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Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

gutenberg.org

51–60 of 72 posts

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#51
post #38

The visual design of this landing page reminds me of soulless pay to view journals. I don't like that. The visual design of the actual online book/HTML is excellent.

Gutenberg might be ugly, but it was fast to load, had all the data I needed and I was downloading the ePub within 5 seconds. That's a winning formulla these days in my book (no pun intended)

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#52

Interestingly, Charles Mackay, the author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, was himself one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the Railway Mania [0] "urging people to put their money into the railways and pooh-poohing those who were concerned." and "He had become famous by mocking the bubbles of the past - but had rather less to say about the far more serious bubble that he himself had he…

Helping to inflate a bubble is a valid strategy as long as you undestand the mechanics enough to organize a favourable exit.

I think we have lost a number of treatises on this exact subject since at least Egypt's old kingdom, 3000BC.

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#53
post #7

My intro to psychology classes was one of the most valuable classes I ever took, just with the way it systematically shattered my own notion of how much I could trust my own notions of perception and thought to be a rational and accurate reflection of reality. I definitely had a notion of how irrational “people” could be before that, but of course I somehow thought I was above all that.

Human beings are rational animals as such, but our exercise of that rationality can be quite weak and subject to character flaws and bad habits, and requires cultivation to refine, purify, and actualize. Of course, we also must be careful here because you're using your own faculties to judge the content of the psychology class (as were the psychologists who produces the content you were learning). Skepticism falls in…

> Human beings are rational animals as such

Really? Explain the success of advertising, superstitions (including religion) then.

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#54
post #51
post #38

The visual design of this landing page reminds me of soulless pay to view journals. I don't like that. The visual design of the actual online book/HTML is excellent.

Gutenberg might be ugly, but it was fast to load, had all the data I needed and I was downloading the ePub within 5 seconds. That's a winning formulla these days in my book (no pun intended)

I literally instinctively pressed the back button the first time.

I don't understand this instinct you're displaying here, to defend anything because it's open/free.

It can be made better. Can't we all agree that is a good thing?

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content on "priming" (significant pillar of the book) has collapsed as part of the reproducibility crisis in psychology. More here: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

As someone who used priming heavily at Google, and its wide use in social networks to billions in revenue. I’m gonna go with the academics trying to take this down are BS. Adam Curtis even suggests lightly that the takedown of priming in academia was paid for to bury its actual effectiveness (and liability by implication)

Yes, there is a sort of blindness in science. The idea that if something hasn't been proven it's not true.

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You all renember SPACs,Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. And all the "experts" who needed the money because they had some great investment that could not be financed any other way. That wave hit its peek less than 5 years ago. Yup, that was a great way to invest. I suspect it happens at every cycle.

Not sure why you're downvoted. Chamath Palihapitiya was a tome of SPAC heyday.

I guess some people didn't get that I was being facetious. Just to be clear, SPACs did not turned out to be great investments as a whole. There are definitely better ways to invest your hard earned money.

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#57
post #7

My intro to psychology classes was one of the most valuable classes I ever took, just with the way it systematically shattered my own notion of how much I could trust my own notions of perception and thought to be a rational and accurate reflection of reality. I definitely had a notion of how irrational “people” could be before that, but of course I somehow thought I was above all that.

Yet prediction markets are incredibly accurate. It seems that with money on the line, humanity (at least as a whole) are ultra-rational

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content on "priming" (significant pillar of the book) has collapsed as part of the reproducibility crisis in psychology. More here: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

As someone who used priming heavily at Google, and its wide use in social networks to billions in revenue. I’m gonna go with the academics trying to take this down are BS. Adam Curtis even suggests lightly that the takedown of priming in academia was paid for to bury its actual effectiveness (and liability by implication)

priming obviously works. it is inherent in the physical structure of the brain. nerve endings from various all over the body terminate in different physical locations in the brain, and then these are interlinked in an adaptive biological mesh network. nerve responses are triggered by cascades of correlated impulses across different nerve endings, so at a physical level a strongly correlated signal from any two major nerve groups will trigger a sympathetic response when one of them fires independently. the experiments that social scientists come up with may be flawed, but this is definitely how my brain works, so i don't need a study to prove it.

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#59
Another great book in the same vein is; The Natural History of Nonsense by Bergen Evans (1946).

Author - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen_Evans

Reviews - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/375107.The_Natural_Histo...

Pdf - https://tzmvirginia.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12...

Excerpt:

This book is a contribution to the natural history of nonsense. It is a study in the paleontology of delusion. It is an antibody for all who are allergic to Stardust. It is a manual of chiropody for feet of clay.

...

This book is intended as a sort of handbook for young recruits in the gay cause of common sense. It indicates where the main armies of ignorance are now encamped and tells in a secret code what garrisons are undermanned or mutinous. It tries to show the use of cover and camouflage and the techniques of infiltration and retreat. It maps road blocks and mine fields and shows how to rig a booby trap. It warns of counterespionage and gives— again in code—the five infallible signs to know a fool. When the recruit has finished with it he can toss it over the wall into the enemy's barracks. It may encourage desertion.

Re: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

#60

This book is an interesting chronicle of financial bubble history, but a far more distilled and actionable understanding of crowd psychology is Gustav Le Bonn's "The Crowd - A Study of the popular Mind" (1895): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/445

You have to be careful while studying Gustave Le Bon and his works. He was a product of his times and so there is an undercurrent of racism in this book due his being influenced by pseudo-scientific "Social Darwinism" theories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

Approach it as just a sociological/psychological case study of the 1800s and there is much to learn.

Book overview and excerpts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popu...

Author - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon

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