What is connection strength?

Connection strength is a concept in personal epistemology: Not all connections are equally strong — quantifying strength improves your model.

Example: In 1973, Mark Granovetter surveyed 282 men in the Boston area about how they found their jobs. The result upended conventional thinking about relationships. Most job leads didn't come from close friends or family — the people with the strongest ties to the job seeker. They came from acquaintances: people the job seeker saw occasionally or rarely. Granovetter called this 'the strength of weak ties.' The finding wasn't that weak ties are better than strong ties in some absolute sense. It was that the strength of a tie determines what it can do for you. Strong ties provide emotional support, trust, and reliability. Weak ties provide novel information, bridge access to distant clusters, and exposure to opportunities your close circle would never surface. A relationship map that treats all connections as equal misses this entirely. It's the difference between knowing you have 500 LinkedIn connections and knowing which 12 of those connections actually move information that matters to your career.

This concept is part of Phase 13 (Relationship Mapping) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for relationship mapping.