- Greg

- Greg

” Benoit Mandelbrot pointed out that markets don’t work anything like physics.”

No. He argued that markets don’t work anything like physics.

Do you see the difference? The way you wrote sounds like he was pointing out a universal fact. Wrong. He made an argument.

Again,

“He was, of course, proved right by the recent financial crises, which occurred just before his death in 2010.”

Stop. You are making huge leaps by citing very little data. That statement needs considerable data to back it up that you don’t provide. Using words like “of course” and “proved right” shows your, for lack of a better word, ignorance.

Instead, write like this:

“The recent financial crises gave support to his argument because of blah blah blah”.

I see your point. Euler developed graph theory way back in the 18th century and Erdos, Rappoport, Milgram, Garnovetter (among others) all made important contributions as well. However, you could say the same about Einstin and relativity or Darwin and natural selection or just about anything else. As Kuhn pointed out, primacy is really a matter of perspective as much as anything else.

However, network science in the modern sense really comes from Watts and Strogatz paradigm changing 1998 paper along with the Barabasi work that followed shortly after (work that he himself says was inspired by Watts and Strogatz). So while I don’t mean to unequivocally assert anything, I think there’s good basis for my statement.

Thanks for contributing.

- Greg

In those moments of deep thought, I begin to think exactly like this. This was a very in depth post, based on some very real stuff.

I too believe marketing is transforming. This word of mouth thing is murky, isn’t it? Love it though. Sweet post.

- Greg

The concept of “friends’ friends network” seems obvious yet compellingly efficient in terms of observing or even detecting patterns of behavior which could be typical to the network.

This made me think about a definition of friend – I nominate a friend, influential/well connected, which he might or not be as well as cherish or not similar friendly feelings towards me – and whether it could not be substituted by colleague or any sort of relationship-delineating factor, especially in societies (I think many in West and East as well) where one has more colleagues with whom one interacts both for work and socially. In case colleague is what’s nominated, the same Granovetter’s ideas apply, except here bonds between points might be doubly strong as colleague implies a colleague and also possibly a friend.

In your section for stopping the flu above you quote the study of Christakis and Fowler. Christakis in his TED talk tells of three ways that massive-passive intervention can happen: passive, quasi-passive and active. The first two are mostly based on lateral information one receives from key hubs of the network. For the active, as perhaps in the best of cases for the other two, the early detection is what Christakis preaches, this being, according to him the key to solutions/improvement of networks. While I agree about the importance of early detection in prevention or tacklign various network issues, I wonder if there are other active massive-passive interventions that can go further than an early detection.