Friday, March 09, 2012
Is Everything Culture?
In my readings on culture, I've found a fascinating set of theories called digital physics. These theories posit that the universe fundamentally consists of information (i.e., the "it for bit" doctrine that every particle, atom, quark, and so on is describable as a dichotomous "yes or no" categorization), and thus that the universe is in principle computable. Opponents to digital physics claim that reality is continuous, but the rejoinder is that reality only appears continuous, and is fundamentally categorical (for example, the Planck length suggests that reality is quantized). More relevant to sociology, these perspectives suggest that everything is culture -- i.e., information -- and thus that societies can be usefully modeled as information systems.
Blog Archive
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2012
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March
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- Physics Envy
- Irving Louis Horowitz
- MyPersonality
- Why are Economists so (Consistently) Led Astray Ab...
- Popularity of Programming Languages
- Big Science and Sociology
- Statistical Lexicon
- McKinsey on Big Data
- Inequality: Everyone's Thinking About It
- Universal Limits in High-Dimensional Statistics
- Rethinking Tragedy and Success
- Why Inequality Matters
- Inequality "Crisis" of Marriage
- Corporate Culture Revisited
- Misc. Links
- MIT Inequality Talk
- Scatter Plot Matrix in R
- Taxes and Inequality
- 3-D Scatter Plots Redux
- Checking Weather in Stata
- Is Everything Culture?
- Ternary (or Triaxial) Plots
- Causality and Ethnography
- The Mystery of Power-Law Distributions
- Visualizing a Correlation Table
- Why Models are Not Data
- R versus Stata Redux
- Culture and Poverty
- Values and Politics
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March
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