The Six Degrees of Duncan Watts at TAICON

Duncan Watts, the writer of “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” gave a talk at a TAICON event. His talk sketches out the scholarly history of the small world problem (alongside its meteoric rise in popular culture), from its origins in sociology up to the recent explosion of work in physics and mathematics that uses it as a central reference point. The lecture also discusses the relevance of the “six degreesâ€? theory to a range of phenomena, from job hunting and organizations solving complex problems, to the spread of disease and the cascade-like dynamics of cultural fads. In the modern world, it is not enough to recognize that we are all connected; we must go further to understand both the patterns of these connections and the way they drive our individual and collective behavior.