Social Capital and How It Affects Real Capital

Doing the daily reading for yesterday's class, it strikes me that we trust other people a great deal in order to live our daily lives. This includes loved ones, obviously, but I am talking about total strangers. How do we know, for example, that those driving on the road won't stop for us when we cross the road on foot? Their car won't be affected, and if more people got hit crossing the road, fewer people would attempt it. This would enable drivers to stop less, since they must stop for fewer people crossing the road. Clay Shirky in his book refers to this as social capital. If we wish to have social capital in our society, we must invest in that capital. Jesus called it service. We must demonstrate that we want to make ethical and moral decisions on a regular basis, for if we do not, the very systems allowing us to make money will break down. Consider the case if no one stopped for pedestrians. It would become more difficult to travel at all, since most people must at least walk through a parking lot at the end of their journey. This is part of what Jesus meant, I think, when He said that by putting others first, we promote our own ends.

The Mathematics of Groups

The most interesting thing about Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, is that it demonstrates that the mathematics behind group forming is inherently tied to that group's structure, longevity, and purpose. His book outlines the power law distribution, Metcalfe's Law, and Reed's law, and shows in a down-to-earth fashion that these theoretical and discreet principles of mathematics profoundly impact the formation of groups in our world. That there are basic, guiding principles which govern complex phenomenon is an idea which feels timeless; yet, interestingly, this idea is younger than the computer itself. This idea was a revolutionary idea in mathematics, and was put forth by Benoit Mandelbrot, famous for discovering fractals. Mandelbrot discovered that some shapes looked similar at different levels of magnification, and also discovered that a relatively simple formula governed this complex and sometimes erratic shape. This self-similar design appears in Shirky's book also, on page thus-and-so, when he starts to talk about how small-world networks look similar to itself at different scales. Thus, he ties into Mandelbrot's fractals, and hence that complex phenomenon can be described by simple rules, but also shows that in spite of that, these phenomenon are still relatively unpredictable. Though he did not mean to do so, Shirky showed how social networks relate to the mathematical framework of fractal geometry pioneered by Mandelbrot, giving us hope that there is a way to examine social phenomena in a mathematically rigorous way.

Tweeting During Conference

I failed in every attempt to create a more descriptive title for this blog post, because I fail in every attempt to describe twitter or the experience of tweeting during General Conference. The speed at which people were tweeting astounded me --- I saw the tweets on twitter of quotes from talks, including graphical quotes, before I saw them on the screen (since there was a delay of live video coverage of about a minute). I tweeted quotes that meant a lot to me. One such quote was favorited many times by my friends, and was by Jeffrey R. Holland: "Defend your beliefs with courtesy and compassion, but defend them. #ElderHolland #ldsconf". I also browsed various hash tags created during conference, including "#ldsconf" and, not surprisingly, "#OrdainWomen". The latter saddened me that so many were online in that discussion, but as with topics discussed in Clay Shirky's book, it is difficult and maybe even wrong to prevent a group from forming, even if someone disagrees with the group's ideals.

Immigration in the United States

Gaming and More

Everyone engages in some addictive behavior or other. Were it not so, everyone would be completely free and able to choose to do the right thing. We would be perfect if we had no addictions. Because of this, it is important that everyone know how to deal with addictions. To that end, and in that light, this article tells us that even doing recreational activities can be addictive. It warns against the evil even of throwing our lives out of balance. This warning reminds the reader that anything can be addicting, and that everyone should learn how to control their own addictions.