Newsletter
When groups go bad and other things
January 3, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: There’s this cluster of classic social psychology experiments from the 50’s through the 70’s that you’ll be presented with in documentaries and whatnot whenever groups of people are behaving crazily. You’ve probably heard of some of them. Milgram’s ‘shock’ experiments, or Zimbardo’s prison experiment, or Asch’s conformity tests, and so on. These things gloss over just how hard it is to get people to do atrocities on a large-scale. Luckily, you have me to tell you how they really happen.
Main idea: Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
Technological innovations have made complaining easier:
Often, when it is easy to complain, only problems that meet a high threshold of complaints are addressed. We present a novel model of the strategic environment facing complainers and demonstrate that the properties of the resulting games’ equilibria justify the existence of high complaint thresholds. By setting the thresholds appropriately, an administrator can prevent complaints that are not worth addressing. Policies that minimize the cost of complaining while requiring a large threshold are universally more efficient for large constituencies.
Carl Schmidt in modern form. Now you know why you can’t find a customer service number.
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Encyclopaedia Brittania is a profitable AI company now. Paywalled, so need a paywall remover like archive.ph. But interesting not just for the amusement, also for the idea of frontloading an AI with content like the Encyclopaedia to improve performance.
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A crowdsourced question, with thoughtful answers.
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Predictions on the subscription economy:
In the summer of 2023, I wrote a piece called ‘The End of the Subscription Era is Coming’. The central thesis of this was that the rise of separate subscriptions for things like entertainment and journalism was unsustainable. The overall costs of these things were rising too steeply, even if atomised subscriptions seemed to reduce waste …
Within a year on Substack The Normalbloke Manifesto had 10,000 subscribers, of whom 320 paid £10 a month for premium access, giving Jeremy a pre-tax revenue stream of £38,400 a year … But two things happened in the past couple of years to disrupt Jeremy’s cashflow. The first is that more publications and journalists introduced hard paywalls for their content …
Monthly costs: Netflix (£17.99), Amazon Prime (£8.99), Disney+ (£12.99), Spotify (£11.99), Audible (£7.99), New York Times online (£8), Financial Times (£39), Substacks (3 x £5), Playstation Plus Premium (£13.49), Fortnite Crew (£9.99), OnlyFans (2 x £7). Total spend: £159.43 …
And so, as 2025 begins, I’m keeping two dangers front of mind. Firstly, that the backlash to spreadflation will culminate in a reduction or stagnation (which will, in real terms, feel like a reduction) of payments for content. But also that with content easier than ever to create and distribute, we have to be conscious of meeting demand rather than exceeding it. A surplus will only drive prices down, where there are prices to be driven down. More likely, it will flood the market with free content just at the point that consumers are becoming more aware of the cost implications. And that is a delicate balance.
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The Rise Of Big Potato:
Saltzman had received a notice from his bar’s food distributor that effective April 4, the four major suppliers of frozen potato products, which sell products like french fries and Tater Tots to bars and restaurants around the country, were all hiking their prices in lockstep, each by $0.12 per pound … That April, Saltzman’s offhand tweet — “Totally not collusion or anything, right?” — went viral. And last month, it was cited in a new spate of antitrust lawsuits brought against the four biggest companies in the frozen potato market, claiming the companies were in fact colluding when they all hiked their prices at the same time in 2022 … just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market
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How to like everything more. Interesting, and very testable.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,