RE: The Problem of Collective Reputation
This is a fine exegesis of the state of social physics. Consequently, it suffers from shortcomings typical of extant physics, particularly oversimplification. You point out that your analysis is based on economic metrics, and this ignores that many social factors are vastly more important than mere money.
I think you misinterpret me. When I define "markets" I'm not talking about "money" but talking about "resources". Social resources aren't necessarily money. Reputation for example is a social "resource" but it is not money and cannot really be bought with money. Social rewards aren't always money either. Social status and rank are social rewards which have to be earned through some process and which do not have anything to do with money specifically.
So when I speak of markets in the social sense I'm not really talking about money markets in the narrow economic sense but of biological markets too, and social dynamics of the human (and even non-human) species.
You use the words 'community' and 'crowd', and this neglects that we are communities, crowds, and individuals. I rarely, for example, find any particular community a perfect fit. I virtually always will act contrary to the modus of a given community.
It is not a fact that individuals exist. I am not saying I believe individuals can exist but I do think deep down a lot of people want to have an individual identity at least. I think a lot of people want to be treated as an individual, as a unique person, and not judged by who they associated with in the past, or have expectations placed on them because they fit into some pre-defined social category.
While there is great value in present understanding, it is far short of a definitive basis for any kind of roadmap, long range planning, or similar undertakings. Social physics remains an intuitive art more than a science, and will for quite some time, IMHO.
Social physics in my opinion is mathematics not art or science. It's as much science as data science is science, in that really it's mathematics. I think science has a more narrow definition, and involves experiments, making predictions about the behavior of reality and testing hypotheses.
I guess that was unclear due to the following from the beginning of your post.
You state:
While it is true we are a social species, we are also not eusocial, but quite variable in our acculturation. I note that I actually do not simply fit into the extant pre-defined categories, and undertake my own course based on my personal analysis of what is meet and proper.
While statistically I am insignificant, it remains true that such individualism spawns neologisms culturally, and this cannot be reckoned by extant social physics.
There is much good that can be learned from applying mathematics to big data. However, that application is hamstrung by nescience. We cannot apply analytical methods to data if we don't understand the actual real world reasons the data is as it is. We don't understand cognition, consciousness, and much else. What we assume about why the data is generated as it is critically affects how we interpret that data, and simply crunching numbers is nothing more than Sudoku.
Social physics necessarily claims to be more than mere number crunching of data, and this is obvious from the name of the field itself. It claims to relate those data to society, and we understand very little of society beyond that it generates data. Improved understanding of the genesis of that data is necessary before such analysis can be functionally applied to social physics.
Which is why I avoid assuming. I simply say I don't know. I don't know if there really are individuals. The science (physics) says there is no free will for example. I also don't know whether or not consciousness is an illusion as some philosophers say or whether it's quantum as some mathematicians say.
All I can see are behaviors. So the data we have does not include what they call "private events". We cannot know anything other than behaviors and from this we have data. Social physics at best can detect behaviors from the data or in some cases maybe predict future behavior statistically but it cannot work magic. It could be because we simply don't have enough data or it could be that social physics just isn't as powerful as some of the mathematicians seem to think.
I'm not going to defend or attack social physics but if it proves to be useful then I'll make use of it out of pragmatism.
References