Kent Hendricks

"Elite groups need time to be the sole adopters of an innovation for it to gain cachet... Fashion relied on social friction to slow down the diffusion process... This entire system is upended by light-speed information flows on the internet."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"The internet has debased two critical signaling costs: (1) barriers to information and (2) barriers to acquisition... Information can't be a strong signaling costs when 'information wants to be free.'"
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

Fashion trends over time:

(source: https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd)

"Today each Scottish clan has a tartan, a practice that originated in the 18th century when weavers named their different patterns after a Highland clan; descendants of those clans use them as markers of ancestry despite no historical relationship."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Taking an economics class decreased the willingness of students to contribute to public radio and to donate blood."
https://amzn.to/4hy71Ud

"From ages 0 to 10, for every 100 girls who die, 150 boys die. At puberty and shortly thereafter, the ratio is 300 men for every 100 women. Why? The proximate explanation involves testosterone and its effects on tissues, immunity, and risk taking..."
https://amzn.to/4hy71Ud

"Women are twice as likely as men to have an anxiety disorder."

The reason:

"Women on average have about the right amount of anxiety for their own welfare; men have the right amount to maximize transmission of their genes, at a huge risk to their health."
https://amzn.to/4hy71Ud

"Fear of heights was seven times *less* common in eighteen-year-olds who had experienced a fall in childhood."
https://amzn.to/4hy71Ud

"In general medicine, symptoms such as pain or cough are recognized as useful responses that indicate the presence of a problem. In psychiatry, symptoms such as anxiety and low mood are often presumed to be the problems themselves."
https://amzn.to/4hy71Ud

"Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. 'That 1 percent,' the futurist Ramez Naam says, 'roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.'"
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-agriculture-system-works

"Historical value is a hedge against social risk...Rational humans, especially conservative ones toward the middle of the status hierarchy, will choose older forms over newer ones when signaling, and this keeps older conventions in circulation."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

How innovation spreads:
1. High-status adoption—for distinction
2. Early adopters' embrace—emulate superiors
3. Early majority reinvention—follow emerging norm
4. Late majority imitation—avoid losing normal status
5. Laggards' adoption—no intention."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"You don't create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Commercialization is a process of lowering signaling costs, not just of money and availability, but also of difficult taste."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down."

Dave Snowden's 7 principles for rendering knowledge: https://thecynefin.co/rendering-knowledge/

Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield The Official Magazine of the Christian Reformed Church

Nice concise review of my @ivpress.bsky.social book Ownership by Mary Li Ma in the CRC magazine The Banner

www.thebanner.org/mixed-media/...

"Until recently in human history, all information was trapped—in someone's head or on a piece of paper. This led to a scarcity mindset. We hoard it to elevate status, create job security, and protect ourselves. This perpetuates the power structure..."
https://amzn.to/40NfxI6

"One-on-ones are often used as a salve for hidden dysfunction. When members lack the authority to make decisions, these meetings become the only mechanism for moving things forward."
https://amzn.to/40NfxI6

"Like it or not, great meetings offer higher bandwidth—more information per second—than any other form of communication."
But: bad meetings run the greatest risk of waste.
There are no meetings with average-productivity. They're either great or terrible.
https://amzn.to/40NfxI6

"Amazon now averages more than one software deployment every second."
https://amzn.to/40NfxI6

Stages of the fashion cycle / how culture spreads:

1. elites' need for distinctive practices,
2. mass media broadcasting,
3. early adopters' emulation,
4. mass producers' simplification, and
5. the eventual achievement of critical mass.

https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Innovations pose a challenge to established conventions... Thus individuals may worry that switching will lead to social disapproval... Widespread change takes place only once conservative majorities feel secure that switching won't damage their status."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Not all human behavior changes for status reasons, and not every instance of cultural change begins *as* fashion, but most behaviors we perceive as 'culture' arrive through a fashion cycle where individuals adopt new conventions in a pursuit of status value."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

""Avant-garde ideas can break escape velocity from the avant-garde community only if broader audiences no longer believe their appreciation will lead to negative social consequences."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Aesthetic value of art measures how an artist can use and abuse existing conventions to elicit emotional experiences... Artistic value measures the originality of the artist's inventions, how much the ideas break existing conventions & suggest new ones."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

The average American consumes around 34GB of information per day.
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1566

Kant's 3 criteria for artistic genius:

1) the creation of fiercely original works,
2) which over time become imitated as exemplars, and
3) are created through mysterious and seemingly inimitable methods.

https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Knowledge of underground culture served as an important criterion for upper-middle class status... The difficulty of penetrating into the subcultural world came with high signaling costs..."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd

"Individuals born into a certain socioeconomic class share a foundational set of unconscious conventions--i.e. the same habitus. This manifests in communal beliefs, concrete lifestyle differences, and distinct taste worlds."
https://amzn.to/3Cabeyd