Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

by Malcolm Gladwell

If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using?

How your doctor treats you, in many cases, has less to do with where your doctor was trained, or how well he or she did in medical school, or what kind of personality your doctor has, than with where your doctor lives.

What he found instead were medical clusters, where the doctors in one hospital district took on a common identity, as if they had all been infected by the same contagious idea.

Whatever contagious belief unites the people in those instances has the discipline to stop at the borders of their community. There must be a set of rules, buried somewhere below the surface.

Oh, Harvard’s run by millionaires And Yale is run by booze Cornell is run by farmer’s sons, Columbia’s run by Jews So give a cheer for Baxter Street, Another one for Pell, And when the little sheenies die, Their souls will go to hell

If you don’t think that social engineering has quietly become one of the central activities of the American establishment, you haven’t been paying attention.

Law of the Few: It’s a very large problem caused by a very small number of actors.

Urban air pollution is a perfect example of a problem caused by the Few. But we behave as if it’s a problem caused by all of us. No one wants to act on the asymmetry, and it’s not hard to understand why: Singling out a handful of big-time polluters would make the job of the people who worry about Denver’s air quality a lot harder. What if the people pulled over were disproportionately poor? What if they couldn’t afford to get their cars fixed? Do you confiscate their cars if they don’t comply? What if the police balk at being asked to enforce antipollution laws? What if environmentally minded groups take matters into their own hands, buy a Stedman box, and start shaming motorists as they pass by? Moving from the position that a problem belongs to all of us to the position that a problem is being caused by a few of us is really difficult. And we are so intimidated by that difficulty, apparently, that we’d rather breathe dirty air.

British research group wrote this: Predicting or identifying people who might be high virus emitters, perhaps even before they are infected, is of interest because they could be prioritized for interventions to block transmission.

Program/ Year/ Viewers (in millions)/ Share of audience for finale: M*A*S*H/ 1983/ 106/ 45.5 Cheers/ 1994/ 80.4/ 30.9 Seinfeld/ 1998/ 76/ 27.5 Friends/ 2004/ 52.5/ 17.9 Big Bang Theory/ 2019/ 18/ 5.4