comments:
Maybe. It's hard to know whether something is going to be successful beforehand. As much as we laugh at Hollywood, it's actually hard. Predicting whether an individual would like a work of art is not very difficult and doable. Judging whether a work of art will take off in a giant social network, that's much harder. A study found that some it is seems quite unpredictable: Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that ‘‘the best’’ alternatives are qualitatively different from ‘‘the rest’’; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial ‘‘music market’’ in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants’ choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible. One of the authors later wrote a book: Everything Is Obvious*: *Once You Know the Answer. People frequently see a success and say its success was obvious because X,Y, Z. Of course, ask them to judge whether something will be a success months before it's released and it doesn't seem so obvious. A few months ago I wouldn't have thought two horror movies from Youtubers, Obsession and Backrooms, would be very successful and a Star Wars movie would falter. How many people are reasoning after the fact and saying it was obvious? That sort of backward thinking fools us to believing we understand far more than we do.