Hubs, Littleton, & Schadenfreude

WABC (770 am) reminded me that today is the anniversary of Klebold and Harris's raid on their classmates at Littleton High in Denver. It's also been about 18 months since Mohammed Atta piloted one of two aircraft into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Buss (2000, p 366) discusses schadenfreude, or the Tall Poppy Syndrome: many of us smile quietly whenever one of the arrogant, the grand take a fall. American pilots bombed the Republican Guards but we cheered second hardest when a Brooklyn trooper helped topple a statue of Saddam. (Hardest? Getting Jessica home.) Biblical and Grecian mottos echo common sense: "Pride goes before a fall."

A statistician might see these reversals as "regression to the mean," a numeric inevitability, a cost paid for moving too far away from the average. Kauffman might see a comparison to evolution's tracking a phase transition: traits too remote from environmental conditions lead to extinction.

Barabasi applies in perhaps the most subtle analysis. Emergent organizations have hubs. Emergent organizations are resilient to random attacks wherein each node has an equal chance of being hit; they are more vulnerable, however, to nonrandom wars that target hubs.

Whimsy (at least what I have that passes for whimsy!): do receptors pick out large, bright things because those things are also apt to be hubs? After all, fitness can be related to hub characteristics and if you choose to dine, then eat the very best! No point eating or mating with the sick or dying!

The point once more: emergent statistical networks are part of our evolutionary heritage, the physical structure of our minds and our manner of arranging our thoughts follow that heritage.

Klebold and Harris attacked the hubs and will be remembered, if indirectly and with anger, in the monument to be constructed in memory of their Littleton classmates, John Wilkes Booth is perhaps more clearly remembered than Lincoln's wife...

Copyright, James Brody, 2003, all rights reserved.

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