'When you look at the compare good and evil optimists, you realize that both believe in change and the idea of "progress." The optimistic evil, when they really get going, tend to put everybody who disagrees with their idea of progress into concentration camps. The optimistic good pursue a softer version of the same strategy: they seek out like-minded people with whom they can achieve positive resonance, and avoid people or thoughts they label "negative," a label they apply to any kind of non-scripted dissent. When they pursue action around fundamentally ugly realities, they still look for "heart-warming" and "inspirational." They are fundamentally what Barbara Ehrenreich has labeled "Bright-Sided" people. Whether or not the realize it, they put people they disagree with on the sidelines in cultural concentration camps where their voices are drowned out by positive cheerleading. This is a "tyranny of the vocal minority" consequence, since the optimistic-good (both Right and Left varieties) are so vocal in singing the same tune. Voices of dissent do not harmonize as well. There is a certain merit to this heuristic. Serious change requires collective action, motivation and energy. Negative thoughts and people do drain this energy. But the heuristic gets dangerous when it turns into an unchecked, runaway sort of self-reinforcing positivism.'

'In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: “...Work alone...” -- Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” ...decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.'

'...I recognize mass hypnosis when I see it. The mind-numbing call-and-return vocalizations captured in this video reflect the same kind of mind control techniques used in cults, sporting events and even some church revival events. The whole point of this experience is to eliminate the individual mind and train everyone to think, and say, and do exactly what they are told to do by a "leaderless leader" who is really a mind control manipulator. This is a perfectly reflection of this hypnosis "zombie training" ritual at which one person holding the loudspeaker utters one verbal command after another as each one is repeated en masse by the crowd of clueless followers. Free-thinking individuals do not engage in this kind of behavior! Repeat after me: Freedom is… You: Freedom is… Me: …when you don’t do… You: …when you don’t do… Me: …what somebody tells you to do… You: …what somebody tells you to do… Me: …just because they claim false authority over you. You: …just because they claim false authority over you.'

Simon says... SIMON SAYS.

'It isn't just saying that the beliefs converge; it is saying that since the beliefs converge along with greater confidence in their "truthfulness", it becomes more difficult for any individual to not converge as well – and feel confident about it. Now consider the more general implications. "Well, I'm going to be an independent thinker and not be affected by the herd and make my own educated guess." No, you won't. The moment you have the other people's guesses, you cannot shake that information. Your "independent" guess necessarily includes that guess in some way, you can't unlearn it. Either your guess converges towards the herd, or your guess is characterized as against the herd. Either way, the herd affected your thinking in ways you don't realize. You're part of the dialectic and you didn't even want to be. That you don't want to be part of it ensures you are part of it. ...it makes a third independent idea highly unlikely (unless, again, it forms in opposition to ideas 1 or 2.)'

'#3. Normopathy: A person who is normotic is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only doing exactly what is expected by society. #4. Abjection: ...every human goes through a period of abjection as tiny children when we first realize that our bodies are separate from our parents' bodies – this sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme horror we carry with us throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated when we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the boundaries of our sense of self. #6. Repetition compulsion: ...the urge to do something again and again. #10. Group feeling: ...there are some feelings we can only have as members of a group – these are called intergroup and intragroup feelings. Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your personal feelings. A group feeling can only come about through membership in a group, and isn't something that you would ever have on your own.'

'Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently. Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses. “The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment. “Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. The wisdom of crowds is valuable, but used improperly it “creates overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”'

'...debates are more than opportunities to hear candidates present views and policy. They’re intellectual boxing matches. People like keeping score. There are, however, reasons to be suspicious of the graphs, known as “worms” in colloquial reference to their squiggling path across TV screens. Many studies describe how people are influenced by what others think, especially when they’ve yet to form an opinion of their own. It seems to be instinctive: Motivated to be accurate, we take others’ assessments of reality into account, whether we want to or not. (As an example, just think how much easier it is to laugh at a joke when it’s followed by laughter.) -- Manipulative effect could also be measured even in test subjects who said they didn’t pay attention to the worm, and couldn’t remember whom it tended to favor. “The worm’s influence may be quite difficult for viewers to discount,” wrote Davis and Memon.' -- How many fingers, Winston?

'"My whole life I've made a concerted effort to give people a fair shake and understand different points of view because I felt that everyone had something valuable to offer, but it turns out most of what they had to offer was complete bullshit." "Seriously," Richman added, "what have I gained from treating everyone's opinion with respect? Nothing. Absolutely nothing."' By his estimates, Richman's receptiveness has resulted in 160 irreplaceable hours of listening to grossly uninformed political opinions, 300 hours of carefully hearing out both sides of pointless arguments, and at least a month of listening to his parents' bullshit about how important it is to be open-minded.'

'"Calling on those close to me to endlessly reconfirm my worldview makes coming to conclusions that much easier." Lim added that on the occasions when she does encounter someone with a conflicting take, she is quickly reassured by her real friends that Laura is a total bitch.'

'According to a study by UK research group Statistical Cybermetrics, cyberspace citizens are overwhelmingly attracted to the negative. (Gasp!) "Long conversation threads are overwhelmingly more emotionally negative than short ones, with happiness scores decreasing logarithmically with the number of messages," writes New Scientist. "What's more, long conversations almost always start with negative comments." "If you want a long chat, don't start by saying 'I love this!', at least not online," says Mike Thelwall, head of the research group. Nothing brings people together like low happiness scores, the study found. An avalanche of posts containing negative keywords, emoticons and misspellings will generate a social group from nowhere... "There is evidence that group cohesiveness may be related to negative feelings about others." "Members of an online community might unite around a perceived attack on them or some aspect of their identity."'

'Nations, the most important group-fantasy constructions of our social alters, act out what seems to be a non-personal history because social events appear to exist in a separate reality and not to be a result of the intentions of individuals. Even when we find a leader to blame events on, we are helpless to explain why anyone followed him, imagining that the leader has the power to "hypnotize" his people. Since the emotional connections between society and self are cut off – nations are often said to behave sui generis – individuals can deny responsibility for what they do and social events can appear to be wholly without motivation. Soldiers who kill in wars are not personally called murderers and politicians who vote to withhold food from children are not personally termed child killers because these actions are imagined to be part of a different reality system, a dream-world that is somehow not really "us."'

'As the group first gathers, people chat, laugh, argue and interact with other individuals from their central conscious selves. At a certain moment, however, "when the time comes for the group to form," individuals switch into their social alters, a social trance forms and the group-fantasy takes over. Language and demeanor change, and people feel somehow detached, estranged from their usual range of feelings and deskilled of critical faculties. A leader is imagined to be "in control" even if he isn't actually present, group boundaries are imagined, work is thought able to be accomplished effortlessly, magical thinking spreads, enemies arise, factions form to act out splits, and empathy diminishes, since others are so full of the group's projections. When the group "ends," often with a trance-breaking clap of hands termed "applause," people wake up, break the entrainment, switch back to their central personalities and the group begins to mourn its own ending...'

'While background checks, which mainly look for a criminal record, and even credit checks have become more common, Social Intelligence is the first company that I'm aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character. Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and "thousands of other sources," the company develops a report on the "real you" -- not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around. The reports feature a visual snapshot of what kind of person you are, evaluating you in categories like "Poor Judgment," "Gangs," "Drugs and Drug Lingo" and "Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior." The company mines for rich nuggets of raw sewage in the form of racy photos, unguarded commentary about drugs and alcohol and much more.'

'Sheeple (a portmanteau of "sheep" and "people") is a term of disparagement, in which people are likened to sheep. It is often used to denote persons who voluntarily acquiesce to a perceived authority or suggestion without sufficient research to understand fully the ramifications involved in that decision, and thus undermine their own human individuality or in other cases give up certain rights. The implication of sheeple is that as a collective, people believe or do whatever they are told, especially if told so by a perceived authority figure believed to be trustworthy, without critically thinking about it or doing adequate research to be sure that it is an accurate representation of the real world around them. The term is generally used in a political and sometimes in a spiritual sense.'

'While 45-65+Year olds are getting hit hard; 15-25+ Year olds have a unique culture, expectation and outlook which is not realistic given the context they are inheriting. I would want people in the younger age group to be more awake as they are demographically positioned as "revolutionaries" while older folks are simply too tired. ...the 15-25+ generation who would rather be rock stars, saving that they want a good job within the system that pays top money, they aspire to be executives at Goldman. They were told they were great by teachers and parents and they were special as they were driven around to a controlled agenda of activities. Only positive reinforcement was used and they were raised in group think, to work together. This is a large disappointment because rather than having a revolution we will have a group of people that are very vulnerable to government co-option thus they are expendable containers or batteries that will be herded and depleted in a slaughter situation.'

'A group attending an event cheered in unison Thursday after a man with a microphone called out the group's name. "Wooooo!" group members yelled in an act that made them feel closer to one another than they had before hearing their name said aloud. "That's us!" The group ceased its excited cheering moments later when another group's name was called.'

'When familiar myths fail and life gets difficult, in turn, the results rather too often include a form of collective flight into fantasy well known to sociologists and students of history. Think of cargo cults, Ghost Dancers, Americans waiting in a suburban Chicago backyard to be taken off the planet by the Space Brothers, and every other example you recall of people responding to a difficult situation by a leap of faith to a farther shore that didn’t happen to be there. Now think about it again, remembering that this time the motivating factors may well include the symbols and slogans and passionate hopes that matter most to you. ...when existing institutions fail and the collective foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.'

Watts on the sheeple: "They wouldn't even know they were helpless, but they would be very 'happy'. Most people cannot think for themselves, they live in Plato's Cave, they can only parrot what each one parrots from the media. And because they can parrot all the same things, they think they're sane."

'#This is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency: bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won: It's very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out. #Bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed: People do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. #Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one's own kind and one's own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked: Once you realize that you can't really buy your thinking you have learned a lesson that's very useful in life.'

'...picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. ...the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness...' -- Warden: "Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."' -- Here be dragons.

Howard Rheingold: 'Collective action is not the same as collectivism. Collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist.' -- Larry Sanger: 'Epistemic collectivism is a real phenomenon; whether they admit it or not, a lot of people do place the views of the collective uppermost. People are epistemic collectivists in just the same way, and for just the same reasons, that they are abject conformists. Surely epistemic collectivism has its roots in the easy sophomoric embrace of relativism. If there is no objective truth, as so many of my old college students seemed to believe, then there is no way to make sense of the idea of expertise or of intellectual authority. Without a reality "out there," independent of us, that we can be right or wrong about, there is no way to justify placing some "experts" above the rest of us in terms of the reliability of their claims.'

'...what the recent climate-science scandals reveal is that such dodgy science becomes more likely the more that science is politicised and used to motor social policy and social-control initiatives. The politicians and green activists desperately calling for the IPCC to get its house in order, to get rid of the crap science and only keep the allegedly good stuff, know which side their bread is buttered. They know that the IPCC is the emperor’s last shred of clothing, providing otherwise denuded rulers and campaigners with a form of unquestionable authority for their backward, killjoy, misanthropic agendas. They are really demanding the preservation of the IPCC by any means necessary because they value the way it provides them with a God-like authority for Orwellian action at a time when serious democratic debate is noteable by its absence. And perhaps we should call for the abolition of the IPCC, not because some of its science is daft, but for precisely those same reasons.'

"The underlying message of allegiance to a sports team is that it's the abstract concept called the team that you should have allegiance to; not how well it does (not how well the government manages things), not who's in it (not who happens to have gotten elected), not who the coach is (not who the president or prime minister is); but just your allegiance. And why should you have allegiance? Because you happened to have been born there? -- It's not uncommon for people who have a strong allegiance to a sports team to also be strongly patriotic... -- Every ounce of emotional energy that you put into irrational localised allegiance towards abstract concepts that you have no control over: the state, a god, or some sports team; is emotional energy that is distinctly not available to you to be a moral person."

'Closed Shell Syndrome is a form of cyberbrain-induced autism, occurring when users of cyberbrain technology shut themselves off from the outside world to avoid harming others or themselves. It can also be a psychological barrier induced by the subconscious to protect the ego from being overwhelmed by the depth and connective nature of the internet.'

'The fact that many readers have automatically conflated the word “sociopath” with “evil” in fact reflects the demonizing tendencies of loser/clueless group morality. The characteristic of these group moralities is automatic distrust of alternative individual moralities. The clueless are not capable of much compassion, unless they can very strongly identify with the person. ...the clueless and losers often externalize their moral sense, into some sort of collectively (and ritually) adopted code, thereby abdicating responsibility for the moral dimension of their actions entirely. You don’t have to think about the morality of what you do if you can just appeal to some code (religious texts are the main kind...). The morality that they defer to is always a codified communal version of the views of some charismatic sociopath, but it is the abdication of responsibility, as a group, by the clueless and losers, that amplifies the impact of both the Hitlers and Gandhis of the world.'

'The Sociopath's private morality is not, in their view, a matter for external democratic judgment. Sociopaths can be compassionate because their distrust only extends to groups. They are capable of understanding and empathizing with individual pain and acting with compassion. A sociopath who sets out to be compassionate is strongly limited by two factors: the distrust of groups (and therefore skepticism and distrust of large-scale, organized compassion), and the firm grounding in reality. The second factor allows sociopaths to look unsentimentally at all aspects of reality, including the fact that apparently compassionate actions that make you “feel good” and assuage guilt today may have unintended consequences that actually create more evil in the long term. This is what makes even good sociopaths often seem callous to even those among the clueless and losers who trust the sociopath’s intentions. The apparent callousness is actually evidence that hard moral choices are being made.'

'Tired of trying to be a prophet, avatar or visionary but can't get anyone to blindly follow you? Have you always wanted to know how to manipulate people in the name of any deity, religion or philosophy you want to hide behind so you can advance your OWN agenda of nakedly abusing power? Look no further!'

'A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can feel like your life is in danger. ...when your perceived sense of status goes up, or down, an intense emotional response results. ...people go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. It operates at an individual and group level, and even at the level of countries. The desire to increase status is behind many of society's greatest achievements and some our darker hours of destruction. People don't like to be wrong because being wrong drops your status, in a way that feels dangerous and unnerving. When you decide you are right, the other person must be wrong, which means you don't listen to what he or she says, and he or she experiences you as a threat too. A vicious cycle emerges. Being "right" is often more important to people than, well, than just about anything else, at the cost of not just money but relationships, health, and sometimes even life itself.'

'#1. The term “climate change” itself. #2. “Climate change denier” #3. The appeal to peer-reviewed and published research. #4. Appeal to authority. #5. Unwillingness to debate. #6. A lack of common sense. #7. Use of climate models as truth. #8. Claims that climate models have been tested. #9. The claim that the IPCC is unbiased. #10. The claim that reducing CO2 emissions is the right thing to do anyway.' -- Comments Gene Nemetz: #11. “We must act now!” -- P Gosselin: #1. “if you care about our children and our grandchildren” #2. “It’ll create millions of green jobs” #3. “unprecedented” #4. “The science is settled” [*groans*] #5. “The whole world is looking to us” #6. “They’re shills of the oil industry” #7. “They’re not real scientists” #8. “The sceptics are a very small fringe group” #10. “We can curb climate change” #11. “Climate killing greenhouse gases” #12. “We’re destroying the planet”'

'What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one. Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists – 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 – were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports.' -- SCUM *spits*

'#2. Stimulation. People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the "best" or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction. #3. Homophily. In a networked world, people connect to people like themselves. Prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power are all baked into our networks. In a world of networked media, it's easy to not get access to views from people who think from a different perspective. In an era of networked media, we need to recognize that networks are homophilous and operate accordingly. Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. Only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own. These people are and should be highly valued in society...'

'In the entire history of man, no one has ever been brainwashed and realized, or believed, that he had been brainwashed. Those who have been brainwashed will usually passionately defend their manipulators, claiming they have simply been "shown the light". The sad truth is that a high percentage of people want to give away their power—they are true "believers". They look for answers, meaning, and enlightenment outside themselves. True believers are not intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but are those craving to be rid of unwanted self. They are followers, not because of a desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy their passion for self-renunciation! They are eternally incomplete and eternally insecure. Never underestimate the potential danger of these people. They can easily be molded into fanatics who will gladly work and die for their holy cause. It is a substitute for their lost faith in themselves and offers them a substitute for individual hope.'

'Propaganda techniques -- #Bandwagon: Pump up the value of 'joining the party'. Play heavily on people's need for belong. #Card-stacking: Build a highly-biased case for your position. Confuse real statistics with high availability of supporters. #Character assassination: Destroy the person: Discredit, Defame, Denigrate, Demonize, Dehumanize. Mud sticks. #Glittering generalities: Use vague power words that appeal to values and evoke emotions. Speak in hypnotic linguistic patterns. #Information management: Knowledge is power. Spin information: Amplification, Downplaying, Distortion, Statistics, Lies, and Meta-propaganda. #Plain folks: Make the leader seem ordinary to increase trust and credibility. #Stereotyping: Classify the other side negatively. Polarize. #Testimonial: Use the testimony of a respected independent person who is seen as more trustworthy. Use celebrities, experts, police, scientists, clerics and divinities. #Transfer: Associate the leader with these trusted others.'

'Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. ...things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. I think I have found an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices. ...they say if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist—that’s what’s underneath. I’m not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans’ choices.' -- ;^)

Discuss -- #More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. -- Elizabeth Kolbert: "People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still." -- The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” -- Birds of a feather...

The perception IS the reality. That's the inherent danger of the immediate consenus-making ability of twitter and other realtime platforms. -- Brendan O'Neill: "Illiberal liberalism" "Emotional incontinence" Righteous indignation/enthusiasm. That's the inherent danger of immediate action/reaction/gratification as opposed to taking the time to think things through – "Boring, hard work," as Nick Cohen puts it. (As a #moralmaze tweeter said, links to in-depth resources provide the best alibi for "shallow" twitterhappy tweetstormers.) Nick Cohen: "There's a lot of utopianism. It's very shallow and very transient. A lot of it is apathetic. It's people affirming themselves." -- RE #moralmaze. It's not surprising to see tweeters so overly keen to defend any and every perceived threat to twitter, though it's not like its going away—calm down. Defending both their newly-felt right to be heard and the social/cultural capital they've built up over the years... TWITTER IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.

'Dr. Lindzen disputes some of the claims made by global warming alarmists, presents real climate facts, and questions the purpose of the bill.' -- Quoting Mike Hume: "The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us. Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects. These myths transcend the scientific categories of ‘true' and ‘false'"

'...reality is either what exists, or what we can agree by consensus seems to exist; the process has been (perhaps loosely and a bit imprecisely) characterised as "[w]hen enough people think something is true, it... takes on a life of its own." The term is usually used disparagingly as by implication it may mean little more than "what a group or culture chooses to believe," and may bear little or no relationship to any "true reality", and, indeed, challenges the notion of "true reality"'

'...if flippancy is more fun then it’s also more attractive. Much like the coolest kid in middle school, it’s funny and it’s exclusive and it’s confident of being understood by just the right people—maybe even especially when it’s being superior and snarky and speaking at someone else’s expense. It can be so attractive, in fact, that you want to share its assumptions, whatever they are. It’s not addressing those assumptions, or earnestly explaining them to you in some dull droning unfunny voice, but you want to share them even more, because you aspire to be on the right side of the cool person’s joke. You might not even think about those assumptions, or notice yourself adopting them. Which means flippancy and snark can be convincing, substantively convincing, without even making an argument. They convince socially, not rhetorically. Being convinced socially isn’t anything complicated or new, not in the least...'

'[The] “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. And it discourages people from taking concrete action.' -- Comment: craazyman: "The issues of central banking, credit, regulation and capital ratios are so esoteric and so remote that few Americans can really build a world view around them. Not out of lack of intelligence but simply because it’s a completely foreign language. There is nothing in this crisis to grab on to — intellectually and ideologically — for most people. Just a stewing frustrated rage that something isn’t right with the big picture. There’s no center, no point of communal traction that could be sloganeered into a reference point to rally around. And so people acquiesce to a state of affairs that they know is messed up, but they don’t know quite why or what to do about it – other than tune out the morons on TV and try to survive the night in the jungle." -- Blurtman: "The Depression Will Not Be Televised."

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk; Talk about things you'd like to do; You got to have a dream; If you don't have a dream; How you gonna have a dream come true?

'When the most intelligent people over-ride the social intelligence systems and apply generic, abstract and systematic reasoning of the kind which is enhanced among higher IQ people, they are ignoring an ‘expert system’ in favour of a non-expert system. -- ...random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.'

'Pack journalism is an often derogatory term used to describe the tendency of news reporting to become homogeneous. Pack journalism occurs because the reporters often rely on one another for news tips or are all similarly dependent on a single source for access (which is often the very person they are covering). A type of groupthink occurs, as the journalists are constantly aware of what the others are reporting and an informal consensus emerges on what is newsworthy.'

'The media is fond of saying that no one in the mainstream saw this coming except Roubini. How stupid is this? The media is the sole decision maker about who we get to pay attention to. If they feature only liars and fools, then of course it will seem that no one saw this coming. And they feature almost entirely liars, fools, and criminal manipulators. Let’s consider who got this right in addition to Roubini. [A long list of truthers] Why did we almost never see these guys on the tube or in print. And why, when we did see them, was the usual purpose to ridicule and harass them? Because the media was and is a co-conspirator, witting or unwitting, with the Wall Street criminal distribution machine. The media is populated by conformist morons, too fat and lazy, too coddled by their Wall Street sponsors to be bothered by anything so mundane as to search for the truth. Only the mainstream infomercial media didn’t get it, because they are, after all, on the payroll of the Wall Street Mob.'

'The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. "The Fed has a lock on the economics world," says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. "There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong." One critical way the Fed exerts control on academic economists is through its relationships with the field's gatekeepers. For instance, at the Journal of Monetary Economics, a must-publish venue for rising economists, more than half of the editorial board members are currently on the Fed payroll – and the rest have been in the past.' -- Useful idiots are useful

'Groupthink emerges because groups are often very similar in background and values. Individual members of the group don't want to rock the boat because it might damage personal relationships. Encouraging critical thinking is not easy, but it is possible. Dissenters are often labelled as trouble-makers and targeted for either conversion to the consensus or outright expulsion from the group. As a result dissenters in groups are likely to be an endangered species. To be effective dissenters must tread a fine line, avoiding pointless confrontation or personal attacks; instead presenting minority viewpoints in an even-handed, well-modulated and authentic fashion. For their part the majority has to fight its instinct to crush dissenters and recognise the risk they are taking in being critical of the majority opinion. Although the majority consensus may well be right, it can be more secure in its decision if dissent is encouraged and all the options are explored.' -- Here be dragons

Never trust the political opinion of someone in debt or with a stock market gambling problem -- '...here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism... Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ...the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn't it happen to them? The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington. -- Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.'

Don't hate the player; hate the game -- '#4. "Cult Members are Stupid, Gullible Sheep!" -- Studies show cult members are just as intelligent, if not more so, than the general public. And around 95 percent of cult members are perfectly sane (when they join up, anyway), with no history at all of real psychological problems. They're not stupid, and they're not crazy. ...once they make friends with these normal, successful people, what are they going to do when they run into some smartass like the Internet commenters above, who talk about how only retarded sheeple believe that garbage? They stand up for the group, that's what. It's not even about defending the beliefs at that point, it's about defending their friends. And mindlessly doing things because all our friends do them is pretty much 90 percent of what society is.'

'From big Wall Street names to real estate agents to ordinary citizens, Covel asks the critical questions: how did we get here and what can we do about it. "Broke: The New American Dream" also cracks down on the media influence upon money decisions. It takes a hard look at the state lotteries and draws remarkable parallels to our Social Security system. An expose of dangerous financial decision-making and media confusion, "Broke" proposes the right accountability for our actions. This riveting investigation dispels the irrational belief that the government can solve personal money woes. Embarking on the genius of Nobel Prize Winners Harry Markowitz and Vernon Smith, viewers get a big picture beyond the chaos and the noise of stock market news and financial journalism. Most importantly, this film is about hope. We don't have to behave like sheep and we don't have to go 'broke.' Active and mindful audiences will discover that there is a way out.'

'Following the crowd is best strategy for an individual until too many people follow the crowd, and then it’s a terrible strategy. The irony. -- For objective things, informational cascades have the potential to do great harm. When people discuss their point of view on something before voting with their behavior, conformity will destroy knowledge. I wonder if the way people find things bifurcates into solutions for subjective things and solutions for objective things? Might social networks like Twitter replace Google and Yahoo! on subjective discovery while the current incumbents retain the keepers of the global truth for objective topics? Will someone use the social graph to sanitize information — that is, use the knowledge of who knows who to de-dupe amplified data and to kill informational cascades?'

'"Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal. Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences.'

'The dominant commandments in our "developed" society too often seem to comprise 'thou shalt consume', 'thou shalt work and be successful', 'thou shalt desire', and 'thou shalt love thyself above all others'. A quick scan of 20th century history provides many examples of where the herd instinct has become a religion and a goal in itself - few examples more destructive than Nazi nationalism. Nietzsche’s alternative to the herd is a life of extreme individualism which is supremely narcissistic. Rather than chase after extreme states of being – within or without of the herd – we should strive to negotiate a balance between the two.' -- Comment: Drew: 'To disobey the conformist pressures of the adjacent crowd is to encourage a disproportionate reaction in those who wish us not to trouble them, with our misdirected need for personal independence from the push and shove of the seething mob around us.'

'There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters. The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.”'

'Now is it just me, or is there this weird group of fanatics growing that think they are influencing the whole of mankind in 140 characters? Seriously, it’s like a cult with chapters and stuff. Yes it’s important, rapidly growing, but let’s get some perspective and just a touch of rigour around some of the claims being made... #MJ was officially dead only when the cult said so #The cult has even delivered democracy to Iran through turning their avatars green' -- On self-regarding sensationalists... 'They title things in really sensational ways, even if it’s not related to the point they are actually trying to make. Why? They know that the cult will see it in their RSS reader, take in the first 4 words, then incorrectly Tweet about it claiming another victory for social media over evil...' -- The self-importance of such people never ceases to amaze.

New York Times article with a running commentary: "His tone is placid, soothing until, that is, the subject of American International Group comes up. At this, his eyes widen, his face grows angry, his hands gesture in the air [Criminals always get angry when confronted with their crimes. It is the natural reaction of anyone facing facts that contradict their world view]. If you didn't like the policy, he says of the decision to bail out AIG and pay off its debts to Goldman, one avenue for pursuing your own interests was to attack Goldman Sachs. [In a world that is full of grey, it is very refreshing to have a target to attack which is pure black.] -- Goldman Sachs had collected $7.5 billion from its AIG credit-default swaps but had an additional $13 billion at risk money AIG could no longer pay. In an age in which we've become numb to such astronomical figures, it's easy to forget that $13 billion was a loss that could have destroyed Goldman at that moment."

'the Collective chooses what is Good without regard to societal beliefs, whom the Creator is, or anything associated with how we may otherwise regard new things. Gone, is "Oh, Apple made that? I don't like Apple," gone is, "Jeff likes that movie? Jeff sucks at picking out movies," no longer are there any preconceived notions on what Good is. Good is what the Collective thinks it is. -- Good is a Lie. Anonymous is a Lie. The ideal as improbable as passing a camel through the eye of a needle. -- Anonymous is a lie because it's against nature. As the toad is killed by the scorpion, so then is the Collective dependent upon the Collective. The human searches for patterns, searches for meaning, searches for it's group. As much as we wish to deny it, we are as much a pack animal as the wolf. We agree with those in our pack, and reject those who are not, going so far as to label them, "enemy;" fight against them as though their existence somehow threatens our own.'

"What blogging lacks is an enthusiasm for finding out about the world, it has no curiousity, what it actually has is the desire to bully and to shape the world in the way you want it... but it gives people security, you've found your home, here is the part of the internet – and therefore of the world – in which there are people who believe that the Iraq war was all about about oil, over here there are those who believe that actually it was about stopping muslim hordes taking over our culture, and here is the neo-conservative lot who believe it's all about idealism... all these groups are working out how to hold each other up... everyone just establishes their position, the media [inaudible] up, and that's it. -- What marks out all these groups is they're fundamentally negative, they're looking for something to criticise, they don't actually have a political ideal, and what they do is retreat into a simplified – and often very dated – view of the world."

'I think the idea that you could make it big in the blogopsphere was always a bit of a distortion, since those people who did make it big most likely would have succeeded in journalism anyway. What seemed to have happened is that the early bloggers formed a network and were able to help each other along into the establishment as they began to advance in their careers. In the past, those sort of networks would not unfold in a public forum, as they did in blogs with all the reciprocal links and log-rolling. If the charm is gone in a certain sector of the blogosphere, it’s because the pretense that it’s not an audition for big media punditry has been dropped. -- Talent is a matter of taking your own work seriously, and the “freewheeling world of the blogosphere” early on had the illusion of being a place where such serious career-mindedness wasn’t necessary. Now we know better.'

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

'Facebook management is acting like a group of cult leaders intent on changing the rest of us into more social, less private people than we might want to be. -- ...a cult-like group "offers considerable security to young people because it greatly simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology." Facebook's claim to speak to the basic human need to "connect," combined with the company's number crunching and shiny new graphs, certainly seems scientific and all-encompassing. But isn't there a lot more to human connection than one liner status updates, photos posted online, "thumbs up" and the other relatively mechanistic interactions that people have on Facebook? What's the end result of all these magical connections through relatively shallow communication? Advertising!' -- What have you bought your self into? How much will it cost to buy you out?

"Stacy Summary: Stay tuned for the shocker that comes from minute 01.36. [embedded YouTube] The interviewee casually mentions that Mousavi was responsible for executing thousands of political dissidents. Was anyone else aware of this??? I should imagine Rummy and Dick are thinking if they stay quiet for a decade or so, they, too, could possibly return as reformist heroes to the twitterverse?" -- What have the tweeple got themselves mixed up in?

"People have always been affected by the taste of those around them, and that susceptibility to influence helps them make up their own minds. The effect discovered by the Columbia University researchers, however, was much bolder and more specific than that. When an electronic feedback loop is called on to make decisions about quality, their work suggests, there arises an effect that throws everything out of kilter and amplifies the decisions of a few early arrivals into a randomly self-reinforcing spiral of continued popularity. Left to fend for ourselves in a sea of online information, with only our online peers for direction, our decisions about quality and taste, it seems, can become snagged in a self-perpetuating feedback loop of follow-the-leader."

"In the computer industry, extreme male brains permit years of concentration on hardware and software design, while also iterating those designs seemingly ad infinitum. The extreme male brain is really the extreme Google brain. Google was founded by extreme-male-brain nerds and, by all outward appearances, seems to hire only that type of person, not all of them male. My impression of “Googlers,” which I concede is based on little direct knowledge and is prejudicial on its face, is one of undersocialized, uncultured, pampered, arrogant faux-savants who have cultivated an arrested adolescence that the Google working environment further nurtures. Their computer-programming skills, the sole skills valued by the company, camouflage the flaws of their neuroanatomy. Their brains are beautifully suited to the genteel eugenics program that is the Google hiring process but are broken for real-world use."

'In the 2008ies we need some new way to keep ourselves from thinking. I don’t know the right word for the new way, but maybe something like a “cinderellism“? Like, you know - that tale, where a simple girl suddenly gets everything? Yeah, the midnight is kind of a downer, but, none of these above stories seem to talk about that. Since there’s a lot of problems around, you need to: 1) be deterred from thinking about those problems; 2) vote for the right guys, just to make sure that YOU chose him. Which later, as Robert Cialdini teaches us, leaves you in defensive position even if you made a bad decision... So, you chose The President, now you must approve what he does - he’s your decision. This is really weird - every other day I hear another Cinderella story, but it stops right before midnight. It’s like some weird recurring dream. It seems like marketing/political plays, made to drive sales/elections. But what if ALL those guys were hired actors?…'

'And maybe it doesn't matter so much if the most-deserving entrant wins, whether it's Britney Spears ruling pop, or a gossip item leading a list of most-read news articles. "If we view the role of cultural products as giving us something to talk about, then the most important thing might be that everyone sees the same thing and not what that thing is," Prof. Salganik says.' -- Monkey see, monkey do. -- 'Users are shaping news by voting up popular-culture coverage and gossip on many sites. "Celebrities, sex and anything Jon Stewart-related" rise quickly to the top of the list at the news-aggregator Newser, according to Chief Executive Patrick Spain. "This is at odds with what people tell us about what they want in their news -- serious, important stories."' -- Monkey is, monkey isn't.

'Groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions. ... Ironically, ... groups that talked more tended to share less unique information. Why? My guess: people know they are respected and liked more by other team members when they say things others already agree with. Saying something new may help the team, but it puts you at risk.'

'Now that everyone relentlessly Googles baby names, parents have no excuse if they saddle their kids with the most popular names. What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.” And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered. “People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says. And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future.' -- How about choosing one that's good?

"[Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'] argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions – or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. -- The industrial paradigm can only interpret running out of one resource as a call to begin exploiting some even richer one. If there is no richer one, and even the poorer ones are rapidly being depleted as well, what then? From within the industrial paradigm, that question cannot even be formulated; the assumption that there is always some new and better resource to be had is hardwired into the ways of thinking that the industrial paradigm makes inevitable. Thus a change of paradigms is necessary."

On popularity crowding out quality.

"Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence [followers], signal-to-noise ratio [RT, via. @, http://, #], generosity [RT], velocity [tweets/time], clout [@self], and other useful measures of success in social media."

*The Classics* -- John Maynard Keynes on useful idiots: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." (Oh, the irony.) -- Ben Bernanke (Holder of a PhD in How To Create A Great Depression) on the Fed-created Great Depression of the 1930s: "You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." (NEVAR FORGET) -- Alan Greenspan on a career built of doublethink: "I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." (Got Gold, Mr Greenspan? http://bit.ly/77ifu) -- Paul Krugman (useful idiot par excellence) on nobel-prized-prat keynesist fundamentalism: "This is really fairly shameful, that we should be wasting precious months as a profession retracing debates that were settled 70 years ago." (Meaning: 'The logic of spending your way out of debt is irrefutable!') -- Listen to these numbskulls at your peril

'In their thirst for feedback, news sites now feature provocative league tables, ranking stories by “most clicked” or “most emailed.” With exceptions, the rankings are dominated by those that encapsulate the weirder, more idiosyncratic aspects of human existence, at the expense of serious but more abstract issues... As newspaper circulation figures fall sharply it’s only logical for publishers to huddle under an umbrella of popular stories. By reflecting the interests of the crowd, they can attract millions of eyeballs and more advertising. This process, in turn, artificially narrows news around a handful of “tent pole” stories... Stories that need to be found, developed and verified by an international network of permanent staff are expensive by comparison. ...journalists have long been “our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems.” New technologies offer a great opportunity but, if mishandled, the future of civil society is in peril.'

'So, yes, people are "angry" at Wall Street. They are also "angry" at Octomom. I wonder if the depth and quality of those two rages differ--or is this all just a television show? I mean, how many demonstrations, how many economic riots, have there been?' The problem with outrage is that it occludes vision. If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes beserk about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next. And be worried, quite worried, about a society for whom anger is a form of entertainment.'

"I've learned that I am not a natural blogger, I simply don't have that much to say... There is a mismatch between blogging and other kinds of writing anyway. I wrote a book because it is a quiet occupation that suits me. It is a way of arguing without be ingdistracted by other people -- and other people, let's face it, usually just get in the way of a well-thought out argument. Plus, it is a way of avoiding the hurly-burly of actual debate where you have to think on your feet and assert positions you are uncertain of. While blogging is not exactly like real life, it is a bit closer to it than the book thing: if you aim to gain an audience you have to pick up on what other bloggers are writing about and respond within hours. So really, blogging just isn't my thing. The arguments go nowehere, no one changes their mind, and the signal/noise ratio is very low. The blogging world is a world built for quick-typing extroverts who don't go in too much for second thoughts."

'#1. People "sell out" to become more influential. #2. As people become more influential, they are less interested in offending their new status quo-oriented friends. #3. As people become more influential, their opinion of the status quo rises, because they see it rewarding them and thus meritorious #4. The status quo is good at spotting interesting, unusual people who will evolve (sell out?) and elevating them to positions of influence. #5. Oddballs who are influential arrive first at where the status quo is later headed, and eventually they end up looking conventional.' -- As a wise man once said: KNOWLEDGE + EXPERIENCE = SHIT

"The sort of extroverted, harmony-seeking, consensus-driven collectivists who think it is all about the group, cutting big-ego prima donnas down to size, and building Brave New Egalitarian Communities that enshrine social justice values. It also explains why thoroughly introverted, unsociable, egoistic and ornery individualists (I am one; among my nicknames in college was “hermit”) take to the medium like ducks to water. This conflation of social with sociable, collectivist and communitarian is extraordinarily tempting. Yes, the medium fosters communication and collaboration, but remember, wolf packs communicate and collaborate rather better than sheep. And they compete viciously for the carcass right after. The true nature of social media, the “message” of this medium, is one of radical, uncompromising individualism, within a brutally competitive, bubblegum-flavored Darwinian virtual environment. The “social” adjective is about something else entirely, not collectivist utopia." ...

'Studies show the brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our point of view. The same studies proved that, strangely, we also get a rush from intentionally dismissing information that disagrees, no matter how well supported it is. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks. So with a little prodding, the followers will happily close themselves in the same echo chamber of talk radio, blogs and cable news outlets that give them that little "They agree with ME!" high.' -- Oh dear.

"Click at your own risk. This is the NYT article explaining how ridiculous economists are for failing to embrace socialism in light of the current and perfectly obvious failure of the free market. So you can take a market and beat it, tax it, regulate it, subsidize it, flood it with fake money, punish its performers and reward its losers, hobble its capital sector, strangle consumers, nationalize stuff at will, and erect every barrier to trade and cooperation, and STILL call it a market. When the scheme fails, it's the free market that failed, so clearly we need the totalitarian state to sweep into action."

"Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations [of group inequalities] invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."