Nicholas A. Christakis > Quotes

“If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity (2) Love for partners and offspring (3) Friendship (4) Social networks (5) Cooperation (6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”) (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism) (8) Social learning and teaching”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Plagues reshape our familiar social order, require us to disperse and live apart, wreck economies, replace trust with fear and suspicion, invite some to blame others for their predicament, embolden liars, and cause grief. But plagues also elicit kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, and ingenuity.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Because of our tendency to want what others want, and because of our inclination to see the choices of others as an efficient way to understand the world, our social networks can magnify what starts as an essentially random variation.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than are fraternal twins or other siblings. Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends 50 percent on a person’s genetic set point, 10 percent on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and 40 percent on what they choose to think and do.31”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“Most human virtues, I would argue, are social virtues. To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people. No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you are kind to yourself. People care about whether you show these qualities to others. And so friendship lays the foundation for morality.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“For a few years after we either reach herd immunity or have a widely distributed vaccine, people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required, perhaps through 2024. I’ll call this the intermediate pandemic period. Then, gradually, things will return to “normal”—albeit in a world with some persistent changes. Around 2024, the post-pandemic period will likely begin.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family; our actions can make them happy or sad, healthy or sick, even rich or poor. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely, our friends and family serve as conduits for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. It is as if we can feel the pulse of the social world around us and respond to its persistent rhythms. As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“Unlike war or famine or natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes during which people can gather together, an epidemic is a collective catastrophe that must be experienced separately.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“even if masks reduced the transmission rate of the virus by only 10 percent, our models indicate that hundreds of thousands of deaths would be prevented around the world, creating trillions of dollars in economic value. This is a big effect of a small thing.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“that routine childhood vaccinations might provide kids with cross-immunity against SARS-2. In particular, the tuberculosis vaccine BCG (not currently used in the United States) has received substantial attention due to its nonspecific protective role that could have an effect on novel viruses.36 Other”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“A group can be defined by an attribute (for example, women, Democrats, lawyers, long-distance runners) or as a specific collection of individuals to whom we can literally point (“those people, right over there, waiting to get into the concert”). A social network is altogether different. While a network, like a group, is a collection of people, it includes something more: a specific set of connections between people in the group. These ties, and the particular pattern of these ties, are often more important than the individual people themselves. They allow groups to do things that a disconnected collection of individuals cannot. The ties explain why the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And the specific pattern of the ties is crucial to understanding how networks function.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“It was this situation that led mathematician Chris Hauert and his colleagues to consider another possibility in an important evolutionary model published in Science in 2002. In Axelrod's study and in most previous theoretical models, individuals were forced to interact with each other. But what if they could choose not to interact? Rather than attempting to cooperate and risking being taken advantage of, a person could fend for herself. In other words, she could sever her connections to others in the network. Hauert called the people who adopt this strategy "loners."

Using some beautiful mathematics, Hauert and his colleagues showed that in a world full of loners it is easy for cooperation to evolve because there are no people to take advantage of the cooperators that appear. The loners fend for themselves, and the cooperators form networks with other cooperators. Soon, the cooperators take over the population because they always do better together than the loners. But once the world is full of cooperators, it is very easy for free riders to evolve and enjoy the fruits of cooperation without contributing (like parasites). As the free riders become the dominant type in the population, there is no one left for them to take advantage of; then, the loners once again take over -- because they want nothing to do, as it were, with those bastards. In short, cooperating can emerge because we can do more together than we can apart. But because of the free-rider problem, cooperation is not guaranteed to succeed.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis

“Sadly, 12 percent of Americans listed no one with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“Epidemics generally take advantage of the deepest and most highly evolved aspects of our humanity. We evolved to live in groups, to have friends, to touch and hug each other, and to bury and mourn one another. If we lived like hermits, we would not be victims of contagious disease. But the germs that kill us during times of plague often spread precisely because of who we are.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Whereas cells in men have just a single, maternal X chromosome, cells in women have both a maternal and a paternal X chromosome. Female cells inactivate one of the two X chromosomes, resulting in a mosaic of cells with distinct combinations of gene variants. This variety could result in an immunity advantage compared to the more fixed expression in males.51”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“helping the public grasp during the early part of the epidemic what is likely to happen later is essential. But this is also one of the reasons it’s so difficult to sound the alarm. If we say that many people will be sick and that our world will be changed “soon,” people will look around and conclude that everything seems normal enough, so no interventions are necessary, thank you very much. And it seems normal the next day too, so the Cassandras are seen as merely alarmists.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“There was the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague of Justinian in 541 CE. The Black Death in 1347. The Spanish flu in 1918. There were gods of plagues in ancient times—not only the Greek god Apollo, but the Vedic god Rudra and the Chinese deity Shi Wenye. Plague is an old, familiar enemy. And so, in 2020, a plague once again appeared.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds, and I do not think I have met a single person who didn’t share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one’s story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The first kibbutzim were founded in Palestine in 1910, and, by 2009, there were 267 kibbutzim scattered throughout modern Israel. These groups account for only 2.1 percent of the country’s Jewish population but 40 percent of the national economic agricultural output and 7 percent of the industrial output.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Om ett slumpmässigt urval av en befolkning vaccineras för att förhindra spridning av en infektion krävs det närmalt sett att man vaccinerar mellan 80 och 100 procent av befolkningen. ... Ett effektivare sätt är att inrikta sig på naven i nätverket, det vill säga de personer som befinner sig i nätverkets centrum eller de som har flest kontakter. [...] I själva verket kan man uppnå samma nivå av skydd genom att vaccinera omkring 30 procent av alla människor om man vaccinerar dem med hjälp av den här metoden som genom att slumpmässigt vaccinera 99 procent av befolkningen om man gör ett slumpmässigt urval!”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“Den modell som bäst kunde förutsäga strukturen i de amerikanska senatorernas nätverk var faktiskt den som beskrev det sociala slickandet hos kor.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“When a disease is very deadly, it kills its victims so rapidly that the pathogen does not have much time to spread. This is why the super-deadly Ebola epidemics that kindle in Africa every few years tend to burn out.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“nonpharmaceutical interventions,”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Finally, the quantification of excess deaths allows us to summarize the overall impact of the pandemic on people’s health. The virus kills some people directly, by infecting them, and others indirectly, by, for example, prompting people to delay going to the hospital for other conditions and thus needlessly dying, or by increasing suicides as a result of depression due to job loss or social isolation.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Doctors also think that many patients may have long-term consequences of infection with SARS-2 in many organ systems, in what is called “post-COVID syndrome.” Such patients may have permanently scarred or injured lungs or kidneys or hearts, for example, or even, in rare cases, neurological deficits.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live