Complex Numbers

Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Of all the idiosyncrasies of human nature, one that remains elusive to me is the concept of "fashion."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613034/the-hipster-effect-why-anti-conformist...

The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same
Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity.

I used to joke that the "Fashion" merit badge here on WDC would be the last one I'd get, so of course, once, someone awarded me with one as a joke. What the hell; I'll take it. Somehow, I managed to get a "Family" one, too, for similar reasons - which is amusing if you read yesterday's entry.

So I'm going to take the time to say I'll probably never get a "Consistent" Merit Badge.

You’ve probably seen this effect—perhaps you are a victim of it. You feel alienated from mainstream culture and want to make a statement that you are not part of it. You think about wearing different clothes, experimenting with a new hairstyle, or even trying unconventional makeup and grooming products.

"Victim?" Hardly. I wear what's comfortable, with some thought to appropriateness. When I go out, I wear one of my most elegant t-shirts, along with a Hawaiian shirt and black jeans. When I don't, I wear a less ritzy t-shirt and sweats. As for makeup and grooming products, well, I haven't worn makeup outside a stage production (though I don't object to it for men on cultural grounds, it's simply too much trouble), and my grooming products consist of an electric razor and a comb.

The razor is mostly to keep my cheeks relatively smooth and my goatee relatively symmetrical and non-frizzy. Due to some genetic fuckery, I can't grow a full beard; hence the goatee. Why a beard at all? I don't know; I just think I look better with a goatee.

And yet when you finally reveal your new look to the world, it turns out you are not alone—millions of others have made exactly the same choices. Indeed, you all look more or less identical, the exact opposite of the countercultural statement you wanted to achieve.

Apart from people deliberately emulating The Dude, I rarely encounter people who made the same choices. Not "never," of course; there are about three billion men out there, and certainly some of them have longish hair and goatees.

This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences.

This actually came to my attention when I was a kid and hippies were still a thing. My dad pointed it out. "Let's display our individuality by all looking the same!"

And his conclusion is that in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. In other words, the hipster effect is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people.

Or it could be an inevitable outcome of having large numbers of people and finite fashion choices, combined with the Blue Car Effect, also known as confirmation bias. The idea is before you own a blue car, you rarely notice them, but when you do own one, you see them everywhere. But what do I know? I'm not a college professor and I know dicksquat about fashion. I do own a blue car, however.

I have noticed an odd thing about fellow beer geeks, though. The male ones, anyway. The vast majority seem to have beards. This is, to me, counterintuitive; if one of your primary recreational activities involves pouring delicious, foamy malt beverage into your maw, it seems like having a beard (or at least the mustache part) would be contraindicated; it's a lot easier to wipe beer head off your upper lip if it's bare. But since I have upper lip whiskers, and it doesn't bother me, I don't really care.

This simple model generates some fantastically complex behaviors. In general, Touboul says, the population of hipsters initially act randomly but then undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state. He finds that this happens for a wide range of parameters but that the behavior can become extremely complex, depending on the way hipsters interact with conformists.

I guess it becomes a form of social signaling, like putting bumper stickers on your car, or even your choice of car. "I am in this tribe, and not the others." Whenever I see a dude with a full beard, it's a good bet he's a beer guy and we can have a conversation. Still not sure how to identify female beer geeks in the wild; if I knew that, I might not be single.

Hipsters are an easy target for a bit of fun, but the results have much wider applicability. For example, they could be useful for understanding financial systems in which speculators attempt to make money by taking decisions that oppose the majority in a stock exchange.

Those are called "contrarians," and, pretty much by definition, they're not generally speculators. Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor alive and once the richest man in the world (still in the top five) as a result, once said something like (can't be arsed to look it up) "be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy." Short-term market thinking results in getting in and out of positions, usually at the exact wrong time. For example, if you sold stocks last Monday, you were doing so when the market was crashing - which it was doing because the majority of people in the market were also selling. However, if you used it as an opportunity to buy, you'd be richer today than you were Monday (what it'll do tomorrow is anyone's guess).

Point is, there's a difference between "speculators" and "investors," and the former tend to follow the herd, to their eventual detriment.

So anyway, just linking this because it's an interesting article and made me think about fashion. Who knew it was subject to mathematical modeling? I would have never thought about it like that. But then, I'm proudly contrarian.