How does a pot of water boil? How does a viral disease become a pandemic? How do some social media posts go viral? How do empires fall?
How does anything change?
Let’s introduce three concepts: (a) nucleation, (b) non-linearity, and (c) phase change.
Nucleation is the gathering of right conditions for a system to change. You can keep a cup of water in the freezer and it may remain liquid even below 0°C (a metastable system). But take it out and throw in a spec of ice, and the whole cup of water freezes. That spec of ice is the nucleus around which water molecules can gather and crystallize. This is why — in the right conditions — small protests can lead to massive uprisings in societies.
Non-linearity refers to the fact when things start to change, it can happen suddenly, even exponentially. This why the spread of pandemics always surprises decision-makers.
Phase change is a systematic change for the long-term. Systems find new equilibria after a phase change — simply removing the instigating perturbation may not allow a return to the status quo. The world changes around you.
To sum it up: things don’t change until they do, when they do they change slowly at first, then blindingly fast, before settling into a new normal. A system may appear invulnerable, until it starts to collapse — and the rate of change may surprise even the most keen observers.
These are the lines from William von Hippel in his book “The Social Leap” that I found to be incisive and insightful. “The ability to kill at a distance is the single most important invention in the history of warfare, because weaker individuals can attack stronger individuals from a position of superior numbers and relative safety.” “As if division of labor were not enough, Homo erectus then sealed the deal with the single most important innovation in human history: the control of fire.” “Long before the invention of writing (which is only about five thousand years old), human culture had become cumulative by virtue of our oral storytelling traditions .” “When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than
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