"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary
and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's
invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and
revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented
after you're 35 is against the natural order of things." - Douglas
Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

(Fads/Crazes:) Everyone thinks that people are making decisions based on what they know, when in fact people are making decisions based on what they think the people who came before them knew. Instead of aggregating all the information individuals have, the cascade becomes a sequence of uninformed choices, so that collectively the group ends up making a bad decision.

"Social proof" : the tendency to assume that if lots of people are doing something or believe something, there must be a good reason why.

That's why the crowd becomes more influential as it becomes bigger : every additional person is proof that something important is happening.

The more important a decison, the less likely a cascade (fad/craze) is to take hold. The more important the decision, the more likely it is that the groups' collective verdict will be right.

[When one person realizes they are clearly a non-conformer in a group of conformers, they tend to conform. But...] having even one other person in the group who felt as they did made the subjects happy to announce their thoughts and the rate of conformity plummeted.

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
- THIS HAPPENS NATURALLY AS A PRODUCT OF [CONFLICTS]

Advances are made in great leaps, which are followed by longer periods of minor tweaking.

Pioneers - they are the ones with arrows in their backs.

The longer an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy.
- GOES FOR TRENDS IN GENERAL, EVEN TRUTHS

over time, cycles persist as positive or negative feedback loops
- positive feedback loops grow more intense each time
- negative feedback loops sustain themselves through corrective mechanisms

Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession.
- THE [PROFESSIONAL] IS THE PERFECTION AND FINESSE OF THE DOMAIN, WHICH THEREFORE IS A BAD THING IN A [NEW TREND]

Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don't involve an orderly transition from point A to point B, rather they go from A - through a long period of chaos - and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.

In 2005, a French bus company, Transports Schiocchet Excursions (TSE) sued several French cleaning women who had previously used TSE for transport to their jobs in Luxembourg. The women's crime? Carpooling. TSE asked that the women be fined and that their cars be confiscated, on the grounds that the service the women had arranged to provide for themselves - transportation - should be provided only by commercial services such as TSE. (The case was thrown out in a lower court; it is pending on appeal.)

This strategy - suing former customers for organizing themselves - is precisely the one being pursued by the music and movie industries today. Those industries used to perform a service by distributing music and moving images, but laypeople can now move music and video easily, in myriad ways that are both cheaper and more flexible than those mastered and owned by existing commercial firms, like selling CDs and DVDs in stores. Faced with radical new efficiencies, those very firms are working to make moving movies and music harder, in order to stay in business - precisely the outcome that the bus company was arguing for.
- THE [BAD SYSTEMS] ARISE WHEN THE NEW TREND TAKES HOLD

Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviors.
- VERY TRUE, AND MOST [TECHNOLOGIES] ARE HERESY FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE FORMAL ADOPTION

Social awareness has 3 levels:
1. when everybody knows something
2. when everybody knows that everybody knows
3. when everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows
Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.
- 1 IS THE EARLY ADOPTERS' WORK, 2 IS THE LATE MAJORITY ACCEPTING, 3 IS THE LAGGARDS' FIGHT

Meetup.com is most appealing to people who share some philosophical outlook but have no support from the broader culture. (There are many more presbyterians than pagans but they have less of a need to meet up in this way because they have less transaction costs than pagans, who have no culturally normal place and time to meet and no ready way to broadcast their interests without censure.)

Meetups are also popular with fans of cultural icons whose work is quirky enough that those fans want to be in one another's presence. (Two people who like fencing are likelier to be friends than two people who like football.)

Our new freedoms are not without problems. It's not a revolution if nobody loses. Most obvious loss is to people whose jobs relied on solving a formerly hard problem.

The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business in the same way that movable type was sad for scribes - the loss from this kind of change is real but limited, and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change.

Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of:
+ a plausible promise
+ an effective tool
+ an acceptable bargain with the users

The promise is the basic "why" for anyone to join or contribute to a group.
The tool helps with the "how", for the difficulties of coordination.
The bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you?
- EVERY TREND IS ESSENTIALLY [CONSENT](CONTRACTS) OF THE PARTICIPANTS

Any new claim on someone's time must obviously offer some value, but more important, it must offer some value higher than something else she already does, or she won't free up the time.

The promise has to hit a sweet spot among several extremes. Voice of the Faithful was neither too mundane ("let's blow off steam about abusive priests") nor too disprespectful ("let's demolish the church"). Linux was neither too provisional ("let's try to see if we can come up with something together") nor too sweeping ("let's create a world-changing operating system"). Modest but interesting.

The problem of getting the promise right is unlike traditional marketing, because most marketing involves selling something that will be made for the listeners rather than by them. ("Buy Cheesy Poofs" is a different message from "Join us and let's invent Cheesy Poofs together").

You need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective but that others will find it so as well.

Founder of Flickr said, "You have to greet the first 10,000 users personally." This let the early users feel what it would be like to have an appreciative public, even before such a public existed.

Bargain helps clarify what you can expect of others and what they can expect of you.

Wikipedia arms its users with ways to help enforce the bargains that make the site work.

All it takes is a small number of intolerant, virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

This is the equivalent of entering a game in which one needed to not just win more points than the adversary, but win 97 percent of the total points just to be safe.

One in a family of four eats only non-GMO food (which includes organic).
This one imposes her rule on the four and now all will opt for non-GMO.
Now the family goes to a BBQ party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat non-GMO, the hosts will cook only organic.
The local grocery store, realizing the neighborhood is only non-GMO, switches to non-GMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler.
... and the system continues to renormalize.

Once you have 10 percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only need one set of glasses.

If one of the persons in the room doesn't speak German, the entire meeting will be run in English.

All it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the blacklisting of some people.

It is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

It took seven or eight Poles to help one Jew.
It took only one Pole, acting as an informer, to turn in a dozen Jews.

An intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world.
So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.

Markets aren't the sum of market participants, but price changes reflect the activities of the most motivated buyer and seller.
That's why a price can drop by ten percent because of a single seller. All you need is a stubborn seller.

MAKE A NOD TO RHYTHM UNDER "CYCLES"
- Rhythm itself is effectively a time-based [pattern](symbols.md) of something that repeats.

[Fierce Nerds](http://www.paulgraham.com/fn.html)

[Earnestness](http://www.paulgraham.com/earnest.html)

[Find Your Tribe And Start Building – Gab News](https://news.gab.com/2024/05/find-your-tribe-and-start-building/)

[The Men Who Just Want to be Left Alone – Dude Named Ben](https://namedben.com/the-men-who-just-want-to-be-left-alone/)

[Simon Wardley](http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html)
(2015) On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.

[Hype Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)
a branded graphical presentation developer by Gartner, for representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies

[John B. Sparks](http://www.visualcapitalist.com/histomap/)
Histomap: Visualizing the 4,000 Year History of Global Power

[Doomerism: The Pernicious Force Defining Our Age – Gab News](https://news.gab.com/2024/08/doomerism-the-pernicious-force-defining-our-age/)