The Network Effect
1. Supercritical Networks
Networks are critical for transmitting ideas (or diseases), but what causes some to survive and others to die? Play around with some great interactive simulations exploring this concept.
The bottom line:
Networks are comprised of nodes: the more "neighbors" a node has, the more chances for an infection has to spread
To sustain a condition, 23% of the population must be "infected"
"Infections" spread more easily in cities
Networks are important for sharing information, getting support, finding new jobs (you know, important human connection stuff). Networks are essential for driving real change in organizations. But what level of adoption is necessary to sustain new ways of working? From the original link:
It turns out that there's a precise tipping point that separates subcritical networks (those fated for extinction) from supercritical networks (those that are capable of neverending growth). This tipping point is called the critical threshold, and it's a pretty general feature of diffusion processes on regular networks.
I'm still stuck on what makes cultural evolution so difficult. It's easy to blame failed cultural evolutions on the narrow-mindedness of individuals, but that's not the most likely culprit.
...there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can't spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can't.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It's not that rural folks are e.g. "small-minded"; when exposed to one of these ideas, they're exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it's that the idea itself can't go viral in the countryside because there aren't as many connections along which it can spread.
The shape of the underlying network (the density and connectedness of nodes) can kill off new ideas, hindering cultural change.
2. Distributed Viruses
How can you increase the chances of survival under adverse network conditions? Virology may provide a roadmap.
The bottom line:
"Multipartite viruses" split their genes, which seems like it shouldn't be possible—how do they reproduce?
These types of viruses create protein networks that allow them to survive and propagate
Genetic information doesn't have to be all in one cell for the virus to replicate—a solid evolutionary trait. From The Atlantic:
...the virus’s genes might be stuck in neighboring cells, but the proteins created by those genes can move. The capsule-making protein can get into a cell with the DNA-copying gene, and cover it. The DNA-making protein can get into a cell with the capsule-making gene, and copy it. Think of the eight segments as factories in different cities, shipping assembly robots to one another so that each site can manufacture its own separate product. It is within this expansive trade network that the distributed virus truly exists.
Assembly robots sound pretty cool! Perhaps similar to the specialized proteins passing between cells to do their magic, certain people can pass between organizational silos to the same end. A single individual introducing some small method to a disparate department doesn't seem terribly impactful, but moving many such individuals through an organization over and over could result in something amazing.
3. Social Creatures
Separating signal from noise can be hard, but it can be especially tricky for neural networks.
The bottom line:
The human mind can naturally focus on certain sensory inputs and ignore others
Neural networks need attention allocation algorithms to help them do the same
This becomes especially important for image identification—translating visual information into words
Language is complicated, and evades simple formulas. From Skymind:
Words are social creatures. Like humans, they derive much of their meaning from relationships.
And:
Soldiering along under the tyrannies of time and paper, sentences have lulled us into thinking that their meaning is linear, that it unfurls like a ribbon of print across the page. This is not true. In any sentence, some words have strong relationships with other words that are not bang-up next to them. In fact, the strongest relationships binding a given word to the rest of the sentence may be with words quite distant from it.
In language, proximity doesn't necessarily equate to connection. That seems true for organizations as well—sitting in the same office doesn't create relationships, shared meaning does. But, once defined, proximity and networks can certainly speed its spread.