I'm going to start a new series of posts on this blog. I'll occasionally post about how the power of weak links is being ignored. Now that I'm thinking about weak links, I see it all around me. Here's one example that I feel is relevent as we lead up to the presidential elections later in the year: the left and right of the political spectrum do not listen to one another. Now, this may not be shocking, but it has important implications. How can consensus-driven, non-partisan politics succeed, without communication? Here's the evidence for this claim.
1) A recent study of links between politically-oriented blogs was carried out by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance (see the complete study in pdf, and a blog that discusses the study). These researchers showed that blogs fail to link to blogs of the opposite political orientation. The following figure shows the links between top twenty political blogs from each side of the aisle, such that only connections of five or greater links in either direction are shown. Note that connections are robust within one political affiliation, but extremely rare across the aisle.
But that's the political wonks that have highly trafficked blogs. What do people actually read about?
2) One way to study what people are interested in is to look at what they buy together. Valdis Krebs did just that, using web-based bookseller data. He identified political books from the New York Times bestseller list, and looked for incidences of co-purchase, that is, 'someone who bought book x also bought book y'. Here's the data:
There are only a couple of books that bridge the left-right divide! People are reading only what they already agree with and know.
Again, I don't think this is surprising, but it has important implications. There's no chance of communication under these circumstances. And no chance of consensus-building, and not even a good chance of negotiation or compromise. In a broader context, this is dramatic evidence of the difficulty of finding, considering and integrating new ideas.
This is a sort of confirmation bias, which I learned about in The Black Swan. People tend to look for evidence that supports their hypotheses or beliefs. But the better test would be to look for counterevidence. This is analogous to exactly what people are not doing when considering their politics: listening to counterarguments, carefully considering them, and then either changing opinions or figuring out what the problem is with the political argument.
But that's the political wonks that have highly trafficked blogs. What do people actually read about?
2) One way to study what people are interested in is to look at what they buy together. Valdis Krebs did just that, using web-based bookseller data. He identified political books from the New York Times bestseller list, and looked for incidences of co-purchase, that is, 'someone who bought book x also bought book y'. Here's the data:
There are only a couple of books that bridge the left-right divide! People are reading only what they already agree with and know.
Again, I don't think this is surprising, but it has important implications. There's no chance of communication under these circumstances. And no chance of consensus-building, and not even a good chance of negotiation or compromise. In a broader context, this is dramatic evidence of the difficulty of finding, considering and integrating new ideas.
This is a sort of confirmation bias, which I learned about in The Black Swan. People tend to look for evidence that supports their hypotheses or beliefs. But the better test would be to look for counterevidence. This is analogous to exactly what people are not doing when considering their politics: listening to counterarguments, carefully considering them, and then either changing opinions or figuring out what the problem is with the political argument.
Stumble it!