of locally-based rules that give rise to some collective behaviour at the next scale. and it may be that predicting the rules
at the next level is extremely difficult, and they have to be taken
from empirical observations.

the particular paper we’re discussing on friday has some
outcomes that i thought you in particular would be interested in.
basically, the system they have evolves into two factions in most
cases and into three in relatively special cases. the big problem
i have with this model is that the mechanism doesn’t make much sense.
technically, the model itself is extremely interesting and they have many excellent results but the basic set up is odd.