3 ms·

Yeah, but basically it’s a statement that value scales linearly with the number of pairwise connection.

• fsckboy 4y ago
  but it's a loose approximation so it's not good to overanalyze it. The number of pairwise connections grows as the number of pairwise connections, and connections ("how many people can you talk to") are valuable, so value grows. But individual connections to networks grow the pairwise connections by N, so that's even better. broadcast (one to many connections, like giving a speech to a crowd) is an efficiency hack, which is good, and efficiency hacks grow as the number of connections grow, so that's good too... ... is more how I think about what Metcalfe was talking about. Which aspects are x, which are x squared, which are log x is interesting, but that's not all bound up in his simple statment, despite his "as the square" wording. and Bob Metcalfe is personally a great guy in all the ways people are saying, but it's not soooo unique, that's the way a lot of tech types were as the mantle passed from the Greatest Generation to the Boomers (and what was that one in the middle, "lost" or "invisible" or something) I'm not suggesting we've lost that (we may have) just saying that's how it was, for instance as an undergrad you could walk into any professor's office and get serious attention.