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Computational sociology

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Re: Computational sociology

#5
post #3

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) Snark aside, I'm definitely interested in whether or not this field will have impacts on future policy. In order to be useful I feel it would have to actively avoid simplifying assumptions that have trapped similar fields.

Regarding academic study, sociology is so partisan you need not worry about them using computer science and/or logic to uncover hidden truths in the near future.

In the private sector however, companies such as Premise and Palantir are already eons ahead of academia, but their insights and data are proprietary.

Re: Computational sociology

#6
There's another field closely related to Computational Sociology called "Computational Social Science" - an area/community which I was a part of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_social_science

There are many universities like Stanford, Cornell and Columbia which have dedicated working groups for Computational Social Science.

https://iriss.stanford.edu/css

http://as.cornell.edu/block/computational-social-sciences

http://datascience.columbia.edu/computational-social-science

Re: Computational sociology

#8

The "impact on society" paragrapg is quite short. Has any work of computational sociology inspired a real policy? Could it replace economy as the main driver of politics and policies?

Depending on how you classify him (as an economist or a sociologist), Thomas Schelling's work on residential segregation has likely informed policy over the last decades.

Recently a nice animation of his dynamic models of segregation processes was posted here: http://ncase.me/polygons/

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