Antisemitism explained through network science - chapter 3
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Have you ever wondered about the strange relationship between the world and the Jews? The root cause behind antisemitism and the cure for this persistent phenomenon? Who are the Jews? Is everyone a Jew? This and other questions are finally getting answered with network science, big data and some help from ancient texts.
Where does that influence come from? The best thing we can come up with is some kind of a worldwide conspiracy. But if we really want to solve this, we've got to see it in context, in the real dynamics of the human system. So let's start with a more accurate question. What are Jews and why do we feel about them the way we do? What are Jews to us? See, biology social, political science, they look at pieces of the system. They give us only race, religions, and power politics. That's where the definitions of Jews cancel each other out. It takes much more information than any partial observation can give us. We need a holistic science that deals with organizing principles and how they steer the larger system, a science of relationships, if you will. That science is cybernetics and network science, which have been around since the middle of the 20th century, but mostly theoretical, until we started getting evidence from super-computing and big data sets. That gave us the first evidence-based perspective, but they couldn't make accurate use of the data until they had a mathematical model from a complete data set. They found it by accident, in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. You know that game, that’s based on the assumption that Kevin Bacon is the most connected actor, the hub in the schmoozing network of Hollywood. It works because they use only the closed world of Hollywood actors. You know how the game works. You play by finding every actor that played in a Hollywood film and this is between him and Kevin Bacon, and it always works out to six degrees or fewer. That was the EUREKA! moment, because now they had a clean and complete data set of a small system, and they could actually see the mechanisms, the forces that make that system collapse or survive. It was actually the structure of survival itself! These are new findings and the science is still in development but the broad strokes are clear. Nature develops its part from simple systems into complex ones by predictable patterns called scale-free networks. Now this is going to get a bit mathematical, so stay with me.