What is relationship propagation?

Relationship propagation is a concept in personal epistemology: If A relates to B and B relates to C there may be an implied relationship between A and C.

Example: In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google's PageRank algorithm on a single transitive insight: if important pages link to a page, that page is also important. A link from Stanford's homepage to your research paper doesn't just mean Stanford acknowledges your work — it means that every page that links to Stanford is now indirectly boosting your paper's ranking. Authority propagates transitively through the link graph. A page with no direct connections to major institutions can still accumulate enormous rank if it sits at the right position in the chain. PageRank doesn't count votes. It propagates weight — recursively, transitively, through every path in the network. The entire architecture of modern search is built on the principle that relationships between A and B, combined with relationships between B and C, create an implied relationship between A and C.

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