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14 Jul, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Very cool paper that shows the modern formula for having high status tastes: you like every genre (rap and classic rock, comedy & horror) but you only like very particular “high consecration” examples (Kendrick Lamar & Bob Dylan). The chart of consecrated media is worth a look!
Side note: this appears to be only the 5th academic paper to reference “Paul Blart: Mall Cop”
It also matches an earlier paper in the same journal on the general decline of genre snobbery as a sign of cultural tolerance.
More on changing high culture tastes: What the British elite do, from 120 years of UK Who's Who:
🦊The 1800s: parties at estates & aristocratic pursuits like fox hunts
🎨The early 1900s: highbrow arts
🐕Recently: hanging out with pets & friends, with a little high arts for spice

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More from @emollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
12 Jul
You've seen new optical illusions on Twitter. You may not know that they are windows into our brain. 1/

This square is not rotating! This illusion by Caplovitz & Harrison shows how our brains create the perception of motion by integrating tiny movement. weforum.org/agenda/2016/07…
The Perpetual Diamond developed by Flynn & @agshapiro2 never moves. The illusion shows that our brains pay more attention to the edges of objects than its center to infer motion. More in their article: 2/ journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
All of the lines in this illusion have the same gentle curve - really! The curvature blindness illusion by Takahashi suggests that our visual system defaults to seeing edges, given a lack of other information: 3/ journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20…
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
7 Jul
Humans have always relied on odd sources of randomness as protection🎲
Today: The security of 10% of the internet is secured by a wall of lava lamps watched by a camera to generate true randomness
History: Use of divination allowed us to avoid cognitive traps by adding randomness
Article on the wall of lava lamps, to be used if “other sources of entropy are compromised”: blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-pr…

Article on why relying on randomness & divination is often better for decision-making: aeon.co/essays/if-you-…
If rules you are using to make decisions are bad (either because they are biased or because you don’t have any information that would allow you to make a decision), than random decisions are better: “What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions.”
Read 7 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
27 Jun
A lesson of COVID is that a real danger to humanity comes from "boring apocalypses," where the decay of governmental capability & general dynamism result in a lower ability to adapt. This increases the chance that the next near-miss existential threat may lead to catastrophe. 1/2
This time, fast adaption saved us (Car companies retooled their assembly lines & made 80,000 ventilators! Vaccines developed in record times! Quick moves to remote work!) but also failed by many institutions. Continued decay of those poses a real threat. 2 researchgate.net/publication/32…
Near Non-Boring Apocalypses prompt action. After 9/11, it took two months to create the TSA & less for the Patriot Act, which were (at the time) responses to a potential Non-Boring Apocalypse (chemical, nuclear, bio terrorism). Similar stuff happens after nuclear accidents. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
25 Jun
Noise is a remarkably insidious form of pollution: a 10db noise increase (from dishwasher to vacuum) drops productivity by 5%. But the kicker is you don't notice: noise hurts your ability to think, not your effort. You work as hard but do worse! And poorer areas have more noise.
Here's a link to the paper, which makes the point that policy is really needed to regulate noise, since people don't realize how much they are impacted by it, and so don't value quiet as much as they should: joshuatdean.com/wp-content/upl…
Also other forms of pollution also impact cognition in subtle ways. More 👇
Read 5 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
14 Jun
A profound understanding of technology is found in Historian Melvin Kranzberg's 6 Laws of Technology. Here they are in a 🧵

1st Law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral,” many problems occur when benign technologies are used at scale. Think DDT (or Facebook) Image
2nd law: “Invention is the mother of necessity” - new technologies, as they scale, require their own suites of innovations. Self driving cars have pushed development of new sensors, phones ever better cameras, etc. This is a good rule for entrepreneurs looking for new markets.
3rd law - “Technology comes in packages, big and small” Technology is all about systems, you can’t study individual things in isolation. One issue with blockchain is that it doesn’t fit well into the social, organizational, and technical systems that it is supposed to replace.
Read 6 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
6 Jun
A thread on the science of stories:

Stories are persistent: this paper traces back fairy tales across languages & cultures to common ancestors, arguing that the oldest go back at least 6,000 years. One of the oldest became the myth of Sisyphus & Thanatos in ancient Greece. 1/
That may be the start: this paper argues some stories may go back 100,000 years. Many cultures, including Aboriginal Australian & Ancient Greek, tell stories of the Plaeades, the 7 sisters star cluster, having a lost star- this was true 100k years ago! 2/ dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl3…
Stories share similar arcs: Analyzing 1.6k novels, this paper argues there are only 6 basic ones:
1 Rags to Riches (rise)
2 Riches to Rags (fall)
3 Man in a Hole (fall rise)
4 Icarus (rise fall)
5 Cinderella (rise fall rise)
6 Oedipus (fall rise fall) 3/
epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.11…
Read 8 tweets

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