3
" If we think about information spreading, it’s keeping track of how well-connected my friends are. That might be a better measure than just counting friends. What we thought about was, neither of these are actually designed for understanding information spread. Information spreads in a way that has two different features. One, it’s somewhat probabilistic. And, secondly, it has a finite time horizon. People get tired of it after a while, it decays, and it stops spreading after some time. So, if you look at the half-life of tweets or other things, sometimes they’ll be as short as eighteen hours, sometimes twenty-four hours. There might be a period in which things spread, and then it’s old news and it just dies out. And so what we added was sort of a simple measure that has two dimensions to it. We called this diffusion centrality. "
― , Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
4
" Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their stories that justify their power and privilege. Well, over the last several decades, they found a new source of authority: economics. Economics has been used to justify a lot of very self-serving behavior. Economics has also been used to justify a lot of behavior that we now know is very damaging to the planet. Where social media comes into the picture is it is an incredible mechanism for accelerating the spread of stories, making them go viral. But we know from psychology and cognitive science that the stories that most excite our brains are not the most true or useful; rather, they are the ones that trigger emotions like moral outrage or tribal affinity. By splintering our notion of reality and distorting our stories, social media is doing far more damage to society than just the near-term political stuff. It is really an unwinding of the Enlightenment. "
― , Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium