This is a great interactive essay. I found the part about diffusion in cities particularly interesting.
I’ve been discussing with a friend on what makes big cities worth living in and one of the point raised was that just by putting a lot of people in a small space, you get much more innovation than spreading out the same amount of people in a wider area.
This is one of the reasons why Edward Glaeser dubs city as “the man's greatest invention“ in his book. He brings up the rate of new patents to back up the above claim but the blog post offers another mathematical reason.
I think the benefits of living in a city on a day-to-day basis have a lot less to do with "innovation" than with positive returns to geographic density for a lot of activities and industries, like entertainment, fine dining, the arts, and public transit.
I agree! Though I think "innovations", in a broad sense, can also be a delightful reason to enjoy cities. I find a fair bit of really niche ideas (mini "innovations" if you will) when I go to an indie exhibition and that fills me with inspiration and joy. I know that your comment also covers this aspect ("the arts") but I think increased creativity from being near other people is worth pointing out.
Companies are going in different tracks and some universities are more remote friendly than others. It will be interesting to compare how the companies are doing 5 years later to see the effect.
Great article and the interactive graphs work well to explain concepts.
I can think of a few extensions: make it more realistic with a global map of fiber-optic cable networks and local extensions, and then compare how information spreads through things like peer-to-peer sharing vs. information posted to 'central authorities' like Twitter. (Notably there was also that study that showed false information spread faster across Twitter than accurate information, attributed to the 'surprise factor'). This could also be modified to include the authoritarian filter effect (i.e. how does China's 'Great Firewall' affect the spread of information, for example).
With respect to this simple nearest-neighbor model, I suppose a complicating factor would be long-distant transport from a given node to a distant node by some out-of-plane connection method (i.e. Covid spread rapidly by airplane, for example).
The article really shows that graph-based network thinking is a great way of approaching these problems, nice work.
when careerists take up space in a Real Science research community, they gum up the works. They angle to promote themselves while the rest of the community is trying to learn and share what's true. Instead of striving for clarity, they complicate and obfuscate in order to sound more impressive.
Great essay. The simulations sure make this point hit hard. I feel the author's jadedness coming out here.
Should one feel like a small colored dot encircled by immune grey, it is essential to maintain a belief in agency: believing oneself capable of networking, relocating, and modifying the surroundings.
I have been looking for this with my friend for the last 6 months. I saw it on HN about two years ago and have shown it to him. Neither of us were able to find it again, especially since we thought the title was `Going Viral`, which made it especially hard to find given the COVID's pollution of the search keyword space.
I’ve been discussing with a friend on what makes big cities worth living in and one of the point raised was that just by putting a lot of people in a small space, you get much more innovation than spreading out the same amount of people in a wider area.
This is one of the reasons why Edward Glaeser dubs city as “the man's greatest invention“ in his book. He brings up the rate of new patents to back up the above claim but the blog post offers another mathematical reason.