HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Inspired to do: Connected http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-...

I was utterly amazed by the concept of Social Network Analysis, how emotion travels through a network, how the 6 degrees thing works. Did you know someone you have never met can affect your weight? I was so amazed I started a company building a CRM from the ground up using graph theory. We launch in Q1 2015.

Inspired to be: The seven habits of highly effective people. A great book, which many read and sight. Forcing myself to write about my values and behaviours means you have to live up to them :) I read it once and now I am reading it again with my girlfriend actually doing all the exercises. You can read it in a week but to really take it all in you need to work on it over a lifetime. http://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effect...

⬐ joshux

Connected is on my audible that I'm planning to listen to. I'm also interested in networks, 6 degrees..etc.

May I ask how you apply what you learned from the book to your startup? I'm quite curious.

⬐ MrMattWright

A lot of it is encapsulated in my talk at a neo4j meetup: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/5179-private-social-net...

Which was a while ago (April), I'll be doing a new one soon with what we have learnt since then. My main learning is around Mark Granovetter works on "the strength of weak ties" when it comes to job hunting and recruitment. That and the concept of triadic closure are really useful when trying to build technology that maps the recruitment process from first principles.

Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen.

I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification.

At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window and http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-...

Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable.

So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.

⬐ waterlesscloud

Don't you think your efforts will just be co-opted though?

I've got a number of friends on social networks who don't hesitate to share their political views now. The problem is that they're doing so by whatever divide-and-conquer meme the political masters are spinning this week. It's the same as it ever was, only faster and 10x as annoying. I've actually hidden a couple of people on my FB timeline because of it.

What do you think will make it possible for your efforts to avoid being co-opted into more of the same old trap?

⬐ jdunck

It's a risk, but it's one we recognize. We're in this to disrupt hierarchy and broadcast-as-politics. I think that peer re-broadcasting is basically incompatible with the spirit of the interaction. The medium is the message, and the message is formed by the medium.

I don't think you can successfully run a broadcast system on top of the peer-based medium. The transition may be slow[1] and painful[2], but the change is economic (in terms of transactional overhead and diminishing returns); it's hard to see how it could be avoided short of censorship and regime[3].

If these peers are just spouting the message (the easiest thing for them to do - RT "yeah!") that will not be persuasive. The angels don't need to be saved.

What's new here is that collaborating on issues can span time and space; group-forming doesn't need a reason before it can happen. The reason can be discovered.

[1] http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100284

[2] http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4517

[3] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and...