Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct. People have a lot of explanations for this, but they're all incomplete because they don't realize the same thing is happening everywhere. An oligopoly has conquered all of popular culture.
In television, for example, it used to be pretty rare for two versions of the same show to appear twice at the top of the viewership charts. Now it's common.
The oligopoly has come to music, too: the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades (chart cred: Azhad Syed, towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-ana…)
And literature. Until 1990, it was pretty remarkable for one author to have multiple top-10 bestselling books. Now it happens almost every year.
And video games. These days, basically *all* bestselling games are franchise installments.
Most importantly, I don't think we've realized what all these sequels and spinoffs are doing to us. It's not that they're bad––some are great! But movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, and they can't do that by feeding us reruns forever
My paper with @DanTGilbert is out today in Nature: people believe that people are less kind than they used to be, they're probably wrong about that, and we have an idea where this illusion comes from. nature.com/articles/s4158…
My whole life, I've heard people complain about the demise of human goodness. "Used to be you didn't have to lock your doors at night!" etc. Is this just a vocal minority, or do most people believe this?
Turns out, it's most people. 177 surveys, N = 220,772. Here's a sample:
This isn't just the US. In 2002 and 2006, Pew sampled folks in every country highlighted in red below and asked them whether moral decline was a problem in their country. In *every single country* a majority of folks said it was at least a "moderately big" problem:
Recently I wrote a post suggesting that peer review doesn't work, and then some weird things happened. A tenured professor threatened to get me fired. Strangers sent me unhinged emails. (People said nice things too.) This week I sort through it all.
One common argument: "peer review is a barrier against misinformation; without it, wackos like creationists could publish their 'findings' unhindered!" Well, here's The Journal of Creation, a peer-reviewed journal all about creationism. creation.com/journal-of-cre…
One highlight was this comment from Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, who did a lot of the research on peer review I cited.
People think peer review has been with us for centuries. Not really! Scientific publishing was always a hodgepodge and most outlets were nothing like our current system. Pre-publication peer review only became common in the 1960s. lps.library.cmu.edu/ETHOS/article/…
Published today in PNAS: people don't know how American public opinion has changed. I've been working on this for a very long time and I'm excited to share it. Here's a thread so you don't have to read the paper. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
(If you do want to read it, this link will be available until the Feds shut it down. Science should be free!) shorturl.at/deuJ9
A few years ago I got into reading lots of public opinion polls, and I was constantly surprised. People became *more* in favor of immigration after Trump's election? Support for gun control has *fallen*? White Americans feel as warm toward Black Americans as they did in *1964*?