I was always surprised that small changes in public perception, a slight change in consumption or political opinion can have large effects. This post introduced the concept of the social behaviour curves for me, and it feels like explains quite a lot of things. The writer presents some example behaviours and movements (like why revolutions start slowly or why societal changes are sticky), and then it provides clear explanations for them using this model. Which explains how to use social behaviour curves and verifies some of the model’s predictions at the same time.
The second half of the post bases a theory on what an ideal society would look like, and how should you act on a radical-conformists axis. Be a radical except if only radicals are around you is a cool slogan for a punk band, but even he writes that he’s gonna do a little trolling. I feel like there are some missing assumptions about why he chooses these curves.
In the addendum, there are references to other uses in the literature, which can be used as a jumping point for further understanding. What I’m missing from this post is the discussion of large networks. Everyone knows everyone in a small group, but changes propagate over time for large ones; it also matters if someone has few or many connections. There is also some kind of criticality in large networks too, but it’s a bit different. Also, the math gets much more complicated, in fact, graph criticality results are few and hard, and most places use computer simulations instead of closed equations. All in all, I think social behaviour curves are a simple and good tool for understanding an aspect of social reality.
I was always surprised that small changes in public perception, a slight change in consumption or political opinion can have large effects. This post introduced the concept of the social behaviour curves for me, and it feels like explains quite a lot of things. The writer presents some example behaviours and movements (like why revolutions start slowly or why societal changes are sticky), and then it provides clear explanations for them using this model. Which explains how to use social behaviour curves and verifies some of the model’s predictions at the same time.
The second half of the post bases a theory on what an ideal society would look like, and how should you act on a radical-conformists axis. Be a radical except if only radicals are around you is a cool slogan for a punk band, but even he writes that he’s gonna do a little trolling. I feel like there are some missing assumptions about why he chooses these curves.
In the addendum, there are references to other uses in the literature, which can be used as a jumping point for further understanding. What I’m missing from this post is the discussion of large networks. Everyone knows everyone in a small group, but changes propagate over time for large ones; it also matters if someone has few or many connections. There is also some kind of criticality in large networks too, but it’s a bit different. Also, the math gets much more complicated, in fact, graph criticality results are few and hard, and most places use computer simulations instead of closed equations. All in all, I think social behaviour curves are a simple and good tool for understanding an aspect of social reality.