New mathematical model shows stupid is highly contagious
Or: Homeopathy is famous because it doesn’t work. The article is interesting, and the gist of it is:
- people do things they see other people doing
- people spend more time on medicines that don’t work than medicines that do
- medicines that don’t work have more time to convince people to try them
Now, completely aside from how horribly depressing that is — and how interesting it is that somebody used the mathematical models used to understand the spread of disease to the spread of crazy — it clarifies and provides a metaphor for a thought that I’ve sort of had knocking around the back of my head for awhile now.
Worldviews (Weltanschauung? nah.) seem to spread in similar ways to crackpot ideas; I mean, you understand the world in ways that come from the people you interact with. The more strongly that people express a worldview the stronger the effect it has on you. Not necessarily positively, of course. But who is going to believe the most passionately about their WV? People who really need something to believe in. And, of course, if your philosophy is just really fundamentally not working out for you — as, for example, it wouldn’t if you just expect everything to work out because somebody somewhere loves you / hates your coworkers — then you are going to need a philosophy all the more. And especially if it doesn’t lead obviously to gratuitous horrors you are more likely to tell your friends and coworkers (whom your deity/world energy/doctor doesn’t like) that it is the thing that makes the world OK.
So, point is, think carefully when you tell people that ______ is always there for you/around you/touching you with his noodly appendage, because sometimes even an imaginary touch is inappropriate.