happy chaos freedom machine

 The work of Duncan Watts, described in this article at Fast Company, has truly profound ramifications.

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo NASDAQ:YHOO –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

In essence,  what Watts is proposing is that trends, fads, adoption of any idea or product or behavior or other socially-transmitted trope depends not on the vector finding a highly connected and influential individual to adopt and promote it, but rather random “luck.” If this is true, the “Tipping Point” type theories of social trends and marketing are complete fabrications, the product of the human proclivity to retroactively create rationale for events.

If this is true, this not only means that the assumptions behind viral marketing and influencer-based marketing are false, but that our entire approach to complex systems are also flawed. It may in fact be that scientific predictability is limited to very simple systems. Drop an apple, it falls. Systems that cross some threshold of complexity in terms of the number of nodes, of actors, of variables become resolutely uncertain. Drop a leaf in a creek, try to predict what shore on which it will land. You can’t. The stock market, despite  all our various attempts to predict its behavior, is random. The economy — random.

Perhaps more psychologically important, especially in our capitalist society, is that fame and fortune are random. In one of Watts’ experiments, he created mini-societies of musical taste. Rankings were socially influenced and songs rose to the top, resulting in Pareto power distributions of rankings. All as one would expect, but what was not expected was the eight parallel taste societies he created all chose different songs to make famous. The implication? If one could rewind time to before an individual met with success and then play the events all over again, there is no guarantee the same individual would be successful again. Another individual could just as easily step into the shoes of any success story.  This is fundamentally at odds with the mythos of the capitalist system – that talent and hard word equal success. They may improve your odds, but in the end, it’s all just a roll of the dice.

So why the insistence that there is some reason why a product or web site or person becomes successful while another does not? To me this seems like an example of a primate bias – something in our basic psychological building blocks abhors randomness — if something happens there must be a reason for it. It makes sense, in evolutionary terms — how else would we have begun making tools, harnessing natural phenomena,  and mastering our environment without the nagging suspicion that things happened for some reason? Is there a term for when a beneficial evolutionary trait is taken to a point that is detrimental?