Duncan Watts
speaker
18 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Duncan Watts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's not a coincidence that we see riots and social violence in sort of bursts.
You don't see individual people turning to violence.
You see them all doing it together.
The fact that other people are doing things sort of normalizes that kind of behavior.
The problem with that, and we know this from decades of mathematical modeling and experiments and so on,
The problem is that once you introduce this social influence into the equation, you immediately generate a huge component of unpredictability.
You can have two populations that are, for all intents and purposes, identical.
Everything that you can measure about them would look the same.
And one of them can remain calm and the other can tip into all-out violence.
Just because the necessary conditions are satisfied doesn't mean that it's inevitable that you're going to see riots.
And it tells you virtually nothing about how frequent and how big they're going to be and precisely where they're going to happen.
If you look at some of the people who have been profiled, it's sort of like, well, you know, he's 19 years old and he only learned to read three years ago and he has no sort of hope for the future and he doesn't trust the government.
And that's why he's doing this.
That was true of this guy two years ago, a year ago, six weeks ago.
It'll be true of him in a year from now.
And he's not writing at all those times.
Clearly, there's some other very, very important factor that is responsible for the particular timing and location.
And that is not accounted for by the kinds of explanations that we give.
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