For example, what would it look like to transform chains of thought into “social chains of thought,” to build not only cognitive benchmarks but social benchmarks?

(as well as returning to and drawing from very intriguing ideas by sociologists in the last wave of AI enthusiasm, such as Randall Collins’ proposal for how to build a sociological AI from out of Meadian-Goffmanian insights).

The seminar will pair close reading of social theory and recent technical work on social AI with hands-on experiments on multi-agent LLM systems

We will treat that dimension not only as an intellectual matter but as a design problem: If social intelligence arises in and is stabilized through social interaction and order, then artificial agents must be equipped with those interactional and organizational capacities.

On the way, I suggest that Bourdeusian sociology is an outgrowth of empty formalistic thinking invading the substance of social life, and that the genre form of the contemporary sociological theory article also displays that same formalism creeping into the sociological representation of social life

As an alternative, I explore the Hegelian idea of "tarrying with the negative,” using Talcott Parsons as a guide.

I don't expect to convince Seth to spend the next few years reading Hegel. But still, authors like Kant and Hegel cast long shadows, seeing them has value, especially because they appear in forms you might not expect, such as in Bourdeusian soc of culture or the genre form of the theory article.

Rob Ford’s mayoralty in Toronto is a telling case, in that it occurred outside of national politics and hot-button issues, and within a multi-cultural metropolis (often represented as more or less inherently on one side of the populist divide).
This type of case helps build more general theory.

The case study method helps to give some empirical flesh to a conversation that threatens to become highly abstract.

The populist cocktail becomes politically potent with horizontal and vertical are conjoined.
To the extent that populism represents a revolt against rationalism, rationalized forms of mediating social organization are a key target. Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is a good place to start.

The script includes two dimensions: the more familiar vertical one between elites and the people, and a horizontal one between insider and outsider. The vertical often includes a third term, a “sub-popular” element beneath the people (often represented as parasites, sponges, deviants, disorderly).

key points:
Building on Brubaker, Populism is a social script, which leaves room for improvisation to specific contexts, topics, and ideologies as it is reproduced locally