Top Highlights

• Emergent properties are collective behaviors: dynamics of the whole that don’t depend on the details of the parts, the macro that rises above the micro.
• Watts and Strogatz’s paper was published in June 1998.
• Miller’s piranha was a classic loonshot. The most important breakthroughs rarely follow blaring trumpets and a red carpet, with central authorities offering overflowing pots of tools and money. They are surprisingly fragile. They pass through long dark tunnels of skepticism and uncertainty, crushed or neglected, their champions often dismissed as c...
• Listening to the Suck with Curiosity (LSC)—overcoming the urge to defend and dismiss when attacked and instead investigating failure with an open mind.*
• wrote the Canon of Medicine. For seven centuries, it was the most widely used medical textbook in Europe.