Six Degrees

"Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts, who until recently was at Columbia University – he’s now at Yahoo Research. Watts has been looking at the small world phenomenon to identify whether the web itself has shrunk our world, and in fact it hasn’t. That’s the lovely thing about it: we still have the same number of friends as was outlined in Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the 1950s, where he coined the term ‘small world’ and identified the six degrees of separation phenomenon. Watts has been running an experiment for the past few years: if you sign up you are given the name of somebody randomly – clear across the world or next door – and tasked with becoming connected with that person via e-mail or instant message (it all has to be online), like a treasure hunt. These online environments certainly hyperinflate the number of acquaintances you might be exposed to. Now, you would think that that would make Watts’s experiment a lot easier, that it would be easier using all of your potential weak ties to go from points a to b faster, but it’s not. We still do have those six degrees of separation, even by e-mail, with somebody who’s in, say, Brazil. When it comes down to it, ultimately we do still have the same number of friends and the same number of connections between two points in the world."

"First of all, I would like to say that the Optimum Population Trust has been making dire predictions like the ones in this book for quite some time. And my fellow policy director David Nicholson-Lord has written some excellent things on environmental population threats. But this book by Mark Lynas is a must-read, I think, for anyone who has any doubts about what is at stake. It’s a very fast-moving explicit scenario about what might happen on earth to all of us, with each degree of global warming temperature rise. And it’s based on a lot of scientific research. For example he has looked at each of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios. The latest one projected, I believe, a rise of up to six degrees in the next hundred years. And we are already at nearly one degree over pre-industrial levels. Mark Lynas takes us very eloquently, as Virgil did descending through the Dante’s circles of hell, through what might happen at each degree of warming. A rise of two degrees is the point of no return; the tipping point at which nothing can be done to reverse the warming. And very frighteningly Lynas concludes (as do many others) that we have in fact got just seven years to stop emissions raising temperatures to this two degree threshold. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Seven years from now – yes. Of course there is always doubt. Let’s hope everybody’s wrong [laughs]. But I think we should act under the precautionary principle that everyone now agrees with, that action must be taken very fast."