Tag: networks

Wanting, is this mimetic?

MIKE

This is not a book review of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. It is only a slice. Wanting should be subtitled ‘networks effects’. The book is based on network structure and connections but I can’t recall ‘network’ being used at all.

In mimesis, a centralized network is ‘Celebristan’. Our relationships with one-namers like Lebron or Cher is a centralized model. In mimesis, a dense, not centralized network is ‘Freshmanistan’, these are our relationships with roommates, neighbors, and colleagues.

2 networks

A network’s structure dictates information flow. Information is anything: ideas, vaccines, and so on. Lebron’s favorite salad dressing transfers widely, but only to us. He does not care about our top topping.

But, one-namers have dense networks with each other. Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal is an example of Burgis’s point. One-namers took the same trips, owned the same properties, bought the same toys. Though they were celebrity to us, their network was ‘Freshmanistan’.

The information in mimesis is status, rivalry, and desire.

Well, our best versions say, I don’t care about all that. This, mimesis OG Rene Girard said, is the romantic lie. Rivalry exists because we don’t really know what we want. “In the universe of desire,” Burgis writes, “there is no clear hierarchy.” It’s not that you want Ray-Ban sunglasses, it’s that someone else does.

This is my sticking point. I’m on board with the network structure and information flows. I’m okay with wants being fungible. But the conclusion feels wrong. Maybe.

There’s this dumb thing that happens to my wife and me. One of us suggests dinner, vacation, or weekend spot. The other mehs it. Time passes. A friend suggests that place to one of us. They go to the other and suggest it. ‘What the heck, I said that last month!’

Something is happening. Is it mimesis? I don’t know.

Status is an evolutionary advantage. Group membership helps us survive, and status games help the group because they are non-violent competitions. Draymond Green probably attacked teammate Jordan Poole because their status games were off. But the episode proves the point. Had Green’s punch landed, both individuals and the group would be hurt. Signs of status like cars, homes, jewelry, people, experiences prevent this conflict.

Is this mimesis? I don’t know.

Rather than rule on the mimetic ideas, we can triangulate them. In the spirit of looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck. How does mimetic theory fit with…

Network theory? Great! Network theory is the underlying structure. All networks have information like covid viruses, neighborhood gossip, bumping electrons. Mimesis fits with our social networks.

JTBD? Surprisingly okay. In jobs theory people begin to ‘hire’ for solutions with “passive looking”. Maybe that stage is our social influences. If we are imitative then seeing one person with something might influence us.

Status games? Not bad. Mimetic rivalry creates the status hierarchy within a group.

Incentives? Less good. In the aggregate a bunch of people work to make as much money as possible. But does any one of them do that because they have a mimetic rivalry with any other? “The romantic lie” is great branding but incentives feel more right than mimesis.

The book confused me. It seems kinda right but not really right. But here we are, thinking about it, which may be mimetic itself.

…

A few network examples that didn’t make the post: The Zappos Holacracy was CEO Tony Hsieh’s attempt to recreate college, increase random interactions, and optimize “a return on collisions”.

The Theodore Roosevelt Covid outbreak as another example of network structure and information flows.

The Vaccine Friendship Paradox

MIKE4 Comments

One non-intuitive concept, at least in scale, is the network. Like average numbers, it takes some work to construct the correct conclusions. Graph, chart, and count the way that people interact, decide, and connect and there will be patterns. It’s network effects which fuel companies like Instagram and create the increasing returns economy.

Networks, as Nicholas Christakis notes, are agnostic. They spread whatever they are seeded with, whether real viruses like Ebola or WOW viruses like corrupted blood. The question then is; How and what to seed a network with?

Eric Bradlow wondered about Covid vaccines on Wharton Moneyball:

“We study diffusion of products all the time. In theory, you want to observe the social graph. In marketing the question is: Who do you give the free product to? This is standard network analysis and with that data you could do a smarter initial seeding (of a vaccine).”

Is there more bang for the buck if one person gets the vaccine rather than another?

Yes, though it’s not intuitive.

As the Friendship Paradox video shows, we aren’t all connected to the same number of friends. Some people have more, some have fewer friends and to wisely allocate a scare resource (like with marathon slots) it takes some small adjustments.

Christakis has spent a lot of time mapping networks and noted that across cultures, space, and time most human networks look the same. Some people are more connected than others. A few have hundred of connections and hundreds have a few.

It’s important for Christakis because like Bradlow, he works with a diffusion problem. Rather than marketing products though, it’s about sharing vaccines and vitamins. The thinking for both goes like this, if you can share something that works with the right person then they will share the benefits of that with the rest of their network.

But how do you pick the right person? Christakis shared this tip: “Go into a village and pick people at random. Have them suggest their friends and vaccinate their friends rather than the originals.”

Most networks are like the Curb Your Enthusiasm network (via Funkhauser).

curb_your_enthusiasm_-_season_9_-_network_graph

Randomly enter that network and you could get anyone but then ask for that person’s friend and more often than not you’ll get Larry. He’s the hub. He’s the super spreader. He’s who to vaccinate or market to.

It’s a neat bit of math. Rather than random choice, ask one question to improve the odds of an idea, movement, or effect catching on.

While there’s nothing on networks, my latests pay-what-you-want is on Tyler Cowen’s ideas about decision making. One idea is ‘meta-rationality’ or knowing when you don’t know AND knowing where or who to go to to find out. 

Fat Bottom Tails Make the Complex World Go Round

MIKE4 Comments

This is an attempt at understanding R0 (reproductive number) as more than a numbing number. View these notes as less definitive. 

In his (2014) paper Risking It All: Why are public health authorities not concerned about Ebola in the US?, Yaneer Bar-Yam writes about why R0 isn’t an even distribution.

One April report noted the coronavirus reproductive number was 5.7 but offered a range of 3.8-8.9. In January the estimate was 2.6. There’s many reasons but one is that the reproductive number varies by the individual in the network.

Humans form the same (power-law graphed) networks over and over again. In research about Wikipedia edits, the graphs of posts per user was nearly identical across languages. It holds across time too, we can imagine that church members knew their parson but not every other member. It’s on TV too.

curb_your_enthusiasm_-_season_9_-_network_graph

Image from Funkhauser.

These networks are so common, they may be part of our evolution, like ten fingers. Nicholas Christakis said, “Maybe natural selection had something to do with the topology of human networks.”

Christakis looks at networks to seed interventions like a farmer who avoids the arid or soaked parts of a his field. In lab research, Christakis found that when one person is nice to another person (via monetary rewards) then that person is nicer to the next. Courtesy is contagious.

In other studies, Christakis changed the visibility of charity (or selfishness) and the  contagion changed too. Visibility of inequality mattered a lot, unseen inequality mattered very little. That’s kinda interesting.

Christakis has found three features which influence how things spread through networks.

  1. Connections, more lines between hubs
  2. Contagions, faster spread between hubs
  3. Positions, different originations hubs

If Larry David gets an idea for his television show and he wants Julia Louis-Dreyfus to guest star he can ask her (#1), but if it’s someone he doesn’t know he’ll have ‘his people call your people’. He could pitch Julia via text (#2) or write her a letter. If it’s Jeff Garlin that has the idea and not Larry David, (#3) then the idea has to wind through Larry to get onto the show.

A real example of virality is the Zillow Zestimate. Co-founder Rich Barton wanted to advertise. That had worked for Barton at Expedia. But Bill Gurley said, “If you’re buying ads to sells ads, then you’re arbitraging traffic and that dog don’t hunt very long.” Barton wanted to focus on spreading the message (#3) far and wide. What worked better was creating something people would share (#2) among themselves.

Bar-Yam warns about an average R0 when he writes about Ebola:

“However, in a complex interdependent society it is possible for the actual number due to a single individual to dramatically differ from the average number, with severe consequences for the ability to contain an outbreak when it is just beginning.”

Ebola needs to be a disease of more concern, he wrote in 2014, because the prediction models used the connections, contagions, and positions of Africa — a different structure. “One person is not likely to be in close contact with much more than about 10 or 20 family members.” That is, the rural African figures for 1, 2, and 3 are quite different from the urban African figures. “In urban areas in Africa and in the US, the nature of the contact network is different.”

Ebola is a hot virus and should be treated with extreme caution. Richard Preston’s book, The Hot Zone is about the mid-90s almost crisis when the Ebola virus was spreading through the air in a monkey research facility just outside of Washington D.C.

(Here’s Preston in 2019)

In the book Preston writes about the history of research. Recalling one trip in the mid-80s:

“Occasionally they (researchers) came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear.”

Some strands of Ebola pass through he air (#2). Some do not. African villages follow the precautionary principle.

Thanks to Tim H and Tim B for the suggestions and trailheads for this post. For thinking about position (#3) check out the Friendship Paradox.