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Popularity Is Random

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Popularity Is Random

Robin Hanson
Apr 19, 2007
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Popularity Is Random

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Sunday’s New York Times told of an experiment on music popularity randomness:

In our study, … 14,000 participants … were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of.  Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group – in what we called the "social influence" condition – was further split into eight parallel "worlds" such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. …

In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. …

In fact, intrinsic "quality," which we measured in terms of a song’s popularity in the independent condition, did help to explain success in the social-influence condition. …. But the impact of a listener’s own reactions is easily overwhelmed by his or her reactions to others. The song "Lockdown," by 52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in quality; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.

No doubt this also applies to many other kinds of popularity, including in blogs or academia.  Beware of overconfidence about how good is the popular, or bad the unpopular. 

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Popularity Is Random

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

Kaj, art doesn't have objective quality, no matter what Paul Graham might tell you. If it was we would have machines rather than fallible critics review it for us.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

The unpredictability of cumulativeadvantage

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...

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