Pentland frames free will as a low-frequency statistical deviation from predictable social patterns
Evidence
Unlike Skinner, though, Pentland is careful to round the square, perhaps in the hope of evading a withering review by the likes of Noam Chomsky. … Pentland sidesteps the risks of Skinner’s jeremiad by taking a softer tone: “Some people react negatively to the phrase social physics, because they feel that it implies that people are machines without free will and without the ability to move independently of our role in society.” Like Meyer, Pentland acknowledges that humans have a “capacity for independent thought” but insists that social physics “does not need to try to account for it.” As Pentland sees it, the problem is not that “independent thought” is omitted from the picture but rather that “internal, unobservable” thought processes are just friction that “will occasionally emerge to defeat our best social physics models.” Fortunately, the models are not really in danger because “the data tell us that deviations from our regular social patterns occur only a few percent of the time.” The autonomous individual is but a statistical blip, a slip of the pen that is easily overridden in the march toward confluent action and someone’s greater good. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1406
Categorization
- DEFINE: Captures the core defining move of social physics: independent thought redefined as measurable friction, a statistical blip, rather than an ontological fact.
- SEED: Article angle: the rhetorical technique of ‘rounding the square’ — acknowledging free will verbally while engineering it out of the model — as a template for how tech credo writers disarm critics.
- XREF: connects to: Scientific fields’ deterministic stance leaves philosophy to defend apologetic free will — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2554; Pentland recasts society as a causal system to be engineered from behavior data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1382; Freedom is compatible with determinism when thought is part of the causal mix (+3 more)