The Age of Approximation

New map reveals distrust in health expertise is winning hearts and minds online
May 2020, phys.org

Communities on Facebook that distrust establishment health guidance are more effective than government health agencies and other reliable health groups at reaching and engaging "undecided" individuals, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. 

Distrust in establishment health guidance could spread and dominate online conversations over the next decade, potentially jeopardizing public health efforts to protect populations from COVID-19 and future pandemics through vaccinations. [link]

Medical science is an interesting subset upon which to study the dynamics of memetics. Ludwig Fleck used medical science to study his idea of the "evolution of a scientific fact" using the history of syphilis. He showed how the ideas that characterize syphilis (the syphilis meme) evolve via the sharing of experimental data between scientists.

Unlike some other sciences, medical science has a specific purpose -- to releive suffereing, or something to that effect. It can be measured, in controlled experiments, by the amount of people who are sick or well. If it works, or in another way of saying it -- if it's true -- then people get well. In a twist on the Feynman Psalm, you can't say that you understand syphilis until you can cure someone of it.

Let's shift from syphilis to vaccines. If we know how vaccines work, why, and not only if but how much of a positive health outcome we can get from them, then it should be safe to say that our understanding is the truth. And yet, as with many public health interventions, it is difficult to get people to believe this truth.

But this is something that Fleck also discussed in his meta-scientific discourse. He described two networks among which ideas are shared. One is a network of scientists, the esoteric network. This is where syphilis, or vaccines, are really studied, observed, worked with and thought about. The other network is the exoteric, the laypeople, the public. Scientists and the public.

Within either of these networks, the evolution of a scientific fact, as Fleck describes it, starts with an initial anomalous, ambiguous observation. This first idea, formless, spreads through the network with minimal restrictions, recombining with other facts from other disciplines and theories, in a prodigiously creative affair.

Over time, as the idea of syphilis begins to take shape, the network splits in two; all the rampant theories self-organize by their correlated characteristics and relative fitness, until there are two.* At this point the debate becomes ultimately controversial, and the scientists break sharply into their opposing sides. Eventually, one wins, and sets the final limits, or rules, on how we can think about syphilis, what it really is, does, and how to make people better if they suffer from it, and in the most effective way possible.
*In this case, fitness is "making people well".

The lesson we get from the current anti-vaccination network, circa the year 2019, is that science has to go through one more transformation to really be considered the truth. It needs to traverse the public network of laypeople, and self-organize within --their-- epistemological constructs, --their-- ideas of what things are.

A stark contrast, the exoteric network of the general population has a wild conflagration of code in its operation. This lets the network expand into all kinds of experimental dimensions as it searches for the best fit. Consider, the group of global scientists, large as it may be, is nothing compared to the overall population.

Yet, the popular exoteric network needs to self-organize. The more people, the more iterations it may invoke before it finds a fit that satisfies all the people in it. (Note that we're talking here about the idea being satisfied within your belief structure, not whether the idea is medically effective or not, because in the public sphere, that's not good enough.)

The meme takes shape when the network bifurcates, or polarizes. It trims the innumerable variety of personal theories, forcing or constraining the conversation. Those with outlying views, the undecided referenced above, get picked-off, drawn to one side or the other, and until there is only one.

What we're seeing firsthand is the exoteric vaccine-memetic-network crystallize and organize itself, through the data that comes from digitally mediated social transmission (ie Facebook posts). This new spread of misinformation is a growth spurt, if you will, in the evolution of the exoteric network.

A larger pattern being described here is that because the pool of people in the general population, through which this idea has to travel, keeps getting bigger, and keeps changing people, the truth is never really achieved, as it is a moving target. This comes to the same conclusion as Fleck, and the one that has most people flummoxed about it, which is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Big data begets the age of approximation.

Study Data:
100 million Facebook users in vaccine community networks during the 2019 measles outbreak.

Post Script:
What is not mentioned in the summary article referenced at the outset, is how many of these users were known or suspected to be socialbots or composite intelligentities, vs real people. And therefore, we don't see the effect of non-human interference, ie socialbots programmed to amplify an idea, "artificially". I think we can just call it deception, and say that people have been doing it forever. Yet, we should keep in mind their effects, as they're only bound to increase.

Notes:
The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact - A Review

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland)
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

I'm sure lots of things were said, since this work did reach a crescendo in the 60's - 70's along with Kuhn's Revolutions. Nonetheless, that was almost 50 years ago, and so many passages of this text conjure visions of contemporary phenomena.

I'll start with a basic overview, then a glimpse at a critical component of his theory called the Thought Collective, and some technical and editorial details. Successive posts will present a kind of functional analysis, and a good look at how Fleck's theory manifests in sociological phenomena like the Greta Garbo effect and of course, perennial favorite at Network Address, viral memetics.

But first...

On the Development of Syphilis as an Idea
This entire book is about Fleck following the "facts" of Syphilis as they evolved, starting with the most fanciful explanations, sometimes outright astrological, and ending with a test for the disease that couldn't have been developed without massive changes in the collective understanding of how the disease works in the body.

"Theoretical and practical elements, the a priori and the purely empirical, mingled with one another according to the rules not of logic but of psychology." (p5) (!!) 

If you are familiar with Kuhn's Revolutions, then you have an idea of what Fleck is talking about. Kuhn "serendipitously" found this book, which he later credited for much of his thinking. This book got no mention beyond its initial and limited reviews in the 1930's, and wasn't discovered until the 1960's, and by Kuhn, who sent it (and Fleck's idea of thought collectives) into the general public by the 70's.

-image source: Michael K Richardson 1998 embryo drawings 

The Life Cycle of a Fact

Fleck has provided a theory of knowledge whereby tentative pre-ideas can develop into scientific facts by means of a  process of collectivization. Fleck analyzes the development of syphilis from the Middle Ages to the Wasserman Reaction in the early 20th century. The fact has a life-cycle:

1. Vague visual perception and inadequate initial observation.
2. An irrational, concept-forming and style-converting state of experience.
3. Developed, reproducible and stylized visual perception of form. (p94)

Notes On Translation

• Thought Style - (from the German Denkstil, this word invented by Karl Manheim 1925)
• Thought Collective - (from German Denkkollektiv, and much consternation over the choice of collective vs community and their difference in meaning, especially at that time in history, i.e., Communism) 

Fleck describes or makes the exception for certain people who have a strong personal thought style, within themselves, he participates in several thought collectives, a "marginal man"

Fleck mentions the words collective imagination and thought collective but never the word Noosphere. ~p83

"Thought style is the readiness for directed perception." (p143 and elsewhere)

Science itself is a specialized thought style: "Good work done according to style, instantly awakens a corresponding mood of solidarity in the reader." (p145)

-image source: George Romane 1892 embryo drawings attr to Ernst Haeckel

Notes On the Thought Collective

"The conceptual creations of science, like other works of the mind, become acccepted as fact through a complex process of social consolidation." (Trenn, preface, p xiii)

"Without social conditioning no cognition is even possible." (p43)

"Knowledge exists in the collective, and it is always being revised." (p95)

In other words: Knowledge is a social creation. 

Thinking is a social activity. It does not exist apart from the thought collective that guides it. The way a thought collective thinks is called a thought style, and these are its features:

• related to problems of interest to a thought collective
• evolved by what the thought collective considers evident
• tested by methods which the thought collective applies as a means of cognition (p99)

"Thought style is the readiness for directed perception." (p143 and elsewhere)

Science itself is a specialized thought style: "Good work done according to style, instantly awakens a corresponding mood of solidarity in the reader." (p145)

Thought collectives are referred to as a "harmony of illusions" (ch2 sec3) which sound a lot like filter bubbles or echo chambers.

Post Script - The Duck Rabbit Illusion

When looking at the Duck/Rabbit, we see the duck or the rabbit, but not the lines on the page ... the lines are not the facts that make the duck or the rabbit. (Kuhn, Foreword)

Error, Objectivity, and Collective Psychology as Professional Habit

Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, Hans Van Meegeren forging Johannes Vermeer, 1942

Greta Garbo, circa 1942

Let's start with these pictures above, and a quick story about the greatest forgery in history. One picture is Greta Garbo, one of the most well-known stars of classic cinema, circa 1930's. You could also refer to her as one of the most publicized women in the world at that time. Also, look at her eye makeup.

The other picture is a forgery of a Vermeer painting. The painting never existed, so it's not just a fake copy; it's totally made-up. The guy who made it up was Hans van Meegeren. He fooled the entire art world with this painting. Everybody, experts, everybody.

I'm an art history major, I recognize that. But you don't have to be; look at that painting -- look at Jesus. Look at those eyes. Chiaroscuro like a mf. And now look at Greta Garbo. Look at her eyes.

You don't have to be an expert to see this. At the dawn of celebrity culture, she was recognized by the world over, and so was her makeup. That was how people looked at that time. It was all around you. You didn't think about it because you were in it, immersed, consumed. Van Meegeren was immersed in it, and so were the art historians and critics who validated his painting as a lost masterpiece of Vermeer.

Why is it so easy for you and I to see this as a total sham? Because we don't live in 1930. We don't live in a world where Greta Garbo is really popular, and where everyone's eye makeup looks like  that. We therefore notice the uncanny similarity.

Today, we know this painting is a forgery. It took a long time, first to figure it out, then to finally admit it. But now it's pretty damn obvious. And the greatest forgery in history should leave you wondering how this is even possible, that so many people could be so blind... . I can't say it better than this guy:

“There is one time-related art historical principle that VanMeegeren could not account for or combat – namely, the fact that works of art often bear the stamp, the characteristics of their own era. [Because of these tendencies for contemporary features to creep into forgeries] the style of VanMeegeren’s paintings is like that of Vermeer only superficially. The important resemblances to such Symbolist artists as Toorop are much more important. Characteristics that mark an era may be those that are most universally appreciated at that time. They seem also to be the qualities that become “dated” most quickly. The generation for which these qualities are in fashion tends to be blind to them, but to the next generation they may become painfully evident. This is certainly true of the VanMeegerens. What was lauded in the 1930’s looks superficial and thin in the 1980’s. No doubt we are as blind to the telltale appearance of our own taste and fashions in contemporary forgeries.” (p2)

-1. Rudolph Arnheim, “On Duplication”, pp232-245
-2. Hope B. Werness, “Han VanMeegeren fecit” pp1-57
in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art
Denis Dutton, ed.
Berkeley, 1983

***

Consider this phenomena -- it is possible, and perhaps common or even expected, that we are blind to things that are actually all around us. Such that the more prevalent something is, the more blind we would be to it. This is true in art, but also in science. And this is where we come back to Ludwig Fleck, as he explores the process by which knowledge is created.

Comparing visual descriptions of bacteria cultures from different scientists, author Ludwig Fleck outlines the development of the idea of Streptococci, and of epidemiology in general:

1. The material offering itself by accident (hmmm, what's this?).
2. The psychological mood determining the direction of the investigation (well that is some crazy sh**!).
3. The associations motivated by collective psychology, that is, professional habits (Tim from accounting says this sounds like some crazy sh**).
4. The irreproducible "initial" observation, which cannot be clearly seen in retrospect (what the heck, why can't I do that again?).
5. The slow and laboring revelation and awareness of "what one actually sees" or the gaining of experience (ahhh, now I see...).
6. That what has been revealed and concisely summarized in a scientific statement is an artificial structure, related but only genetically so, both to the original intention and to the substance of the "first" observation need not even belong to the same class as that of the facts it led toward (p89)

In other words, what you discover isn't a resolution to your initial anomalous observation, but in the process, you discover something useful nonetheless.

***

Again, using comparative descriptions of an organism in a petri dish by different scientists, Fleck enumerates the errors in the description:

1. Assumptions are already incorporated within the choice and limitation of the object of investigation.
2. It is altogether pointless to speak of all the characteristics of a structure. ... and it depends on the habits of thought of the given scientific discipline.

He concludes that observation without assumption is impossible.

But he does focus on two types observation apparently worth investigating:
1. The vague initial visual perception.
2. The developed direct visual perception of a form (which requires being experienced in the relevant field of thought, yet at the same time we lose the ability to see something that contradicts the form). (p91-92)

So there is something about the curse of wisdom that inhibits us from seeing things that don't fit into our schema, even if and especially if they are new things, new observations that might even contradict our theory.

***

Before we leave this, I have to relate it to a moment in Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's a book but also a film by PBS. The book talks about seemingly small facts, such as the difference in protein per gram for rice vs wheat, or the difference in the predominance of a land mass to be east-west vs north-south, or the distribution of medium-sized domesticable animals throughout the regions of the world. These things make the Fertile Crescent, and then Western Europe, and the Americas, to be the top of the global food chain. It's not because they're better or smarter; it's because of initial conditions that snowball over time to put one place on a wildly different trajectory compared to others.

Kind of unrelated to this thesis, there is a moment in the film where the indigenous people of the New World see Christopher Columbus's ships approaching on the horizon. Only they don't actually see them. They have never seen a ship, not like this, and so they actually can't see it. A shaman among them is the only one who can see it, because that's what shamans do (and that's what artists do), they see things that barely even exist yet, and prepare their people. The shaman tells the people what it is, and all of the sudden they can see it.

This moment is similar to the one Fleck describes above, the process of acquiring knowledge, the genesis and development of a fact.

And let's end with a quote that's hard to resist in this context:

"In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature." (p35)

Notes:
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

On Hindsight and Blindness
Network Address, 2012
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/12/on-hindsight-and-blindness.html

Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives

"The more developed and detailed a branch of knowledge becomes, the smaller are the differences in opnion." (Fleck, p83)

Ludwig Fleck observed this feature of network phenomena 80 years ago. He made many similar observations and even outlined a basic network theory, although he certainly called it nothing of the sort.

Network theory did exist before the internet, and as far back as Fleck, in fields such as electronics and biology (although it was likely called graph theory at the time). But it was the linking of webpages and eventually the linking of people that made it so ubiquitous a phenomena in our world of today.

A book called Linked comes out in 2002, right at the same time as Friendster. By that summer, everyone knew the difference between "links" and "nodes" (although Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon circa late 1990's already gave people a very simple and accessible understanding of the idea.)

By the year 2016, the world would come to grips with the more nuanced (and insidious) features of the social network and digitally-mediated socialization in general, i.e., polarization, filter bubbles, echo chambers, etc.

Fleck explored the formation of a scientific fact. He studied the development of the idea of Syphilis, and found that over time, as the facts became clear and the idea crystallized, divergent views became less and less, concentrating on a unified theory.

He describes in great detail the way an idea developed from a vague ambiguity to a crystal clear and consensual episteme. For one, he turns to the use of "slogans", referring to the terms used in science such as "Deep Learning", or "Microbiome", and says that they have magical power:

"Whenever such a term [a slogan] is found in a scientific text, it is not examined logically, but immediately makes either enemies or friends." (p43)

Enemies and friends are polar opposites. So one of the ways in which the theory finds its unification, is by using a means to quickly send scientific texts into one of two directions, or into one of two piles, thereby organizing all the facts. Fleck's slogans are like codes embedded into a text to quickly determine which pile it should be thrown into. Eventually, one of those piles will be the winner.

You may recognize Fleck's "slogans" in their contemporary versions, such as metadata hashtags and coded dogwhistles. These keywords and codewords signal to people which side the idea* is on, and are used as a shorthand to identify text as immediately good or bad, but nowhere in between. It should be noted here that Fleck didn't give humans free will in his networks; they do not "examine logically", but instead follow the algorithm embedded in the network. 

*I would love to call the author/idea a meme, but the word has lost its 1970's meaning in light of 21st century memetic engineering affronts, especially by coordinated inauthentic entities.

By this initial identification, the process of polarization is amplified and reinforced, and we end up with the echo chambers and filter bubbles that define socialization and the propagation of information in our contemporary society.

Later, Fleck goes way deeper into the dynamics of information propagation, describing in detail the way thoughts move throughout the scientific body, the noosphere of science, the "thought collective" as he called it.

Image source: Lund University Sweden, Faculty of Engineering, Course in Network Dynamics. 

Network Dynamics

"New junctions [of trains of thought] are produced time and again and the old ones displace one another. This network in continuous fluctuation is called reality or truth." (p79) 

"It is as if with the increase of the number of junction points, free space were reduced. It is as if more resistance were generated, and the free unfolding of ideas were restricted." (p83-84)

Fleck describes the facts about Syphilis as they move throughout the network. He calls this network the thought collective, and describes its purpose as a means of constraining, inhibiting and determining the way of thinking.

But I have to argue, do we say that the blood vessels constrain or inhibit the flow of blood? Differing from Fleck, I would say the thought collective is the network. It is the exchange of ideas. It doesn't inhibit, it facilitates. (~p159)

What inhibits is the spatial boundaries, which can also be thought of as the number of dimensions in the network. The facts (about Syphilis for example) are points within a space which we could call "Syphilis", but which may be called more generally the noosphere, to choose a term. Thoughts evolve and replicate their positions as they advance towards the truth (about the disease), all the while reconfiguring the network in noospheric space (Syphilis space).

The restrictions are set by the society's ability to handle the truth. As the truth becomes ever-faceted, and more complex, so does the network. The network does have limitations; so does our circulatory system in delivering blood to cells (a network bound by the three dimensions of the body), the highway system for delivering things and people (two dimensions). So the thought collective is bound in its ability to deliver facts to a society, and this by n dimensions, although I can't tell you what n is. Maybe it's the number of people, maybe it's the number of epistemological units. Maybe it is simply the amount of different ideas about the same thing that a homogenous group of people can maintain at once.

At any given time, a network can only process so many facts. And yet truth is a moving target.

The only way to proceed is to force another dimension, another direction in thought. The paradigm shifts, catalyzes, and the final crystallization of the theory is formed. All of its dimensions are then flattened, and become a single point in higher dimensional space.

I cannot read Fleck's "unfolding of ideas" without seeing the unfolding of network dimensions in a fractal space; it wants to unfold and evolve, but restrictions become increasingly rigid, the rules develop sub-rules and ad infinitum, until they become airtight, and cancel any new idea that might come along.

In the same way that fractalization is a way to cram more stuff into the limits of dimensions available, the ultimate endpoint is the adding of an extra dimension entirely, or rather the collapsing of the previous dimensions, a dimension-reduction that allows more information into the same amount of space.

And what does this look like: Note the line drawings below; they are one dimensional lines, but drawn in a way that could eventually appear to fill the entire two-dimensional space to the point they might appear as a single two-dimensional object. But it only appears that way, the line instead develops more crinkles, rules and sub-rules and sub-sub rules.

1-D to 2-D

1-D to 2-D

2-D to 3-D

Still they would appear to take on the identity of a solid two-dimensional object. Your blood vessels do this in order to try and get oxygen to as many parts of your body as efficiently as possible, to fill their entire three-dimensional vessel with the least amount of space necessary. This is the same for tree branches and highways and basically anything else that carries things or communicates ideas.

Esoteric vs Exoteric
Marching on, now that we have seen how Fleck's network behaves, we can get into the details. This is the part that begins to push the edge of what we know even today about networks.

According to Fleck, esoteric and exoteric are the two types of thought collective networks, one made of experts (eso-) and one of laymen (exo-). Scientific fact permeates from the eso- to the exo- and then reverses as feedback, so the process of social consolidation creates the facts and the knowledge. The most advanced states leave no room for differences of opinion.

But how do we explain anti-vax phenomena? The concepts of disease, infection, immunity, etc, have already been fully-formed as bodies of scientific knowledge. Yet, as they traverse the larger exoteric networks of general society, they seem to come undone.

Perhaps what we are seeing is a network that is always trying to grow, and once it becomes too tight in its thought space, it needs to split in order to keep growing? Not the scientific theories of vaccines or disease, but the greater philosophical theories that allow science to be realized by the society as a whole.

Is anti-vaccination a feature or a bug of the network? And how would we know? It is certainly a threat to public health, just as syphilis once was; The global health body has declared it as such. Someone might easily say that it's a social problem, not a science problem. But if the purpose of vaccines are to get rid of infection, then they're not working regardless.

Let's take a quick look at a description about infowar and the anti-vax phenomenon:

"The [socialbot] campaign used sophisticated Twitter bots to amplify highly polarizing pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages, containing the hashtag #VaccinateUS..."
-"Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate". Broniatowski DA, Jamison AM, Qi S, AlKulaib L, Chen T, Benton A, Quinn SC, Dredze M (October 2018). American Journal of Public Health. 108 (10): 1378–84. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567. 

Granted this is different than the pursuit of science; these particular socialbots are pursuing the opposite in fact. But this description echoes Fleck. Slogans (hashtags) categorize the messages so they can be organized (polarized) by the exoteric social network.

Socialbots, intelligentities, spread their information throughout the network not to inform but to take information away, I suppose, as to redistribute the network in Vaccine space, artificially forcing new dimensions into the debate that didn't get there from scientists, but anarchists (not sure what to call a malicious socialbot). On the receiving end, the misinformed hold a less-efficient Vaccine space in their mind. Fleck's Syphilis, on the other hand, is an esoteric network, where the senders and receivers are both scientists.

Perhaps it is the exoteric network of ordinary people, not the esoteric network of scientists, that is more susceptible to corruption in general. Speaking of corruption...

On the Expansion and Corruption of a Fact

The Sidereal Origin of Syphilis and the Development of Syphilogical Thought
-citing an Iwan Bloch in his 1901 Der Urspring der Syphilis (The Origin of Syphilis)

"Most authors assume that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter under the sign of Scorpio and the house of Mars on 25.XI.1484 was the cause of the carnal scourge. ... The sign of Scorpio which rules the genitals, explains why the genitals were the first place to be attacked by the new disease." (p2)

This discussion on the origins of syphilis is a reminder that even in the esoteric network of specialized scientists, if you go back far enough, it could seem like a misinformation campaign. But Fleck describes this for us: We move away from "everyday experience ... to scientific specialization" (p82). This is all a part of the process, even astrological explanations had their rightful position in the configuration of early Syphilis space.

But calling back to anti-vaccination, we see movement from specialization back into the everyday, and the network must struggle to fit its new topography. The harmony of illusions can no longer be sustained.

***

The anti-vax story is another step in the evolution of disease control, and Fleck's ideas provide a great substrate for understanding this.

In the case of anti-vaccination, the disease has evolved a new method for infecting people -- namely the use of socialbots, e.g., socially malignant intelligentities, to infect the population's belief system. Which is another way of saying it is attacking the exoteric network itself, without which there is no esoteric network.*

*Granted, the anti-vaccination belief system began alongside vaccines themselves, thus long before the internet.

Viruses want to reproduce. Our immune systems try to stop them, but some figure out a way around that. We discover vaccines, and that works for a while. But then the virus figures out another way; it stops the vaccines from working through the use of misinformation. It attacks the esoteric network of public information and understanding of infectious disease, for example, or of science in general.

If it is not obvious, this is a tangent from Dawkins' memetics, where he looks at evolution from the point of view of the gene -- the selfish gene that wants to reproduce. In this case, it's the selfish virus, using socialbots to increase its chances of success. It is attacking the network itself, or from its point of view, reconfiguring the network to optimize its own existence.

Is it a natural process? Are mutations natural? Is disease natural? Does it sound like I'm permissive of socially malignant intelligentities (or a good contemporary term, "coordinated inauthentic behavior")? As long as acknowledgement does not equal permission. 

But I would like to discover the error correcting codes hidden within Fleck's thought collective, that we might be able to withstand, or rather adapt to, our ever-evolving noospheric maelstrom.

Notes
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

Post Script
Great book by Geoffrey West, also check out the Santa Fe Institute:
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. Geoffrey West, 2017.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geoffrey-west/

Where it all starts:
Linked: The New Science of Networks. Albert-László Barabási, 2002.
http://barabasi.com/book/linked

Twitter bots for good: Study reveals how information spreads on social media
Sep 2017, phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-twitter-bots-good-reveals-social.html

Fleck describes the "marginal man" as cruscial for the exchange of ideas between different thought communities. This sounds to me like descriptions of fringe agents in network theory (the opposite of the hubs of the network), who are almost wholly responsible for intra-cluster transmission of novel ideas; see "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter, 1973; he uses the word "marginal" and "liason" in similar ways to Fleck.
American Journal of Sociology. 78 (6): 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469.

On Free Will, Decision Making and Sovereign Awareness:
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-free-will-decision-making-and.html

On Memes and Misonformation:
Securing the Noosphere
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2017/10/securing-noosphere.html

Bose-Einstein Condensate, Fitnees Models, Scale-Free Networks, Preferential Attachment, Zipf's Law, Benford's Law, Stigler's Law of Eponymy:
Laws Metaphysical
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2013/02/laws-meta-physical.html

A Bit On Networks
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-bit-on-networks.html

First mention of an internet meme; in this case Godwin refers to the his eponymous Law of Nazi Analogies as a counter-meme against the "comparing people to Nazis" meme found too often on usernet forums:

Meme, Counter-meme, Mike Godwin for WIRED, Oct 01, 1994.
https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/

And to take the final paragraph, because it hasn't cooled down a bit since /94:
"While the world of the Net is filled with diverse critical thinkers who are ready to challenge self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing memes, we can't rely on net.culture's diversity and inertia to answer every bad meme. The Nazi-comparison meme has a peculiar resilience, in part because of its sheer inflammatory power ("You're calling me a Nazi? You're the Nazi in this discussion!") The best way to fight such memes is to craft counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The time may have come for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering - crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.

Otherwise, plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose."
[The more it changes the more it's the same]

UrSci

From other flavor networks like this we can infer that Asian cuisine is vegetable-based and diverse, whereas North American cuisine is animal-based and limited to basically cow meat and butter. As for this flavor network, it shows us that cashew nuts are more like cheese than nuts.

Ur was an ancient city in Mesopotamia and the birthplace of Abraham, who is the birthperson of the Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim). Because of its potent origin-inducing prowess, it has become a word that means 'the beginning of,' for example, an urtext is the original version of a text.

Every time I hear about network science, I think of the word ur-science, because it sure seems like it's underneath all the rest. If physics is the underlying science from which all else follows, then network science must go beyond even that. It's like the link between math and science, that's another way to look at it. Math is all meta, totally disembodied, no physicality involved. And it's more like a language than a science, a perfect language, God's language if you will. Network science, however, seems to reach in-between this space, in-between the body and the void.

As anyone even slightly interested in science would already know, there's some problems with physics, like finding a universal theory that explains both gravity and quantum mechanics. Although the theories used in both these phenomena are mature and useful, they don't overlap enough to make one single theory.

Then there's other problems, particularly with quantum phenomena, like 'spooky action at a distance,' also called non-locality, and also called teleportation, where a change to one particle that had been entangled with another but then separated by space and yet still entangled, will immediately change the other entangled particle, no matter how far away they may be, and instantaneously, he says again for effect to remind you, the reader, that Einstein's Relativity says that nothing happens "instantaneously" but as a result of its relationship within the greater context of spacetime. (This goes against all intuitive thought in the classical physics mindset, and is the reason Einstein called it "spooky.")

So we know that there's some work that needs to be done in terms of making Science into one thing, and to explain some of the things that we know to be true, yet we still cannot believe, albeit because of our feeble limbic-driven wetware.

***
This brings us to Network Science, this thing that became real popular with the advent of the Internet, although it's been around for quite awhile. My own introduction to this came from the book Linked by Albert-László Barabási which came out just before The Social Network (the thing not the movie) in 2002*.

In it, Barabási gives a rudimentary exploration that even a non-scientist can understand. There's hubs and there's spokes. And although The Internet looks like a mess, there is some order to it, and there are some rules to how networks form, how long they last, what kind of information gets passed through it and between who.

Plenty of work has been done on the subject of Network Science, both since Barabási 's 2002 book and long before it. Granted there is always a draw to something new. But there are also these moments that happen when a phenomena has been sitting around doing its thing for ages, and then all of the sudden an example comes to life so that everyone can see it and use it and think about it (and even write books on it). And that would be the dynamics of the social network that we now use to explain and understand everything from fundraising to depression.

When a thing becomes this pervasive in society, we can talk about it and wrestle with it in common language. And we can see anew a thing that once before we never even noticed. I guess this is similar to how we used to think the nervous system was like a bunch of pipes filled with a fluid that behaved according to laws of pressures etc., and then electricity comes along, and all of the sudden there's a new way of looking at the nervous system.

So perhaps it's possible that Network Science is a new analogy for things we have yet to understand. And then again, maybe it's just another one of those - when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail - and the Network is just the hammer of our day. 

*Physicist Mark Buchanan also wrote about networks in his 2002 book Nexus


Notes:
The dimension of a space can be inferred from the abstract network structure
Sep 2018, phys.org

Post Script:
Network Science is the Ur-Science
Network Address, 2015

URSCI - Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Investigations at Dominican University in Illinois

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-László Barabási
Scientific Reports volume 1, Article number: 196 (2011)

When a Rose is no longer a Rose

("Rose" is her real name)

Google+ abandons need to use real names
phys.org, July 2014

Google+ apologized Tuesday and stopped requiring people to use their real names while mingling in the online social network, as it looks to gain ground on market leader Facebook.