Tangentially related: On Facebook, "The average person is connected to every other person by an average of 3.57 steps." Three and a half degrees of separation

Tangentially related: On Facebook, "The average person is connected to every other person by an average of 3.57 steps." Three and a half degrees of separation https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/02/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/ https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/02/three-and-a-half-degree... When the article was published, there was a tool that helped to visualise that, and I was surprised but excited to see my estimate at 2.91, presumably helped by extensive travelling and diverse social circles. I believe that if Facebook's success metric is connectedness, rather than profit, the world will benefit. It's easy to look the other way, and claim that big problems (plastic in the ocean, climate change) aren't my personal responsibility. And for 3 degrees of separation, that's reasonable: Switzerland has no ocean, so can't fix the plastic problem. But here in New Zealand, I bike past the ocean every day. To "love your neighbour" and stop to pick up litter while biking home from work will have a direct impact on the lives of birds and fish right here, and a butterfly effect impact on the whole ecosystem. By creating software tools like Tao to map the social graph, it's possible to measure the connectedness, and report these metrics. Links are also bidirectional (there's a "thank you" feedback loop) like Xanadu. For comparison, Wikipedia's connectedness is 3.019 degrees of separation. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-analysis https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-an...