Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas

[Triple Zero]

http://scienceblog.com/46622/minority-rules-scientists-discover-tipping-point-for-the-spread-of-ideas/

"Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion."

Yeah I know, it's kind of a large claim. The comments already voice a couple of criticisms about this conclusion too. And the way it is formulated below it is almost paradoxical:

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

Ummm if it takes the age of the universe (aka "forever") for an idea below 10 percent to reach the majority, and ideas above 10 percent spread like flame (and reach the majority). That means all ideas are either held by the majority of people or are held by less than 10% of the population. It also means that, unless a new idea simultaneously pops up in the heads of at least 10% of the population, it is doomed to stay below 10% adoption "forever". This is obviously false and/or bullshit.

Which is why I really want to read the original research paper:

http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v84/i1/e011130

But it's behind a paywall. And I was going to ask if anyone had access to a subscription, but never mind! Because I already found it:

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~szymansk/papers/pre.11.pdf
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61056053/Social-Consensus-Through-the-Influence-of-Committed-Minorities

Look at all those beautifully typeset LaTeX equations on percolation theory If your paper looks like that I'm sure they found something interesting, even if a ScienceBlog mangles it. And I believe the book Tipping Point or a sequel to it, or something like that in the complexity/longtail quasi scientific management genre also mentioned it, which is how I came to the link because a friend of mine started about this theory and I was like, because it didn't make sense (as I said above) and he was like "Okay, *emails link through smartphone*".
Because these books like Tipping Point and Black Swan¹ are super interesting and very inspirational and they usually don't use these kinds of research in a way that really makes or breaks their point, but they do mention it because it's related and sometimes it's even second-hand knowledge of that research and they take artistic license and turn good research into very tall claims that are simply not at all what was found. In my experience, in a worse way than popular scientific blogs do.

Anyway that rant's besides the point. When I finish reading that paper I'll report back to this thread

¹Fooled by Randomness was better IMO