I suppose this article from the NYT will be locked away behind a subscription soon, but Duncan J. Watts describes his teams experiment and suggests that its never possible to predict swings in aggregate behaviour (e.g. how popular somethi…

Some people seem to be reading this as a post that disproves popularity giving any indication of a thing’s quality. I’m interpreting it to suggest that popularity is actually a decent estimator of quality, though obviously not a perfect one. (Or is there any better way to objectively measure the quality of art?)

Regarding the inflationary vs cyclic debate, this is one of those that is or should remain open simply because there has been no clear empirical test or strong evidence. Certainly an existing paradigm has great strength of inertia, as Kuhn argued long ago. It is existing paradigms generating contradictions or failing to explain empirical observations that lays the groundwork for their fall and replacement. But with no clear test, the door is open for a competitor to at least compete.

Here’s an example from just a few days ago. William F. Buckley’s nationally syndicated column is widely read, but his columns are literally *never* seen under Most Viewed News stories on Yahoo!. Now, I don’t check this section every day, but I check it enough to find this next part interesting. For the first time ever in my experience, I saw William Buckley’s column under Most Viewed News Stories with the headline ‘Imus Dead’.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucwb/20070413/cm_ucwb/imusdead

Now, just imagine users seeing this headline as a link so soon after the recent events with Imus. Even though I knew better, I clicked the link imagining that Don Imus had committed suicide or something. Apparently, many others also thought the headline ‘Imus Dead’ was worth clicking on.

Now, everyone who clicked the link might have hated the column. I personally can’t stand Buckley’s stilted prose, so, as usual, I hated the column. But I had already voted. My preference for the headline was aggregated with everyone else’s. The headline worked.

Hal is quite right from my perspective. I would take his statement that marketing is ‘applied bias-ology’ one step further and say it’s mass manipulation. Effective manipulation can not only cause popularity to be entirely uncorrelated with quality, it can also cause popularity to be uncorrelated with *preferences*, other things being equal.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0204479

The author was painfully aware of the dominance of the inflationary view and that he had an uphill battle to get his ideas accepted. Here is his comment:

“The cyclic model could have been proposed at the same time as inflation, in which case it would have been interesting to see which proposal would have emerged as the more appealing idea. As it is, the cyclic model has arrived twenty years late, after cosmologists have become attached to the inflationary paradigm, so there can be no fair measure.”

One wonders if there are many cases like this in physics and other sciences, where being first is more important than being right, in terms of becoming the dominant paradigm.

I might mention BTW that I read this paper in 2003 and have not followed the topic much since (it is just a hobby for me), but upon searching I see that this theory, given the sexier name “the ekpyrotic universe” referring to a fiery wavefront that sweeps the entire universe, is being worked on relatively actively today with a number of groups involved, and is still considered (by them) to be a strong competitor to inflation.

wcw, I have to say I side with Hayek against you here, although being a philistine I would have done so without Friedrich’s help.