Thread by @jposhaughnessy

1/I've been think about this a lot recently. Ideas, be they good or bad, often spread like viruses. There is a whole field of thought called memetics, which is
the study of memes. Memes are very powerful when effective because they can succeed despite being untrue or illogical

2/What's fascinating is that many of these ideas survive and are broadly propagated *despite* being factually incorrect. They survive because they "ring true" to people who rarely question the veracity of an idea, don't seek to test them empirically and basically accept them

3/at face value. And then it becomes like that old 1970s commercial of "I told a friend, and they told a friend, until the entire screen is filled with pictures of people all believing the same thing, true or false. Examples abound: the entire "dietary recommendations" of the

4/last several decades are finally in tatters because they are being consistently proven to be empirically false. Much of social science is now found to lack the ability to be replicated. The entire anti-vaccine movement seemed to spring out of nowhere and then took off after

5/several "celebrities" became adherents. And politically, people like @ScottAdamsSays are looking more and more prescient with their own memes of perception trumping (no pun intended) reality. Obviously, I'm just in the beginning stages of forming some hypotheses and then

6/applying it to the stock market and ideas like why are there libraries full of books on behavioral biases and yet all of these books and papers haven't been able to *touch* people's continual falling victim to them. I'm really just at the start of trying to tie these phenomena

7/together and welcome any comments or thoughts on these ideas. And no doubt, with the few example I've given, I will "trigger" people who adhere to things that I am dismissing. That too is an interesting side effect of the power ideas hold over us. Should be fun.

This is a good piece that @EpsilonTheory shared with my on this idea I'm developing, thanks Ben!

epsilontheory.com/this-is-why-we…

An additional piece on the subject forwarded to me by @millermusing :

stockresearch.net/millers-market…