The birthday paradox illustrates that social complexity scales with the number of pairwise connections, which grows with the square of the number of participants, not linearly—so 36 people yield over an 80% chance of a shared birthday; this is why large organizations are qualitatively different from small ones and must be run differently.
factualpending
Speaker
Clay ShirkyEvidence Quote
“it's that shift from looking at the nodes on a network to the connections whether potential or actual that makes it clear why large organizations are just qualitatively different than small organizations”
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:28:59 AM
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