Lone Gunman

The small sam­ple size of Stan­ley Milgram’s small world exper­i­ment means that the the­ory of ‘six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion’ and the con­clu­sion drawn from it–primarily, the Influential’s the­ory pop­u­larised by Mal­colm Glad­well in The Tip­ping Point–could be deeply flawed. That was the start­ing point for Dun­can Watts’ research that led him to say “the Tip­ping Point is toast”.

So to research how ideas and trends spread virally, Watts (who is author of Every­thing is Obvi­ous, prin­ci­pal research sci­en­tist at Yahoo! Research (he directs their Human Social Dynam­ics group), and found­ing direc­tor of Colum­bia University’s Col­lec­tive Dynam­ics Group) ran large-scale repro­duc­tions of the small world exper­i­ment and hun­dreds of com­puter sim­u­la­tions that brought for­ward two con­clu­sions: the six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion the­ory is cor­rect, but there is no evi­dence for super-connected ‘trend gate­keep­ers’ (such as Gladwell’s ‘Con­nec­tors’):

But Watts, for one, didn’t think the gate­keeper model was true. It cer­tainly didn’t match what he’d found study­ing net­works. So he decided to test it in the real world by remount­ing the Mil­gram exper­i­ment on a mas­sive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 peo­ple, then asked them to ferry mes­sages to 18 tar­gets world­wide. Sure enough, he found that Mil­gram was right: The aver­age length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he exam­ined these path­ways, he found that “hubs”–highly con­nected people–weren’t cru­cial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email mes­sages passed through one of these super­con­nec­tors. The rest of the mes­sages moved through soci­ety in much more demo­c­ra­tic paths, zip­ping from one weakly con­nected indi­vid­ual to another, until they arrived at the target. […]

[His com­puter sim­u­la­tion] results were deeply coun­ter­in­tu­itive. The exper­i­ment did pro­duce sev­eral hun­dred soci­ety­wide infec­tions. But in the large major­ity of cases, the cas­cade began with an aver­age Joe (although in cases where an Influ­en­tial touched off the trend, it spread much fur­ther). To stack the deck in favor of Influ­en­tials, Watts changed the sim­u­la­tion, mak­ing them 10 times more con­nected. Now they could infect 40 times more peo­ple than the aver­age cit­i­zen (and again, when they kicked off a cas­cade, it was sub­stan­tially larger). But the rank-and-file cit­i­zen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

I can’t help but find it some­what ironic that, writ­ten almost four years ago, this argu­ment hasn’t really gained much trac­tion and Gladwell’s ideas are still dis­cussed ad nau­seam.

The devel­op­ment of the human brain is intri­cately linked with almost every moment of our evo­lu­tion from sea-dwelling ani­mals to advanced, social pri­mates. That is the the over­whelm­ing theme from New Sci­en­tist’s brief his­tory of the brain.

The engag­ing arti­cle ends with a look at the con­tin­ued evo­lu­tion of the human brain (“the visual cor­tex has grown larger in peo­ple who migrated from Africa to north­ern lat­i­tudes, per­haps to help make up for the dim­mer light”), and this on why our brains have stopped growing:

So why didn’t our brains get ever big­ger? It may be because we reached a point at which the advan­tages of big­ger brains started to be out­weighed by the dan­gers of giv­ing birth to chil­dren with big heads. Or it might have been a case of dimin­ish­ing returns.

Our brains are pretty hun­gry, burn­ing 20 per cent of our food at a rate of about 15 watts, and any fur­ther improve­ments would be increas­ingly demanding. […]

One way to speed up our brain, for instance, would be to evolve neu­rons that can fire more times per sec­ond. But to sup­port a 10-fold increase in the “clock speed” of our neu­rons, our brain would need to burn energy at the same rate as Usain Bolt’s legs dur­ing a 100-metre sprint. The 10,000-calorie-a-day diet of Olympic swim­mer Michael Phelps would pale in comparison.

Not only did the growth in the size of our brains cease around 200,000 years ago, in the past 10,000 to 15,000 years the aver­age size of the human brain com­pared with our body has shrunk by 3 or 4 per cent. Some see this as no cause for con­cern. Size, after all, isn’t every­thing, and it’s per­fectly pos­si­ble that the brain has sim­ply evolved to make bet­ter use of less grey and white mat­ter. That would seem to fit with some genetic stud­ies, which sug­gest that our brain’s wiring is more effi­cient now than it was in the past.

Oth­ers, how­ever, think this shrink­age is a sign of a slight decline in our gen­eral men­tal abilities.

via @mocost

As neu­ro­sci­en­tist Bradley Voytek points out, “we’re used to think­ing of our senses as being pretty shite”, and this is mostly thanks to the plethora of ani­mals that can see, hear, smell and taste far bet­ter than we can. “We can’t see as well as eagles, we can’t hear as well as bats, and we can’t smell as well as dogs”, he con­cludes… and that seems to be the con­sen­sus on every nature doc­u­men­tary I’ve ever watched.

How­ever our brain is a mag­nif­i­cent con­struc­tion (and our senses are equally as won­drous), and so Voytek tries to reverse this idea by explain­ing just how sen­si­tive and amaz­ing our senses really are:

It turns out that humans can, in fact, detect as few as 2 pho­tons enter­ing the retina. Two. As in, one-plus-one. It is often said that, under ideal con­di­tions, a young, healthy per­son can see a can­dle flame from 30 miles away. That’s like being able to see a can­dle in Times Square from Stam­ford, Con­necti­cut. Or see­ing a can­dle in Can­dle­stick Park from Napa Valley.*

Sim­i­larly, it appears that the lim­its to our thresh­old of hear­ing may actu­ally be Brown­ian motion. That means that we can almost hear the ran­dom move­ments of atoms.

We can also smell as few as 30 mol­e­cules of cer­tain substances. […]

These facts sug­gest that we all have some level of what we’d nor­mally think of as “super human” sen­sory abil­i­ties already.

But what the hell? If I can sup­pos­edly see a can­dle from 30 miles away, why do I still crack my frakkin’ shin on the cof­fee table when it’s only slightly dark in my liv­ing room?

It may not sur­prise you to hear that the answer to that ques­tion is atten­tion.

* For the Euro­peans among you, that’s more than a fifth longer than the Chan­nel Tun­nel’s under­wa­ter sec­tion (or Hyde Park to Stansted Air­port for the Londoners).

A recent red­dit thread about ques­tion­able jobs revealed an real-estate worker will­ing to talk about his expe­ri­ences fore­clos­ing on homes. He expanded his expe­ri­ences into a longer post that is elo­quent, emo­tion­ally charged and reveal­ing about the last­ing impact of the global finan­cial crisis.

[T]hey can get angry and defen­sive, tell me that they were never fore­closed on, tell me that I am tres­pass­ing and owe them $5,000 in “land use fees” for “using” their prop­erty as I walk to the front door. They threaten to sue, they threaten to call the cops, they say I should look under my car before I start it from now on. They send let­ters writ­ten in var­i­ous forms of Eng­lish — one time scribed in crayon — detail­ing their rights and how I am vio­lat­ing some mar­itime treaty from the 1700s. In my trav­els I have learned that if you copy­right your name you can’t be named in any kind of legal action, if you never write down your ZIP code then you aren’t a res­i­dent of the United States and that if I tell some­body that their lender is offer­ing them money to vacate while leav­ing the stair­case (yes, these get stolen) and dri­ve­way (yes, these get stolen) in place then I am guilty of slave trad­ing under some United Nations some­thing or other.

Why my job is to watch dreams die (via the excel­lent NPR Planet Money blog)

The meth­ods through which we cre­ate and main­tain rela­tion­ships are con­stantly chang­ing, with recent decades boost­ing the move from a purely location-based model to one where rela­tion­ships can spawn and develop remotely, thanks to the Inter­net (and, to a lesser degree, the tele­phone and mail sys­tems). How­ever, while this new way of cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing rela­tion­ships has dis­tinct advan­tages over the ‘tra­di­tional’ con­cept of location-based friend­ship cre­ation, many per­ceive it as inferior.

Tak­ing his cue from a quote that did the rounds on Twit­ter last year–Twit­ter makes me like peo­ple I’ve never met and Face­book makes me hate peo­ple I know in real life–David Hayes attempts to shed light on the advan­tages of Internet-originating rela­tion­ships by per­fectly describ­ing the way friend­ship cre­ation has evolved over time (by means of describ­ing the con­straints to doing so). The con­clu­sion echoes my sen­ti­ments exactly:

I view the higher value placed on place-originating (or “real-life”) friend­ships as wrong­headed. It seems only log­i­cal to me that it is bet­ter to build your rela­tion­ships from a pool of peo­ple who speak your lan­guage and have sim­i­lar soft-qualities to you, than to attempt to start from a geo­graph­i­cally con­strained group and then attempt to find soft-quality matches in a face-to-face series of inter­ac­tions. This is fun­da­men­tally what the inter­net allows: the friend­ship process to start from a set of com­mon­al­i­ties around soft attrib­utes, and then poten­tially aim for geo­graphic match­ing. This is the oppo­site of the stan­dard process, but cer­tainly the one more likely to yield deep and long-lasting relationships.

Inter­est­ingly, even though our only com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been through numer­ous back­links and a cou­ple of tweets, I wouldn’t hes­i­tate in call­ing David a friend. Most likely, the major­ity of my Face­book friends (i.e. my phys­i­cal world orig­i­nat­ing friends) would not under­stand this.