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The small-world networks found everywhere, described in the Watts-Strogatz paper, have an intriguing feature. They are both unusually robust and unusually fragile. They are robust against random attacks or random failures. Which is why random server outages, for example, have little effect on internet traffic. But they are especially vulnerable to

Safi Bahcall • Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

I described three common ways in which people flip the hive switch: awe in nature, Durkheimian drugs, and raves. I described recent findings about oxytocin and mirror neurons that suggest that they are the stuff of which the hive switch is made. Oxytocin bonds people to their groups, not to all of humanity. Mirror neurons help people empathize with

Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Once tagged, the dual-apping drivers in the city could be sent a myriad of offers to compel them to change their behavior.

Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

Social experiments live and die by Network Effects, the prize for dealing with all of the human messiness upfront for the few social experiments that make it to the other side. Network effects can become so strong that it doesn’t matter how bad the bits a company produces are, people will stick around (ahem, Facebook).

Packy McCormick • Social vs. Science Experiments

To Build a Strong Community, Stop “Community Managing”, Be a Tummler Instead.

Alex Hillman dangerouslyawesome.com

Over the last 50 years, people have shifted away from meeting and volunteering regularly in associations and informal gatherings such as support groups and Bible study groups, choosing instead to engage through “checkbook participation,” where we outsource and pay local and national organizations who hire professional staff to do the good works and... See more

Alex Pentland • Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation — Digitalist Papers

But the one absolute killer feature of warrens is that they allow your community to become almost perfectly scale free and grow like mad without ever sacrificing quality.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Network : Networks Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090

We think that required active choosing is most suitable when the choices are simple, such as whether to opt in or out. In more complex situations, such as choosing a portfolio from a menu of hundreds of mutual funds, forcing people to choose is a dubious strategy.

Cass R. Sunstein • Nudge: The Final Edition

you can estimate the quality of someone’s opinions about large scale social systems by evaluating their experience as a small scale organiser if you can’t create harmonious relationships in a collective of 15 ppl, why should I trust your opinion about policing or governance?

Richard D. Bartlett x.com