330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. There's a idea in social science circles called physics envy. Economics, especially, is, susceptible to this idea. It's not supposed to be a good thing. You're not actually supposed to be envious of physics, but social science is hard. People are messy. There's a lot of variables going on. Physics is able to make enormous progress by simplifying things a great deal. In part that's because the fundamental ingredients that we study but there aren't a lot of moving parts. The basic things that we're looking at are are sufficiently simple. You can describe them using relatively few variables and you can isolate all the interesting things that are going on in these systems with small numbers of variables. As a result of this, you can make tremendous progress. You can prove theorems. You can do experiments that test your theories to many, many decimal places. It's a lot of fun. Of course people would be envious of this. But it's a disease or at least something to be avoided to therefore try to make your social scientific research too much like physics. When you do social science, you should admit that there are complications there that cannot be abstracted away in the same way that we abstract away air resistance or friction when we're doing physics. Nevertheless, I'm sure that everyone who listens to Mindscape on a regular basis knows, I do think that there are contexts in which physics like reasoning can be helpful or even interesting in the social science. There can be contexts in which physics type of reasoning and concepts borrowed from physics can be really useful, very interesting, in the social scientific contexts. Ideas like equilibrium, ideas of emergence in general, ideas of what is collective behavior like when it arises from the sort of mindless, nondirected interaction of many small things. These are things that physicists think about all the time and are very, very relevant to the social sciences. So today's guest is Petter Thurnberg, who, is a professor of computational social science. I promise I didn't know this, but he admits on the podcast that he actually has a physics background, so this makes some sense. But he uses models, agent based models that we've talked about recently, with Doan Farmer and others, as ways to study the behavior of social systems. Can you make a little model where the individual pieces are either simple agents that always act in some way, or maybe there's a little bit of stochasticity in there, or maybe they're even very complicated. We'll talk about an example where Better used LLMs, large language models, to model human interactions in social media landscapes. And then you can ask, what is the robust behavior? Do you get things that we observe in the real world? Do you get polarization? Do you get sort of an accumulation of influence in certain people rather than having …