Recommendable! Better explanations for the dynamics of spreading information.
"A new study ... introduces a mathematical model for “self-reinforcing cascades,” processes where the thing being spread, whether a belief, joke, or virus, evolves in real time and gains strength as it spreads. ...
“We were inspired in part by forest fires,” ... “Fires can grow stronger when burning through dense forest, and weaker when crossing open gaps. That same principle applies to information, jokes, or diseases. They can intensify or weaken depending on the conditions.”
The model is simple in theory: each time an idea spreads, it has a chance of increasing or decreasing in intensity. If it weakens too much or finds no receptive audience, it dies out. But if it improves, even slightly, it can keep going, triggering large-scale cascades under a wide range of conditions. ..."
From the abstract:
"Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over time. However, social contagions—the spread of ideas, beliefs, innovations—can lose or gain in momentum as they spread: ideas can get reinforced, beliefs strengthened, products refined.
We study the impacts of such self-reinforcement mechanisms in cascade dynamics. We use different mathematical modeling techniques to capture the recursive, yet changing nature of the process.
We find a critical regime with a range of power-law cascade size distributions with nonuniversal scaling exponents.
This regime clashes with classic models, where criticality requires fine-tuning at a precise critical point. Self-reinforced cascades produce critical-like behavior over a wide range of parameters, which may help explain the ubiquity of power-law distributions in empirical social data."
Self-Reinforcing Cascades: A Spreading Model for Beliefs or Products of Varying Intensity or Quality (open access)
Fig. 2.
Phase transitions of SRC and directed percolation on Poisson trees of average branching number ℓ = 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment