Why "Drama" is Inevitable

[mbarrick]

This is a graph of the interconnectedness of everyone on the friends list of tharsis's journal. It's a relatively small system and it is easy to see all the connections. Everyone on the chart is there because they are on Tharsis's friends list. If any of those friends have one-way or mutual friends connections between them, then they have an appropriate single or double headed arrow. Tharsis has 16 friends and belongs to 2 communities.

This, severely reduced because the full-size image is over 14,000 pixels wide, is the same sort of chart for the 65 people and 26 communities on my friends list. You can see how complexity of the connections is exponentially increased over the example above. Any expectation that a system this complex would remain stable is pretty much absurd. In fact, like any complex dynamical system, it's far more likely that one tiny change is going to cause unpredictable ramifications throughout the system.

Comments

[six-v2.livejournal.com]

i want to see the big one!!!
i fond charts like that to be very nice to look at (whats the word for artfull? artistc or art)

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

"Artful" (one "l") is a word and means what you want.

The full sized image very nearly keeled over my machine with 1 GB of RAM when I opened it to resize it. You'd need either crapload of RAM or a lot of patience just to open it.

[bonez.livejournal.com]

i remember when that was an option back in the day, until it overloaded the servers... is it hiding somewhere now? or is that old? i'd like to run mine again hehe... and i have a box at work that'll do it just fine =D

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

It's just a perl script that I ganked from this lj_nifty post:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_nifty/115814.html

Making the image is trivial, it was waiting for the GIMP to open it that was brutal.

Hmmm... Actually...

[logik.livejournal.com]

Complexity theory tells us that the mre complex a system is, the more resistant to catastrophic change. To illustrate, four or five water molecules left to themselves will exhibit motion far more erratic than a whole damn ice cube. It is rare for an icecube to go shooting off across a room. Or put another way, the more nodes there are in the system, the less likely the system will be effected by the actions of one node. In other words it would bre pretty damn difficult to take down the internet with a single home computer.

Complexity implies order and order implies stability.

You may have a more stable system than you think.

Re: Hmmm... Actually...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of limited computational complexity and the jump from phase transitions to chaos. As a complex dynamic system large causes may have little effect or small causes may have large effects. Socially a human only has the capacity to carry on so many close familiarities (friends and family) and a lager number of acquaintances (tribe), operating on the edge of that computational limit runs the significant risk of a strange attractor bifurcating the system or plunging it into chaos.