Network Science
Centrality, weak ties, structural holes, cascades, memetics. Everything is a network.
Who is the structural broker — and where do the cascades start?
Canonical thinkers
- Albert-László Barabási
- Mark Granovetter
- Ronald Burt
- Duncan Watts
Seed concepts
- centrality
- small world
- scale free
- cluster
- weak tie
- structural hole
- six degrees
- power law
- information cascade
- diffusion
- memetic
- network
Underlined seeds link to their full glossary entry. Plain seeds are pending a definition page.
Typed connections
Full graph →How this layer reinforces, counteracts, or depends on the rest of the system.
- Depends on·LayerComplexity Science depends on this layer
Emergent behavior is hard to reason about without knowing the topology that carries the interactions.
- Reinforces·LayerThis layer reinforces Persuasion & Behavior Design
Influence travels through ties; persuasion's reach is set by network structure, not just message quality.
Elements in this layer
16 HBEsSeeing patterns in random data.
Digital-age learning theory: knowledge lives in networks; the skill is forming and pruning the right connections.
Brain network active during rest and mind-wandering — and during creative insight.
Innovators → early adopters → early majority → late majority → laggards.
Responsibility dilutes across a group until it disappears.
Interdependent network of actors evolving together.
People copy the choices of others, assuming they have private information.
A deliberately curated set of people, sources, and feedback loops you draw on to learn faster than alone.
Customers become trapped in a product due to switching costs or network effects.
Value grows with the number of users.
A symmetric bell-shaped distribution where most values cluster around the mean.
A relationship where a small number of inputs account for most outputs.
A small number of items account for most of the value.
Brain system that decides what's important right now.
Ideas, behaviors, and attitudes spread through social networks.
Patients visit in-network hospitals but get billed by out-of-network doctors staffing them.