Complex systems may have billion components making consensus formation slowand difficult. Recently several overlapping stories emerged from variousdisciplines, including protein structures, neuroscience and social networks,showing that fast responses to known stimuli involve a network core of few,strongly connected nodes. In unexpected situations the core may fail to providea coherent response, thus the stimulus propagates to the periphery of thenetwork. Here the final response is determined by a large number of weaklyconnected nodes mobilizing the collective memory and opinion, i.e. the slowdemocracy exercising the 'wisdom of crowds'. This mechanism resembles toKahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" discriminating fast, pattern-based andslow, contemplative decision making. The generality of the response also showsthat democracy is neither only a moral stance nor only a decision makingtechnique, but a very efficient general learning strategy developed by complexsystems during evolution. The duality of fast core and slow majority mayincrease our understanding of metabolic, signaling, ecosystem, swarming ormarket processes, as well as may help to construct novel methods to exploreunusual network responses, deep-learning neural network structures andcore-periphery targeting drug design strategies. (Illustrative videos can bedownloaded from here: http://networkdecisions.linkgroup.hu)
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