Is the Tipping Point Toast? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

fastcompany.com

54 pointslatif13 comments

Here's my takeaway from this piece:

"Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed."

This sure seems to back up Adreessen's argument that market opportunity is the single most important factor in considering an opportunity.

This whole article rests on the idea that reach (number of followers) equals influence.

Twitter pretty much proves that wrong right out of the gate, so why is anyone debating it?

This says absolutely nothing about whether people with real influence (which isn't the same thing at all as number of connections) affect things.

Does Twitter disprove that? A lot of people with many followers on Twitter have mostly fake followers. I think people with a lot of real followers do have influence on Twitter.

For example a friend of mine bought a band's new album just because @veronica mentioned that she liked them. @veronica has 1500000 followers on Twitter. I think for a band it can make a real difference if she mentions them.

So then the trendsetters still get to set trends. They are the people who recognize what will be persuasive, and adopt or create it.

They are also the people who try new things and are out "persuading."

Trendsetters are necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a trend. The lesson for marketers is that you need to create a product that fits the times and push it to the right people.

I tend to agree with the straw man accusation leveled against Watts. His research seems to be an extension of theories of influence, not so much contradictory. But if he didn't pitch it as a war, he wouldn't get media coverage such as this article itself.

Watts' main problem is that the Influence lobby sees one type of influential people when there are degrees of influential people. Complete farce: the Influence lobby itself is not one big bubble; it has lots of different theories, many of which talk about degrees and levels of social influence.

So, whether a trend starts depends more on the environment ("tinder-dry forest") than on the starter ("careless smoker"); but you get a much bigger trend if you start with an Influencer.

So you get more bang-per-buck from Influencers, right?

Seems like a conflict of intentions: science (wanting to understand the big picture) vs. engineering (wanting to make something happen, efficiently).

Watts isn't just some random researcher. His papers are required reading in networks courses. Of course, he's an academic, and academics are boring so fastcompany had to bulldoze some of the hemming and hawing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model

The problem I have with all of Gladwell's works (Blink, Tipping Point, etc.) is that his theories are overly simplistic. They are formulated at the cocktail party level, they make interesting stories but they are not sufficiently well thought out or detailed to actually make testable predictions or be useful in any practical sense. This is a shame because some of the things he studies (especially in Blink) is potentially very important and well done research could have wide ranging positive influence.

Ultimately though Gladwell proves himself as not a scientist, and seemingly content to just write interesting stories rather than to do the less glamorous work of fleshing out his ideas into something of practical value.

Gladwell clearly has a gift for writing interesting stories. Maybe he is also capable of being a great scientist, but I don't think he needs to be. The practical usefulness is twofold:

1. His works serve as food for thought. There are far too many topics for one man to research them all. Providing inspiration for further research is a worthwhile endeavor as well.

2. He provides thought frameworks. He reminds me of an old wise man. His writing contains key ideas, while not based on scientific fact, which are useful as rules of thumb. Sometimes decisiveness and confidence is more important than correctness or optimality. Tribal knowledge has its place.

Agreed, I wish the world had more like him. Even when wrong, he's wrong in interesting ways and we end up learning something new.

his theories are overly simplistic

Sure; he is basically writing popular science, for which conceptual simplicity is a key requirement.

some of the things he studies ... [are] very important and well done research could have wide ranging positive influence.

Sure, but there is no shortage of real social science research on the topics Gladwell writes about -- in fact, much of his writing takes the form of summarizing and selecting from the actual research done in the field. This research is rarely presented in a way that is interesting or approachable to the general public -- but you're free to go read a more rigorous discussion if you want to. Apparently most people are content with Gladwell.

Gladwell proves himself as not a scientist

Gladwell is absolutely not a scientist, but I don't think he is trying to be one, or would claim to be one.

agreed. post hoc analysis that sounds good is of little value without quantitative predictions.

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