{"id":152,"date":"2007-10-24T08:25:55","date_gmt":"2007-10-24T00:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=152"},"modified":"2007-10-24T08:29:37","modified_gmt":"2007-10-24T00:29:37","slug":"how-paradigms-form-nyt-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=152","title":{"rendered":"How paradigms form – NYT article"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a conversation with Denis Dutton<\/a> (of the always good Arts and Letters Daily) he pointed me to a fascinating article<\/a> about the formation of the current paradigm that surrounds popular thinking on diets and heart disease. There’s a great extract which gets to the heart of the matter (excuse the pun – which you’ll understand if you read the article) :<\/p>\n

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at \u201cWho Wants to Be a Millionaire\u201d usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

If the second person isn\u2019t sure of the answer, he\u2019s liable to go along with the first person\u2019s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she\u2019s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an \u201cinformational cascade\u201d as one person after another assumes that the rest can\u2019t all be wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what does this lead to?<\/p>\n

The informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What “popular wisdom” will you question today?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During a conversation with Denis Dutton (of the always good Arts and Letters Daily) he pointed me to a fascinating article about the formation of the current paradigm that surrounds popular thinking on diets and heart disease. There’s a great extract which gets to the heart of the matter (excuse the pun – which you’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}