Phase Transition

While I was studying subjects on analytics, calculus my side-reading was what one could call “grand explanation” books, on subjects ranging from history, strategy and the future. First book I picked was written by a Thomas Barnett, a strategist, where he talks about his “the core and the gap” theory. The gap? Basically what this guy did was plotting all trouble spots in the world and coming up with a huge “gap” on his map:

The sophistication of this analysis was sadly at the level of “bro - there is like a hole in there maaan! juust looook!”, so I quickly moved on to other theories.  

The Tipping Point, Black Swan, Critical Mass were next. Critical Mass was interesting, written by Peter Ball, an ex-physicist, he looks (and finds) a lot of power laws in society, events that cannot be neatly explained by bell curves, linear correlations. A for effort, many anectodes, was a nice read. Same with TTP.

In whichever level of complexity however, all of these books had a theme in common – they were all trying to find this unexpected “thing” that was causing the mayhem / causing a chain reaction. Why did they look for this unexpectedness? Because the world is messed up right? We look around and a lot of unexpected things are taking place. Well, and heere is the intellectual cavalry trying to explain it all. Did they succeed?

Partly.

Maybe the better idea would be to see the changes in society as a phase transition, and, focus on the phases, not the transition. Let me try to explain.

Let’s take water turning into ice - below a certain temparature water will become ice. There is only a brief moment while the temparature is falling the water comes to a certain temparature when icicles start forming, and IMO that threshold is what books like Black Swan, The Tipping Point, Critical Mass keep focusing on. There is water, as it cools down a crystal appears, and another, and another, it spreads rapidly, and then all becomes ice. Wow! So awesome! Did you see that? One crystal appearing “out of nowhere”, it spreads like “wildfire”, totally unexpected.

However for all questions that matter, the when, the why of the transitionary points, the crystals forming is irrelevant.

What we can and should focus on, giving us better stronger analytical results and a more resillient model is looking at the “states”, the phases in which water will stay in for a long time, or the old state it came from which it stayed for a long time.

Now subsitute technology for temparature, society for water. This is exactly what the 2nd Wave / 3rd Wave explanation tries to accomplish. As technology spreads, it forces a phase shift - we were all once living in agrarian societies, then industrialization arrived, before and after situation in such societies became radically different. Same kinds of people (sometimes exactly the same people) started living one way, as opposed to another.

More recent example:

Situation in the Middle East. Street vendor in Tunisia sets himself on fire, and we have dictators falling in the region. A tipping point? Did that minor (though sad) event truly cause everything else that followed? When we look at phases, instead of transitions, we see this: Wikileaks (technology) had arrived, ubiquituous use of cell phones, the Net (technology) had been increasing. Plus there is the backdrop of illegitimate Arab rulers (decaying old rule based on old technology), what do we have? Temparature (tech) comes in, first we see one crystal (guy sets himself on fire), and another, then another, at the end there is a different kind of society.

To sum up: we need to focus on the phases that are long lasting and distinctly seperate from eachother and treat freak events as occurences / projections of the transition in a brief moment. Icicles form, seeming randomly, unexpectedly, which point turns into ice first? Who cares? After a few degrees of change it will all become ice. It might seem one icicle is causing another, that is an illusion, or at best, irrelevant. Any part of the ice would do as a starting point, what matters is the end state, not the temporary, the transitional.