10% of a population is the tipping point for intellectual disruption
news.rpi.edu
news.rpi.edu
The model seems very one-sided. I can't access the original paper, but it seems they have 4 states for each node:
1a) Committed to opinion A
1b) Has opinion A
2) Has opinion B
3) Has both opinion A and B
In this model, there is no "committed to opinion B" -- which makes this useless as a model for things like climate change, evolution, or civil rights where both sides have a committed population. Since this is the case, opinion A can only grow, and at some point will hit a threshold that takes over the whole population.
I assume they built the model this way because if it were balanced, you would likely get random outputs, depending on how the graph is arranged. And random outputs don't make good headlines. :)
It might be worth noting the Xie et al.'s observation is specifically about the relationship between a the fraction Pc of a given population which is committed to a particular state and the time required for that state to propogate through a complete graph. The significance of the tipping point is that in a binary agreement model you simply don't get liftoff below Pc of 0.098, whereas above that threshold the overage makes (relatively) little difference.
I doubt the researchers were motivated by headlines. Rather, they put together a simplistic model and got a simplistic result that is surprising only for the consistency of the tipping point across their chosen variations of the model. For example, other (field) research shows that the common reaction to opinions or facts that contradict one's opinions is to argue, which tends to cement one's opinions further. This doesn't necessarily imply one starts out committed. It also ignores confirmation bias, which limits exposure to contrary opinions. Etc.
As others point out, if their model was accurate, there could be no long-term stalemates, like progressive vs. conservative, both of which have significantly more than 10% true believers. Nonetheless, it is suggestive, particularly as it describes relatively isolated communities and as it implicitly distinguishes between belief systems which insist on absolute commitment (e.g., Evangelicals, Tea Party) vs. those which are satisfied with mere agreement and tolerate dissent (e.g., Ecumenicalists, Independents).
So how does a small group reach 10%? This description of their model appears to claim that it is impossible for the beliefs of the majority to change (because every group begins with below 10% adoption of their ideas).
So how to do it? that's what marketing is about. You can pay people (sales force), fake people (advertising), trick people (Ponzi scheme 'winners'), convert people (early adopters or force people (lobbying as product launch). Sometimes you can achieve a great deal by plying a lever judiciously in just the right place, but that can, of course, be very expensive. If you have time but not money, you can take a map/reduce approach and build dominant positions in smaller markets - a good example being the various techniques used by local bands to build a following among a particular geographic or demographic group.
This sort of research is at a relatively early stage. It's sort of like epidemiology, but we're feeling our way here to a large extent.
The assumptions strike me as unreasonable, the results worthless because the details matter a lot. Another prime candidate for "we tuned our unverified model until it did something publishable", too.
No, seriously, don't just blip over that. How do you verify this result? How do you tell which is correct? There is no evidence in the link that anybody has asked that. Maybe they did, but it's not a negligible detail, it's very important!
Here, run one of them in your browser: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=6599 Have fun yourself seeing how very small tweaks, well below the real-world noise threshold, can have profound effects, the source is right there.
It's not an interesting result, without some sort of verification against the world, and cherry picking a few current events and making vague allusions to how it sort of acts like a system you threw together isn't verification in the slightest.
A good way to explore these problems is to perform monte carlo simulations over the set of possible parameters and then derive general behaviour from that -- looking in particular for 'catastrophic' features in the phases space.
Later you can narrow your data set down based on empirically observed parameters.
As an undergraduate I wrote a standard grid-based model of epidemics which does this. So it's not as though it's rocket science.
Its been shown in various experiments that a significant percentage of the people go along with the group even when the group is obviously wrong. I think it was at least 60%.
So that leaves 40% or less that are capable of adopting something new. You'd have to get half of them to sway the followers. That's 20% or less, which 10% certainly is.
But if your 10% are in some kind of subculture and most are followers, they aren't going to be influencers of the larger society.
If the 10% are all in the media and politics, I think the change is likelier.
It also depends on the nature of the change. A change that requires significant inconvenience will be harder than deciding Pluto is no longer a planet.
http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/p/conformity.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
But it sort of has to work this way. There have to be followers if there are to be leaders and leaders are necessary if groups are to compete with each other, which was the case even before modern humans showed up.
I wonder what this model would say about ideas that oppose each other.
Atheism, on the contrary, simply means "the lack of theistic belief". Anyone who has not subscribed to a religion is technically atheistic. I'm not sure how many "atheist missionaries" you've met, but do you really think that atheism spreads by people convincing other people?
All babies are atheists, by the way.
that's cute. that statement has about as much sense as "all frogs are atheists." if you cannot ask/be asked the question you cannot be categorized by your answer.
my point was that modeling the spread of ideas would require treating atheism as a payload, carried between two people.
>do you really think that atheism spreads by people convincing other people?
no. it spreads by osmosis. atheism leaks through water to other people. the whole of r/atheism has never convinced a single person to take up the atheistic banner through reasoned argument.
sorry, I just don't know how to respond to such a silly claim except sarcastically.