human-meaning

In 1992, economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch published a paper that explained why everyone suddenly believes the same thing—even when the thing is wrong. Their model was called "information cascades," and it solved a puzzle that had haunted economics for decades: how can markets,

In January 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users without telling them. For one week, the company manipulated what people saw in their News Feeds. Some users had positive posts filtered out—they saw fewer happy updates from friends. Others had negative posts filtered out—they saw fewer

In 1993, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management attracted the most prestigious team ever assembled in finance. Two Nobel Prize-winning economists. A former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. The intellectual elite of quantitative trading. Their models were brilliant. Their returns were spectacular—40% annually in the first years.

Every transaction you make—buying coffee, signing a contract, clicking "I agree"—depends on trust you've never thought about. Trust that the coffee isn't poisoned. Trust that contracts are enforceable. Trust that the company will do roughly what it promised. This invisible infrastructure of

This series has laid out the mechanics: how beliefs infect through networks, how the distinction between simple and complex contagions determines what can spread, how emotions propagate beneath conscious awareness, how cascades can detach consensus from truth, how network topology creates the physics of transmission, how R0 determines survival. Now

In 1968, Garrett Hardin published "The Tragedy of the Commons"—one of the most influential and misleading papers in environmental science. His argument was simple: shared resources are doomed. If a pasture is open to all, each herder gains by adding another cow. But everyone reasons the same