Social Physics?

This article caught my attention but I don’t know quite what to make of it. Harry Seldon’s Psychohistory still seems a long way off.

Exploring the entropic nature of political polarization through its formulation as a isolated thermodynamic system

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31585-w

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Not quite the same, but it reminds me a bit of how traffic can be modelled as a fluid flow, and exhibits some of the same behavior (such as shock waves).

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Scratching my head over that one. Maybe they are saying that as one gets a politically extreme agent (i.e., a populist candidate who gains traction), their influence spreads to others who share some amount of political affinity. So they too start parroting the populist, separatist talking points. That could be a bit like how a hot spot makes surrounding material heat up. Is that what they are trying to say?

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