03/21/05 Water Mushroom courtesy of Studio Antwan
"I bet sociology could use a guy like you" Craig Newmark writes back in January in a post entitled "A brief reply to Whats Wrong with Economics?" He was speaking "to the gentleman who claims economics isn't 'predictive' and has the same maturity as "physics before Newton and possibly before Galileo," His comment struck a chord, poet and musicmaker as I am, and son not only to a former Princeton Economics Professor but also Grandson to another Economics professor, a supply side economic advisor to FDR, who just happened to be Alan Greenspan's teacher way back in 1946.
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The fact of the matter is that sociology could indeed use a few more mathematically and scientifically grounded minds, particularly given recent studies by physicists that have used mathematical modeling to better understand the dynamics of social interaction. Similarly, the field of economics could use a few more humanistically inclined folk, especially in light of the rise of prospect theory.
As long as sociologists think economists heartless and economists think sociologists fools and dreamers, we are going to miss the forest for the trees. The "answer" as the Eastern philosophers are fond of saying, lies somewhere in the middle, the "Great nothingness" from which springs forth all being. Or rather, "in the middle of a contradiction there lies truth."
Prescriptively speaking, there ought to greater efforts made to bridge paradigmatic theoretical constructs across entire disciplines, not just with respect to internecine rivalries. Psychologists and Sociologists should be working WITH physicists and mathemeticians, not against. It's no "accident" that the double helix was discovered in a dream, the quark in a Joyce novel; and it's no mere interesting "oh, you don't say..." that Alan Greenspan studied at Julliard before going to NYU to study economics. As Willy Wonka put it: "We are the musicmakers. We are the dreamers of dreams." Or as an economist might put it "Atttude and morale are factors of production."
Simply put, the good market is on sale. The NYT called it "Death by Smiley Face" and cited Craig's List in particular as a practitioner of it, I call it "trickle-up economics" based on a model of psychic barter, universal utility, power and the speed of idea (squared). Hegelian dialectic (aka "triangulation") also figures in. I can anecdotally support my case umpteen zillion ways to Sunday, but it's outside in and inside out rather than bottom up cumulative or top down reverse engineered. Jung called this the "final" rather than the "causal" perspective. I just call it QUANTUM SOCIAL RELATIVITY and it's a psychic fact of existence regardless of the underlying math.
We ourselves are the space and the connection between things. As such, welcome to the 5th dimension aka the eternal "now" and the psychosocial eqivalent to e=mc^2 and perhaps far more:
Z= PI2
Zightgeist = Power * speed of Idea2
Network, system and string theory are the missing links. Also, for what it's worth, my derivations for Z=PI2 predict that light can travel backwards as well as that 1=2 (aka the circular paradox wherein the formaula for the Area can reduce to 1 or 2). But first you've got to accept that 0 actually = -1 and is the opposite side of +1. In physics 101 it's called potential energy.
There's much, much more, but I'll leave it at that for now. I'm not hard to find if anyone who this way comes is interested in discussing further.
