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In Which Steffan Abhors a Vacuum
Sep. 15th, 2010 10:55 am... And fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Since this is here, I feel compelled to put SOMETHING ON IT.
Stanley Milgram, the sociologist/psychologist (who is most famous for his experiments involving blind obedience to authority,) once conducted an experiment where persons living in Wichita Kansas, were asked to send letters to unconnected individuals in Boston Massachusetts. The catch was, they could only send the letters to someone they knew, and those people, in turn, would send it to someone they knew, until somehow, someday, the letters would reach the recipient.
The idea was to see how many "nodes" each person's social network contained. Milgram published his result, and the result is the notorious "six degrees of separation." Milgram found that it took 5.5 connections to get a letter from Wichita to Boston.
The flipside of this story is that in most cases, the letters never reached anyone at all. In one case 232 of the 296 letters sent, never arrived.
This leads to a tangent about lying with statistics. Milgram clearly discounted results that were contrary to his hypothesis, but I won't go there. It's not important. What IS important is that Milgram set something tangible in motion. Whether the experiment is over or not, the letters are still real.
In my head I imagine that these letters somehow entered a network loop that closed just after the initial receipt, maybe in Gees Bend or another similar backwoods cul de sac, where these letters are still... floating through the postal system, intended for recipients long dead, cycling endlessly between thirty elderly people who only have one another as friends.
Someday I see them all escaping and miraculously reaching some small 8 year old boy in Boston, gifted with his great-grandfather's name. Presents from the great postal network, and 6532 degrees of separation.
(Speaking of presents from the great postal network: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/09/it-started-out-as-a-routine-case-of-credit-card-fraud-dr-gemma-meadows-an-optometrist-in-virginia-got-a-call-from-bank-o.html)
Since this is here, I feel compelled to put SOMETHING ON IT.
Stanley Milgram, the sociologist/psychologist (who is most famous for his experiments involving blind obedience to authority,) once conducted an experiment where persons living in Wichita Kansas, were asked to send letters to unconnected individuals in Boston Massachusetts. The catch was, they could only send the letters to someone they knew, and those people, in turn, would send it to someone they knew, until somehow, someday, the letters would reach the recipient.
The idea was to see how many "nodes" each person's social network contained. Milgram published his result, and the result is the notorious "six degrees of separation." Milgram found that it took 5.5 connections to get a letter from Wichita to Boston.
The flipside of this story is that in most cases, the letters never reached anyone at all. In one case 232 of the 296 letters sent, never arrived.
This leads to a tangent about lying with statistics. Milgram clearly discounted results that were contrary to his hypothesis, but I won't go there. It's not important. What IS important is that Milgram set something tangible in motion. Whether the experiment is over or not, the letters are still real.
In my head I imagine that these letters somehow entered a network loop that closed just after the initial receipt, maybe in Gees Bend or another similar backwoods cul de sac, where these letters are still... floating through the postal system, intended for recipients long dead, cycling endlessly between thirty elderly people who only have one another as friends.
Someday I see them all escaping and miraculously reaching some small 8 year old boy in Boston, gifted with his great-grandfather's name. Presents from the great postal network, and 6532 degrees of separation.
(Speaking of presents from the great postal network: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/09/it-started-out-as-a-routine-case-of-credit-card-fraud-dr-gemma-meadows-an-optometrist-in-virginia-got-a-call-from-bank-o.html)
