Pointless Meandering

"6 Degrees" Fades Away

This article shows how the famous “6 degrees of separation theory” fades under scrutiny.  I found the original theory frighteningly seductive, so admitting it might be a hoax — or at least bad science — was a hard pill to swallow.  Then later on in the article I read: “Milgram was so in love with the idea of six degrees that he overlooked the weak statistics backing it up”, which confirms my bias, but hy did he do it?

Truth is, people run in certain circles, and they know other people in those circles, natch.  They don’t necessarily know people in other circles.  So while Kevin Bacon and just about anyone in Hollywood are linked in less than 6 degrees, Kevin Bacon and YOU are about as far apart as can be.

Further, the whole “6 degree” thing was initially an average, not a limit.  The junk science part was that in the original study only 5% of the contacts were made at all: 1 in 2 hops, and the other two in presumably less than 16 hops total.  The remaining 95% of the contacts were never made, so you could call those +inf degrees, or undefined, whichever suits your maths.