The Six Degrees Hypothesis Experienced
It is when you travel that you most powerfully experience the reality of Stanley Milgram's small world hypothesis, the idea that we're only six degrees away from anyone else.
You'd think that with billions of people in the world, the chance of you running into someone you know (even if only indirectly) on the streets of a faraway town would be tiny, yet in my travels, it's happened to me repeatedly.
I'm on holiday in Sicily. I'm walking down the streets of Ortygia, the old town of Siracusa, when I hear a voice say, "My god, it's Tim O'Reilly." It's Kevin Altis, whom I've never met, but who helps us organize the Python track at Oscon. He too is on holiday.
That night, at dinner, at a fabulous restaurant called Don Camillo, where we've gone for a whole fish baked in salt, we see a large group at the next table, all speaking English, but with a couple of people fluent in Italian. We ask for a bit of help with the menu. We discover that this is a group of former and current organic food industry executives on a tour with Boulder-based Culinary Adventures.
They discover in the course of the conversation that we're from Sebastopol. One of them, Peter Roy, the former CEO of Whole Foods, says he's on the board of Sebastopol-based Traditional Medicinals, and asks if I know Drake Sadler, the founder and CEO. I do.
He brings over two other people who know Drake. They are from Boulder, so we talk about people we might know in common. I mention Dave Boykin, the son of our next-door neighbors, Marg Starbuck and Bill Boykin. "The furniture maker? I have his stuff in my house! I've known him, and Marg and Bill, for 35 years..."
Yes, we're in a high-end restaurant catering to foreign tourists, and that increases the likelihood of running into other travelers. But still... This is not a unique occurrence. Another time, years before, visiting Monet's house at Giverny, I ran into two other people from Sebastopol. And a number of years ago, I was walking down a street in Paris, when I someone called out from behind me: "Tim O'Reilly!" It was Sean Devine, at that time the CEO of our Safari Books Online joint venture, who was in town on a business trip, unknown to me. Out of all the streets of Paris, with no knowledge on either of our parts that the other was there, I chose to walk down the street where Sean sat at dinner with a window table facing the street.
It's a reminder that the world is smaller than it appears.
tags: sicily, sixdegrees, travel
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[11.01.07 08:04 AM]
I have to say - as a frequent traveller *and* people watcher - that the openness and ease of Americans when travelling contributes to the discovery of connections. I have a feeling that two tables of Brits mightn't discover each other's backgrounds quite so easily as you did on the island of Ortygia.
Just a theory... and a broad, sweeping generalisation!
[11.01.07 08:15 AM]
It's a reminder that the world is smaller than it appears.
It's not just the restaurant-catering-to-an-english speaker. It's that but at many different scales:
English speaker looking for dinner on that street? That restaurant is a good bet. Business or pleasure traveler from the US in Paris? Much more time in some districts than others. USian in France on business or pleasure? Paris is almost guaranteed. Have some money and hail from the north-west coast? Of course you're likely to hit France -- you mean you've never been?
So, you have an approximate graph of likely travel routes and millions of your closest economic and geographic peers on very similar travel graphs -- the next question becomes the density of population along those graphs and their area. That is: what is the total square mileage of certain districts of paris, a large number of major airports, etc. And, what is their population density?
I suspect that you essentially dwell in a kind of "virtual Manhatten," maybe some small multiple the size of actual Manhatten.
If just a couple of percent are among your "3-degree class/interest peers" in the crowds, you'll have little trouble picking many of them out at a distance by clothing, mannerisms, language usage, activity, etc.
I don't know that this makes it a small world, though. There's an aweful lot of "gatedness" and geographic limit to the virtual Manhatten we're talking about.
I'm not entirely negative about the "virtual Manhatten" -- not by a long shot. For example, while it is "just a Manhatten" it has a huge "frontage" (since it is stretched out around the globe). By "frontage" I mean that the virtual Manhatten *borders on* perhaps a slight majority of the rest of the world. So, from your hotel room, if you want to, you can take a day trip into the Australian bush, then change rooms tomorrow and take a day trip to the Tenderloin distric in San Franciso. Very convenient.
But, I think most of your coincidental meetings are within the boundaries of the Virtual Manhatten.
-t
-t
[11.01.07 08:58 AM]
A few years back I bumped into my aunt and uncle at Montmartre. I live in the UK, they live in Denmark. I was in Paris for the day, they were there for a few hours only. Yet we managed to bump into each other as I was walking up the stairs to Basilique du Sacré-Cœur and they were coming down. Still amazes me today!
[11.01.07 09:06 AM]
A few years ago, I lived in Norway, was in the UK on business and stayed (first time) at the Hilton Heathrow. At 10pm I decided to call my boss and former officemate in Boston. He answered on his cell phone, informing me that he was staying, for the first time, at this Hilton hotel at Heathrow....
[11.01.07 09:39 AM]
Mom always said to act right no matter where you go because you are going to see someone you know.
[11.01.07 10:08 AM]
I hear you and agree, Tom, that there is a kind of global circuit today that includes common destinations for millions of travelers, but there are still surprises. Not to mention one more that I discovered today: turns out the chef at Don Camillo works with an Italian tour company in the US, and gives cooking classes ... in Sebastopol.
This does seem like an extraordinary series of coincidences. But I'm also very mindful of the ideas Arthur Koestler laid out in The Roots of Coincidence, that coincidences seem so significant as we select them only in retrospect. Millions of non-coincidental occurrences happen every day; we simply think nothing of them, but remark on those we learn about.
Nonetheless, even that idea points out how we live in a web of connection, with many of the connections unknown to us at the time. As Daintree points out, some people are better than others at making these connections visible. How we interact with others changes our experience of them.
This is true on all levels, not just in the recognition of coincidence. Be kind to someone, discover kindness in return. Be mean, discover meanness. We shape the world around us by how we interact with it, thinking we are discovering when indeed we are creating it.
[11.01.07 10:15 AM]
Oh, Tom, by the way, this was not a restaurant catering to English speakers. The fact that I had to ask another guest table for help with the menu was because there was no English speaker on the staff.
[11.01.07 10:58 AM]
Dugg up for mentioning "The Roots of Coincidence".
Without meaning to be rude, this is not a reminder that the world is smaller than it appears. It's a reminder that *your* world is smaller than it appears. We circle around doing the same kind of things that the people who do the same kind of things do. This is not surprising.
[11.01.07 11:40 AM]
Good point, Julian. But the odds are still large. I'm curious: how many readers of this blog have ever been to Siracuse?
[11.01.07 11:49 AM]
LOL: Just imagine what top celebrities and high profile politicians go through constantly.
[11.01.07 12:24 PM]
Oddly enough, I'm more struck when the opposite happens. I lived for years as a kid in the same city (pop c50,000) as my grandmother, yet the only time I ever saw her was when we visited each other - we never ever bumped into each other in town.
[11.01.07 12:33 PM]
I've seen it happen a lot to my mother who knows like half of the world's population... when it happens to me however, it is always someone who I do NOT want to run into.
[11.01.07 02:32 PM]
This has happened to me more times than I can count! Yet it never ceases to amaze me.
Most recently: I was in London, waiting in line at the theater kiosk for a last-minute theater bargain, and I overheard a distinctly American voice. To my surprise, it was an old friend from Martha's Vineyard! She was on her way to Paris, where I've also bumped into friends. Small world indeed.
As an aside, I didn't know it was Milgram who formulated this hypothesis . . . and as a grad student, I occupied what was once Stanley Milram's office at Yale!
[11.01.07 04:08 PM]
try finding a sixth degree to a pauper in the slums of bombay... i bet you there is more than six degrees there... unless of course the pauper and we have a common connection at superficial levels like: hey, you know mahatma gandhi... so do i :-)
[11.01.07 04:18 PM]
Reminds me of a story told by Wolf Blitzer of CNN. He graduated from the University Of Buffalo in Wolf is on assignment in Kabul and he's walking through the back alley ways of the main market - a place where westerners shouldn't really go. There's a "local" sitting at a table who looks up and says "Wolf, UB, 19xx, remember me?"
Go figure.
Not sure of the year, but you get the gist of the story.
[11.01.07 10:46 PM]
Tim: I seriously apologize for suggesting that your adventerousness and good taste in restaurants might be limited by your competency in French. Of course not. I was just trying to "construct" the idea and mangled the case you had described.
Dining matters,
-t
[11.01.07 11:46 PM]
mage --
I can do you two degrees on that one, allowing that you start from my end, rather than some random pauper's end. San Francisco cab driver Brad Newsham, one of our authors at Travelers Tales, spent three months backpacking around the world, with the goal of inviting home one of the people he met. He ended up inviting home a farmer from the Phillipines, and then took him on a cab drive around America. But I'm sure Brad met and chatted with paupers in the slums of Bombay during his quest. For that matter, since I'm two degrees from many travel writers, I'm sure that there are many possible pathways.
Or for that matter, since I know many high tech people who have connections in Mumbai, I'm sure those people are within six degrees of poor residents of that city.
[11.02.07 02:59 PM]
An alternative view of this is that such events allow you to measure the size of _your_ world !
Often astonishingly smaller than expected ... as suggested by Julian Bond.
See Brian McCue, "Another view of the small world", Social Networks 24(2002) 121-133 for the maths.
Oh ... and I've been to Syracuse !
[11.02.07 04:57 PM]
Hey, are you *that* Julian Bond? Tim, I have to say that my first reaction on reading your initial post was to think of "War and Peace," and how the Bolkonskys might have remarked on what a small-world coincidence it was to have met some other Russian princeling while dining in Paris... there's the size of the fish, the size of the pond, etc., and I think it's far more likely for you to have such encounters than for others.
I've run into people I knew in odd places (like former UMich dormmates walking down a street in Tucson just because they were looking for a place with a pool to soak while vagabonding around the Southwest), but the one that changed my life was meeting a guy I'd known as a student in a Moscow dorm, on a bus in D.C., who suggested I get a computer account (in 1988) to reconnect with Michigan, which introduced me (virtually) to the woman who I'd meet five years later f2f, and get engaged to 6 weeks after that...
[11.04.07 01:37 AM]
we only meet the people we have something to do with, the other 6 billion we will never see.... and as space and time become more and more "invisible", what we think of now as coincidence will just be normal life...
[11.29.07 06:34 AM]
Fun stuff, Tim. My personal all time favorite has to be meeting my future wife, Joan, in 1971 at a youth hostel in Geneva. We had a fun afternoon together, said goodbye and then, out of the blue, met again a week later in Gustad, Switzerland. The clincher was our third meeting, a month later, as I walked into a youth hostel in Athens, Greece. 'We' were pretty much a done deal by then! Small world... handle with care.
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Charlie Park [11.01.07 08:03 AM]
It is fun when that happens. I wonder if anyone has ever studied the odds of it. Could it just be that, when travelling in foreign countries, we're funneled through gateways that have many more people in them, and so it's more likely that we're going to bump into someone else we know? I know that applies more to airports than to random side-streets in Paris.
Anyway, the important thing: how was the fish?