Is This Anything? 25
The "endowment effect" is the claim that people overvalue things they own relative to things they don't, even if they only just got the item and don't have any reason to be attached to it (or have inside information about it).
So: participants in an experiment are rewarded with a tchotchke, and then they're asked if they'd like to trade it for a different tchotchke, and they disproportionately choose to keep their first tchotchke, even though it was randomly assigned and the people assigned tchotchke-2 generally keep that one too.
I'm sure this finding isn't entirely true, but unlike many other social psych findings it feels genuinely plausible to me.
I think there's a kind of endowment effect for our own lives, and I think I have unusually little of it: I don't generally feel that my job/beliefs/experiences etc are better just because they're mine. (My blog readership, of course, is precious and unique and I would not trade it for anything).
I'm sure you could prove in 10 seconds that I do still have a large and irrational endowment on these things, but my sense is it's far less than other people's. If you also experience this, or experience the opposite, I'd be keen to hear more.
Here's a thing that bothers me greatly. If one person insists on spending 100 hours researching a topic before having an opinion about it, while another spends 1 hour, the low-research person will publish 100x more opinions.
And just on principle I think for any given topic there'd be far more people who have researched it for an hour (or less) than people who have researched it for 100.
So unless there's some gating on whose opinions get published, or some reason to assume that informed opinions would get more traction than uninformed ones, most of the opinions you read will be from people who know very little about the topic.
And note that this is fractal: even if you decide to only listen to (say) Harvard Trained Historians, there will still be far more published content by the Harvard Trained Historians With A Low Bar For Having An Opinion than from the ones who insist on researching a lot before opining.
This seems very bad.
Of all the convoluted pointless bureaucratic loopholes I jump through, one of the least important but most poignant is borrowing ebooks from the library. There's a digital file somewhere that has 0 marginal cost of reproduction, and me and a bunch of other people queue up to have access to it, and when it's my turn to borrow I have three weeks to read it (which usually expire before I get to it), while other people are needlessly excluded from reading at the same time, and all for... what? As I said, there are other more-important pretzels we tie ourselves in for legal fiction reasons, but this one is just so vivid as a pointless game we play to pretend that something is what it isn't.