If people have freedom of choice, do their lives go better? Under what conditions? By what criteria? Consider three distinct problems. (1) In countless situations, human beings face a serious problem of “navigability”; they do not know how to get to their preferred destination, whether the issue involves health, education, employment, or well-being in general. This problem is especially challenging for people who live under conditions of severe deprivation, but it can be significant for all of us. (2) Many of us face problems of self-control, and our decisions today endanger our own future. What we want, right now, hurts us, next year. (3) In some cases, we would actually be happy or well-off with two or more different outcomes, whether the issue involves our jobs, our diets, our city, or even our friends and partners, and the real question, on which good answers are increasingly available, is what most promotes our welfare. The evaluative problem, in such cases, is especially challenging if a decision would alter people’s identity, values, or character. Private and public institutions — including small companies, large companies, governments – can help people to have better lives, given (1), (2), and (3). This Essay, the text of the Holberg Lecture 2018, is the basis for a different, thicker, and more elaborate treatment in a book.

 

Sunstein, Cass R., Freedom: The Holberg Lecture, 2018 (June 2, 2018). On Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2019), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3217325

Source: papers.ssrn.com

The friendship paradox states that, on average, our friends have more friends than we do. In network terms, the average degree over the nodes can never exceed the average degree over the neighbours of nodes. This effect, which is a classic example of sampling bias, has attracted much attention in the social science and network science literature, with variations and extensions of the paradox being defined, tested and interpreted. Here, we show that a version of the paradox holds rigorously for eigenvector centrality: on average, our friends are more important than us. We then consider general matrix-function centrality, including Katz centrality, and give sufficient conditions for the paradox to hold. We also discuss which results can be generalized to the cases of directed and weighted edges. In this way, we add theoretical support for a field that has largely been evolving through empirical testing.

 

Centrality-Friendship Paradoxes: When Our Friends Are More Important Than Us
Desmond J. Higham

Source: arxiv.org

•A generic and novel computational framework is introduced for measuring and optimizing privacy-utility trade-offs.

•The framework applicability is validated analytically and empirically using real-world data from a Smart Grid pilot project.

•Privacy-utility trade-offs are optimized under informational self determination.

 

Optimization of privacy-utility trade-offs under informational self-determination
Thomas Asikis, Evangelos Pournaras

Future Generation Computer Systems

Source: www.sciencedirect.com

The behavioural composition of a group and the dynamics of social interactions can both influence how social animals work collectively. For example, individuals exhibiting certain behavioural tendencies may have a disproportionately large impact on the group, and so are referred to as keystone individuals, while interactions between individuals can facilitate information transmission about resources. Despite the potential impact of both behavioural composition and interactions on collective behaviour, the relationship between consistent behaviours (also known as personalities) and social interactions remains poorly understood. Here, we use stochastic actor-oriented models to uncover the interdependencies between boldness and social interactions in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. We find that boldness has no effect on the likelihood of forming social interactions, but interactions do affect boldness, and lead to an increase in the boldness of the shyer individual. Furthermore, spiders tend to interact with the same individuals as their neighbours. In general, boldness decreases over time, but once an individual’s boldness begins to increase, this increase accelerates, suggesting a positive feedback mechanism. These dynamics of interactions and boldness result in skewed boldness distributions of a few bold individuals and many shy individuals, as observed in nature. This group behavioural composition facilitates efficient collective behaviours, such as rapid collective prey attack. Thus, by examining the relationship between behaviour and interactions, we reveal the mechanisms that underlie the emergence of adaptive group composition and collective behaviour.

 

Social interactions shape individual and collective personality in social spiders
Edmund R. Hunt, Brian Mi, Camila Fernandez, Brandyn M. Wong, Jonathan N. Pruitt, Noa Pinter-Wollman

Proc. Roy. Soc. B
Published 5 September 2018.DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2018.1366

Source: rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org