Curdle your enthusiasm

We have a tendency to want to pin blame on individual objects, but you would never do that in the physics world. There’s no bad molecule that causes water to boil. It’s a collective effect. And so, we wondered if a lot of the social problems that we face are actually better looked at through that lens.

Or would we ? After all, the spark that ignites the gas that causes the water to boil can be traced directly to the action of individual atoms and electrons. An individual molecule doesn't have a temperature, it just has motion, and that motion derives from the influence of other molecules. On the other hand, motion due to an EM field is a bit different. Still, I don't see that such a model fundamentally changes anything : the end result in an agent-based, network approach is still highly dependent on the structure and number of agents conveying particular information. So :

If you have milk in the fridge, gradually, one day that milk suddenly curdles. That is because microscopically, you’re getting this aggregation of objects into communities. And the math of that works perfectly well for the aggregation of people into communities. Now, the typical reaction is: “Oh, but I’m an individual, I don’t behave like a molecule of milk.” Yeah, but collectively we do, because we’re constrained by the others. So there’s only a certain number of things that we can actually do, and we tend to do them again and again and again.

To continue quibbling over the analogy, you could still model the curdling of milk through the interactions of individual atoms. But it might be a lot simpler to model temperature as a field, so in that sense the analogy could be better. More interestingly though :

We found there’s a closed network of about 1,000 clusters, worldwide, online, across all platforms, propagating global hate of all flavors. Now, if there’s about 1,000 people in each of those (it’s actually between 10 and maybe up to 100,000, so let’s just say 1,000 on average) you’ve got 1,000 clusters of 1,000 people – that’s a million people. And that’s our very, very crude first estimate of the number of people online involved with this.
Q : That’s a startlingly manageable number – 1,000 networks.
Not if you’re trying to find that among seven billion. But they’ve already done the job for you. They’ve already grouped themselves into community.

Again I re-iterate : sometimes things spread more rapidly underground, but sometimes their spread demands exposure. It's going to be a lot harder to build significant networks on direct messaging apps than on open, public, social media platforms. The conclusions of this "curdling" analogy are strikingly similar to what one gets in an agent-based approach, albeit with interesting and important subtleties :

The first proposal] is to go after the smaller bubbles. Smaller bubbles are weaker, have less money, less powerful people, and will grow into those big ones. So eliminating small ones – and we showed this mathematically – rapidly decreases the ecology. It cuts off the supply.

I suppose the only potential difference I would be curious about here is the effect of social prominence conveying authority and therefore trust and belief. That is, famous sources (news outlets or individuals) tend to be more readily believed than anonymous random strangers. But I think this still reduces down to my analogy of seeds in a field : you can either attack the resulting trees and prevent future generations from propagating, or attack the soil itself and kill everything at once. It depends on which factor is dominant - the fertile trees or the soil itself encouraging their growth. If there are already many seeds in the field (that is, if people are reaching a particular conclusion naturally), then attacking the soil is your only option. If, on the other hand, it's coming from just a few big, prominent trees, then attacking them is a necessity.

Number two is that instead of banning individuals, because of the interconnectedness of this whole system, we showed that you actually only have to remove about 10% of the accounts to make a huge difference in terms of the cohesiveness of the network. If you remove randomly 10% of the members globally, this thing will begin to fall apart. 

Which again falls out of agent-based approaches. But the next two are less obvious :

[Third proposal] You get [the hate clusters] engaged in a skirmish, basically, and they think that that’s a kind of supreme battle. It slows them down in terms of recruiting; it just engages them in something that actually isn’t that important... fighting with trolls online is actually worth your time... but do it as a group, do it as a cluster. Don’t do it individually. It will break you. 

[The fourth proposal] is my favorite because it it really exploits the weakness that comes from the multidimensional flavors of hate. There are two neo-Nazi groups, both in the UK, both ostensibly wanting the same thing. But they don’t – one wants a unified Europe, the other wants to break everything apart and obliterate the rest of the countries. So introduce a cluster that draws out the differences. I see it as a way to wear individuals in hate clusters out. In the end, they’ll just get fed up. It’s not that it goes away. It’s just that now they’re actually hating the traffic more than they hate the Jews. It shifts the focus.

Those are not at all obvious from any analogy, but unique to the phenomenon itself. People spreading ideologies are desperate for engagement (perhaps more than they are for actually persuading anyone). It's also a natural tendency to love a good argument for the sake of an argument. If we can't persuade people to argue in a better, more productive way, then getting them to use their talents to stifle the spread of the crazies may be a good second best option. On the other hand, debate engenders legitimacy even when not endorsing the ideas, and even more so if it attracts a large crowd, so I'd be wary of this first proposal (but if there are sufficient numbers with opposing views, wouldn't it be even better to try and persuade the trolls rather than fighting them ?). Setting up a group that exists only to get the haters to fight each other is much more appealing, though I still don't see why the milk analogy is relevant to any of this.

The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk

Lone wolves. Terrorist cells. Bad apples. Viral infections. The language we use to discuss violent extremism is rife with metaphors from the natural world. As we seek to understand why some humans behave so utterly inhumanely, we rely on comparisons to biology, ecology and medicine.