Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are li… - Malcolm Gladwell

...as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath — “First, do no harm” — applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch — not an iota — more.