Permuting species and “If Einstein had never been born”
Comment: (If Einstein were not born): They say generalist species are more important. But in fact parallel developing specialists and individuals can far outnumber and have more influence than large nodes with many links. I track these “bubbling up” topics on the Internet and try to find and encourage them to form new global networks. That old saw about “if Einstein had never been born” gives a clue to why this happens. A topic will be broadcast on the Internet and will have billions of entry points. The meme and issue becomes known to all or hundreds of millions of individuals and specialists. They develop partial and general solutions and new approaches and that forms small networks. These, if they seem to be successful or “right” will grow. A few of the earliest might be discovered and broadcast. Often decades might go by and what is actually substantial global activity will produce fairly rapid changes.
I have only been studying this for the last few decades, so there is much I do not know. I know these are relatively easy to identify and relatively easy to influence. But they are fragile and often break from attempts to harvest, commercialize or force. There are relations to swarm intelligence. I know from direct experiments that global networks can be created that spread and grow stronger. Just because humans do work as individuals does not mean they are not concerned with the whole human species.
The mathematics in the article can be cast as an LLM, but LLMs themselves are highly limited because linear regressions do not efficiently cover all types of interactions. Just do “all humans” and, when you go to implement all pairs or size groups, the inefficiency of LLM will show up.
