
In social networks, group boundaries promote the spread of ideas, study finds - anacleto
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-social-networks-group-boundaries-ideas.html
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qntty
The take away:

 _Loosening these tight group boundaries means that people 's next-door
neighbors may have different jobs or levels of education, but they may still
have similar politics or recreational activities. These similarities allow
people in different social groups to encourage the adoption of a new complex
idea, take neighborhood recycling as an example, which can then spread to
other neighborhoods and social groups.

But when group boundaries are eliminated entirely, people have almost nothing
in common with their neighbors and therefore very little influence over one
another, making it impossible to spread complex ideas._

~~~
eevilspock
Hacker News is a case in point. Its success and civility is due in large part
to it being an enclave. Long time users and ycombinator itself has worried
that it will be if not has already been a victim of its success as more and
more of the general population is drawn to it.

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spencertg1
I would argue it all comes down to how much 'trust' can be generated within a
network. A network of people with lots of common similarities and easily
shared traits will have a higher level of trust and therefore a greater
propensity to share and receive more nuanced ideas/concepts. Large open and
highly diverse networks of people will feel less 'trustworthy' or less
'comfortable' for people to contribute to or participate in.

The most effective networks have high levels of 'inner-trust' to generate
ideas between participants, and cross-pollinating trust' to share ideas
between networks.

~~~
golemotron
This is a powerful argument against entryism.

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swehner
I had written about how limits are not necessarily bad:
[http://stephan.sugarmotor.org/2010/08/couple-of-thoughts-
abo...](http://stephan.sugarmotor.org/2010/08/couple-of-thoughts-about-
evolution-and-economics/)

One can make good arguments in favour of trade barriers as well (related also:
"globalization",
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_globalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_globalization))

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okintheory
In _model of_ social networks, group boundaries promote the spread of ideas,
study finds. Has the model been tested well?

~~~
HillRat
To be honest, I don't find anything surprising about this, as what he
describes is a traditional "small world" network (high clustering coefficient
with short path links). The strong links within clusters efficiently amplify
information, and the weak links between members of different clusters serve to
transmit across the graph. (The fewer sparse cuts needed to decompose the
graph, the less effectively you will be able to transmit data across it.)

For example, Milgram (1969) found in his famous letter-delivery experiment
that the strongest predictor of success when sending a letter across ethnic
lines was whether the first jump between ethnic groups was a "strong" or
"weak" link -- weak links were significantly more likely to end in a
successful transmission. This is almost certainly because ethnicity tends to
be an accidental (due to uncontrollable historical factors) signal of
socioeconomic group; weak ties are more likely to be across socioeconomic
boundaries.

There may be more to the article than the press release indicates; Centola is
a former MIT professor with a background in computational modeling, so I
assume he brings something new to the table here.

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davefol
"It could be that the Internet is in fact set up and operates in such a way as
to allow easier coordination on complex ideas," he said.

I'm not sure if he's being sarcastic. I thought that this was the explicit
original purpose of the internet.

~~~
eevilspock
You're missing his point, and what he is providing a counter-argument to. When
he says _" the Internet is in fact set up and operates in such a way"_ he is
referring to the widespread impact of echo chambers and filter bubbles, the
very phenomenon that most people consider to work against knowledge sharing.

 _" Counterintuitively, he finds that breaking down group boundaries to
increase the spread of knowledge across populations may ultimately result in
less-effective knowledge sharing. Instead, his research shows that best
practices and complex ideas are more readily integrated across populations if
some degree of group boundaries is preserved. "_

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Dowwie
Thank you for sharing this study. It is very interesting.

Every kind of social group has its pros and cons.

