The Tangled World: Understanding human connections, networks and complexity

By Terry Lloyd and Gerald Ashley

Every form of life in the world is connected: individuals, groups, businesses, governments. There is no such thing as total isolation. Many of these connections are plain to see, and it is a commonplace to say we live in a global village. Crucially, though, the various links and relationships have been difficult for classical analysis to understand and predict.
As networks and connectivity are central to the human experience, there has been a long history of trying to understand these linkages and to predict their influences and impacts; but the traditional approaches have yielded unsatisfactory explanations.
Many attempts at analysis have centred round ideas of describing the world in terms of free independent agents. But it is agents' 'linkages', both strong and weak, that underpin much of human activity. Whether it is stock market moves, sudden adoption of new technologies, or the unexpected consequences of long chains of events, the inter-connectivity of life appears to defy simple explanation.
In this revealing work the authors draw on multiple sources to uncover the answers to the big questions about group behaviour, connections and the complex relationships that drive our world. In particular:
- What happens when agents interact?
- Is it possible to make sense of all these connections?

- Why are some connections more important than others?
- In a world of hugely complex and intricate links, what are 'super spreaders', and why are they critical?
- Can we measure and model 'emergence'?

- What are the new approaches and thinking we need to embrace and understand the world around us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harriman House
• Release date: Nov 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857191748

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First published in Great Britain in 2011

Copyright © Harriman House Ltd

The right of Gerald Ashley and Terry Lloyd to be identified as the Authors has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978–0857–191–74–8

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

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No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Authors, or by the employer(s) of the Authors.

Acknowledgements

We would both like to thank Jon Norton and John Thirlwell for their thoughts, ideas and observations, and we should also like to thank everyone at Harriman House for their help and encouragement.

Terry Lloyd & Gerald Ashley, London, November 2011

Introduction

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, mathematical physicist and engineer (1824–1907)

People interact with each other in many different ways, and so can be grouped under many general headings: by salary, by religion, by race, by age, by sex, by political allegiance. Various social studies have arisen to study and understand these groupings.

Economics examines people as wealth creators, by studying how they produce, distribute and consume goods and services. Social welfare examines people’s wellbeing and attempts to provide support to raise all citizens to an acceptable level. Political science examines how people in states, corporations and other organisations make collective decisions, covering the regulation of group affairs and the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.

The interactions between people and between overlapping groups are complex. They have been investigated throughout history by philosophers and artists – from Plato, Luther, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hogarth and Gillray in the past, to the commentators, satirists and cartoonists of today.

In the 20th century a collection of disciplines often called social sciences developed to match these generally unstructured comments. These sciences examine the relations within and between groups of people in a formal, quantitative way, but the complex behaviour of the humans at their