I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those interactions. Done.
Of course, there are a lot of scary privacy implications and I'm sure there are a few execs who wouldn't want anyone to discover that, wow dude_in_power_x sure does sent a lot of chats to cute_indirect_subordinate_they_have_no_reason_to_interact_with.
But if and organization really did want a better sociological understanding of their workforce, they could build it.
I like this article. Geoscience isn’t well understood by most people, so I usually get reminded of the Gell-Mann Effect whenever I read a news article about it. But, this one correctly frames landslides as having created these feature in the first place, and that they were always going to fall at some point, rather than treating them as eternal features.
The features we see around us that seem so constant, like mountains, rivers, shorelines, lakes and seas, are all in a state of flux. Geological processes under some of our most populous cities are moving them by measurable amounts every year, and the numbers aren’t microscopic (up and down too, not just the sideways movement many people have heard about). Where once there were sea beds, there are now jagged mountains, and there will sometime be fields and then seas again.
I used to believe that we could determine a basis for most decisions from first principles. However, that requires a level of complete a priori knowledge that’s simply unattainable except for extremely niche situations.
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To take it a step a further, you cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.