You all know the concept--any actor can be linked to Kevin Bacon through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie together.
And now we seem to be witnessing the real-time development of a fully playable Ft. Hood six degrees expansion set. The AP's Pamela Hess fired off the latest salvo this morning in her piece entitled Alleged shooter tied to mosque of 9/11 hijackers.
And as Ms. Hess is surely connected to at least six other mainstream journalists herself, who in turn are connnected to . . . well, you get the idea, no doubt we can expect more of the same line of sloppy, though dangerous, thinking for god knows how long.
I never saw the movie, have played the game at parties a few times, and as a consequence, never knew until I googled it a few minutes ago that what has come down to us as a slightly annoying game actually has a more distinguished pedigree.
In 1929 Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories that included one called "Chains," or "Chain-Links," wherein he explored the thought that technological advances in travel and communications had so shrunk the world that we are all connected to one another now in ways previously impossible. He writes:
One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth—anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.
And so the field of network theory was born.
Now, I don't know anything about the science or mathematics of social networks. But I do know that inferring a relationship between two or more individuals based on nothing more than somebody knows somebody who knows somebody else is some dangerous bullshit.
The mere fact that two people know someone in common says nothing useful about what either party thinks, does, or is likely to do.
The article's lede says it all:
The family of the alleged Fort Hood shooter held his mother's funeral at the same Virginia mosque that two Sept. 11 hijackers attended in 2001, at a time when a radical imam preached there.
Ooooh. Better get another room ready at Guantanamo.
But buried deeper in the article we find that a) the mosque in Falls Church, Dar al Hijrah,is one of the largest on the east coast and is attended by thousands; b)Hasan regularly attended another mosque and may never have actually been at Dar al Hijrah; and c) no claim has been made that Hasan knew or even ever met either the two 9/11 hijackers or the so called radical imam.
In other words, no relationship whatsoever. Except in a Kevin Bacon kind of way. But you sure don't get that impression from this article.