In Antifragile Nassim Taleb makes an argument about knowledge. Roughly phrased: “You don’t need to know things if you know people.” This is tangentially related to Adam Grant’s notion of weak versus strong ties. A ChatGPT summary, based on Grant’s book, Give and Take says:
“Adam Grant’s concept of weak ties vs. strong ties explains the impact of different relationship types on our personal and professional lives. Strong ties, such as those with family, close friends, and colleagues, are marked by deep emotional bonds and trust, offering crucial support and deep, meaningful interactions but often within similar networks, which might limit new opportunities. In contrast, weak ties, like acquaintances or sporadic contacts, are less emotionally intimate but more likely to provide novel information and opportunities, as they connect different social circles and can offer access to diverse resources and knowledge. Grant highlights the unexpected value of weak ties in professional contexts for new insights and opportunities, alongside the importance of strong ties for emotional support and depth.”
For Taleb and Grant, the upside of a wide, loose network is massive and practically unbounded. Weak ties yield perspective, opportunity, surprise. And these are things I’ve been thinking about as I begin my third era of blogging. This new era of Swell and Cut is concerned with “emergent miscellanea“. Its dawning is driven by a deliberate intent. As described on the “About” page, it serves as a channel for things that don’t really fit elsewhere.
Underpinning this intent is a long-held belief about public writing and working in the open:
“People think that the main benefit of writing in the public domain is “exposure”, or that it compels you to think with more clarity/rigour.
Both are true, but both are subservient to the fact that writing in public leads to a handful of unexpected and meaningful relationships.”
But as I’ve been finding the rhythm of this new era I’ve found myself weak tying. Wildly.
Take the recent post about archetypical case making. It describes case making as a practice, suggests six archetypes, saturates each archetype with some relevant useful fictions, and then hints at two main ways in which archetypical cases can be leveraged. Whence weak tying?
Well: when I matched useful fictions to each archetypical case I performed a tour bus drive-by. I zoomed down the road, gesturing to points of interest before proceeding swiftly past them. This contrasts with strong tying; the explicit embedding of a connection within the larger corpus of an artefact or argument. Structurally, a strong tie is an incorporation, an enveloping. It is both more involved, more precise and more formal than a mere hyperlink-hand-wave.
Like Adam Grant and Nassim Taleb, I hold a thesis about the power, the upside, of weak ties. The hypothesis is that conceptual innovation and insight—like opportunities derived from loose connections with diverse people—are driven by them.
This is not revolutionary, by any means; merely a connection I had not made before. After all, the boons of multidisciplinary perspectives, participatory cultures and inclusive structures are known (even if they’re not as widely practiced as one would expect). But considering knowing-as-a-network peppered with strong and weak ties and making an effort to deliberately and unashamedly cultivate the latter is not something I’d opted to do. Until now.
So I guess this is an early brick in the edifice of the emerging Swell and Cut Third Era Style: wild weak tying. And it’s good fun for me. As I produce “offcuts” I have motive to make arbitrary connections. To signal with intent but minus the rigour. And everyone knows that action without accountability is quite the thrill for the enacting agent. Unfortunately, this is less fun for readers.
Perhaps you and I happen to share the same sensibilities. And perhaps we happen to have occupied the same information environment. And to have walked the same trails. Then we may both see why I choose to make certain references, to construct select weak ties. But chances are that you and I are too different, too diverged.
The result? The weak-tie-ridden blogs I produce will house a certain illegibility. The channel capacity between myself and yourself will be restricted because of an elective communication style. This is a tradeoff I’m happy to make, however. I will take increased illegibility per third era blog if it means that I can construct weak ties and think thoughts that otherwise would’ve remained unthinkable to me. Especially if, through it all, my ability to think what I say and say what I think remains above a minimum threshold.
After all, the value inherent in the option of a weak tie emerges only when it is exercised. And ties that aren’t reaffirmed fray; they decay in the absence of inter-action.