Funny, I use this myself, particularly in HN. I think there is a corollary though, which goes something like "Headlines which ask a question are more likely to attract attention when the subject is of interest to the reader." or "Headlines which leave an unclosed loop cause an impulse to find the solution."
Posting this question in a slightly different way than I did before. My theory is that it is possible to deliberately structure an experience within 48 hours or so to create a lifelong bond on a team of 4-5 people. I'm trying to figure out what the elements of that experience would be so I'm using a handy AI tool to help me do the research.
Encounter groups (e.g. "T-Groups") got a bad reputation in the 1970s because they could put people under extreme social pressure.
A few years back (before Ozempic) I'd had an incident where I developed a psychogenic fever after extreme stress which caused me to lose about 15 pounds. (The psychogenic fever is caused by the nervous system activating oxidization of brown fat, which can persist for a few weeks)
I've made some half-hearted attempts since to induce a psychogenic fever including attempts at biofeedback with a thermometer. If I just had some way to measure the tone of the neurons that go to those brown fat cells... Thing is, anything I could expose myself to get extreme stress would be pretty unpleasant, never mind dangerous.
I bet you could cause enough stress by getting 20 people to bully one person in an encounter group over the weekend but that's the kind of experiment you'll never get past the human subject review board.
Yeah, I think what I have in mind is more along the lines of creating a defined goal that people need to achieve in a limited amount of time. Think carrying a sandbag for 20 miles by handing it off between the participants. E.g. pushing themselves physically or mentally, with some time constraints, and helping each other in the process.
I'm doing some research for a book on team bonding. If you have ever been on a highly bonded team and have ideas about what circumstances led to the bonding I'd love your thoughts.
We've seen this before. Lots of investments in the '99 runup had ad buys associated with them which did the same kind of double counting. The example would be Yahoo investing in some startup at an inflated valuation, paying for some or all of the investment with ad inventory priced arbitrarily and which was, for Yahoo, free to produce. Lots of things led to the 2001 crash, but valuation distorting shenanigans like that didn't help. To the extent it feeds through to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon valuations the AI dynamic could follow a similar pattern.
This study by Arthur Aaron on closeness drove all kinds of media attention and still gets cited all over the place. Does anyone know if it has ever been replicated?
Consumer debt to disposable income is low vs. average. It may trend up but my take is that bigger thing at play here is historically low unemployment. Good news, in other words.
I guessing we'll probably see a change on the next update, and then a bigger change in the next update after that, since student loans got unpaused at the tail end of Q3 2023.
It has been at persistently low levels for seven years years now (obviously the pandemic punched a temporary hole in employment, however the US recovered relatively quickly vs its peers). It's structural, we have a labor shortage relative to the hyper scale of the US economy overall (including its aging demographics as a supply problem). The only thing that will severely dent that context is a bad recession, a big crisis like the great recession.
Probably about ten hours, all in.