Jason’s post dis­cussing econ­o­mist Lant Pritchett’s thoughts on how peo­ple per­ceive ‘game-changing ideas’ over time

Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious.

Or, more eloquently:

Silly, con­tro­ver­sial, pro­gres­sive, then obvious.

reminded me of research on the rise and fall of an item’s pop­u­lar­ity that found the fall mir­rored the rise.

Accord­ing to the results, the quicker a cul­tural item rock­ets to pop­u­lar­ity, the quicker it dies. This pat­tern occurs because peo­ple believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, lead­ing them to avoid these items, thus caus­ing these items to die out.

And how did the researchers inves­ti­gate these cul­tural ‘taste changes’ over time? By analysing the rise and fall in pop­u­lar­ity of dif­fer­ent baby names over the past 100 years, of course (“because there is less of an influ­ence of tech­nol­ogy or adver­tis­ing on name choice, baby names pro­vide a way to study how adop­tion depends on pri­mar­ily inter­nal factors”).

This also reminds me of Peter Feld’s First Law of Metatwit­ter:

The more a plat­form is used to talk about itself, the greater the bar­ri­ers to its adop­tion beyond its core users.