Senior Director of Marketing @ZonderAcademic @HarperCollins | Marketing, consumer psychology, human behavior
Grand Rapids, MI
Joined September 2008
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Here are 52 of the most interesting things I learned in 2025:
(Yes, that’s a bale of hay hanging over the Thames)
"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."
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"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.'"
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"Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet."
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"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."
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"Taking an economics class decreased the willingness of students to contribute to public radio and to donate blood."
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The connection between depression & loss of social status:
"Many depressive episodes are precipitated by failure to accept a loss in status. They view low mood as a response to losing a competition and depression as the result of useless status striving."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Fear of heights was seven times *less* common in eighteen-year-olds who had experienced a fall in childhood."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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.'"
thenewatlantis.com/publicati…
"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..."
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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."
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"Commercialization is a process of lowering signaling costs, not just of money and availability, but also of difficult taste."
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"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: thecynefin.co/rendering-know…
