The Mathematics of Hipster-ism
You heard me right. Mathematician and neuroscientist Jonathan Touboul, PhD, has recently released a draft of a paper examining the relationship between neuroscience and the behavior of “hipsters” in modern society. In short, a “hipster” is defined as one who constantly makes a conscious effort to go against the norm, or “mainsteam.” That is if a “hipster” hears that the majority of those around him/her are going to follow choice A, he/she will instead choose to follow choice B, not necessarily because it is more convenient or a better choice, but simply because it’s not what everyone else is doing. In the same way, there’s a particular balance when the hipster will realize that the norm is changing, then will change him/herself, creating a constant changing loops of mainstream trends and the opposite, which are the hipster trends.
The phenomenon that Touboul observes is a surface description of the delay that occurs when hipsters are attempting to go against the mainstream. He observes that the longer the delay of information, the more predictable the pattern becomes, causing hipsters to change fashion trends simultaneously instead of going against the grain as they had intended.
The delay observed in this paper is an example of how certain theories in Networks can be affected by reality, namely typed of information cascades. In this situation, the cascade begins when people decide whether they want to follow the mainstream or if they want to go against it (as Touboul categorizes it, as “normcore” or “punk”). Each person decides individually which one they wish to follow, but this decision is based on what they all see to be is popular. The hipster will choose to follow the contrary to mainstream, a “conformist” hipster will do what the others are doing, while all others will choose mainstream (the most popular option that can be seen). We could potentially represent this situation as an information cascade in which all information is visible (observable), with each person in the cascade making a decision based upon this visible information. However, in the real world, not all information is completely visible. So now, let’s say each person can only see the last 50 people beforehand. With enough hipsters and “conformist” hipsters in the system initially, the information cascade actually causes the whole system to reverse, with normcore becoming punk and punk becoming the new normcore.
What Touboul tells us, however, is that the observable data may have a delay. So those last 50 people observed may not be the latest in the trends or may represent the trends from, say, a month ago. In the sense of information cascades, this implies that the information gathered from previous sections of the cascade may not be entirely credible information since they may be outdated.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/11/11/the-mathematician-who-proved-why-hipsters-all-look-alike/