#86 In Israel, there are only two degrees of separation

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of “friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule. But in the Israel, there are many who believe that the country is so close knit that the separation is only two degrees.

The six degrees of separation concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, where a group of people play a game trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others. It was popularized in John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation.

The idea is sometimes generalized to the average social distance being logarithmic in the size of the population.