As we discussed in class, there are many things today that are examples of information cascades.  One of the most prominent issues in our image self conscious society is about weight and diet.  This blog post from a columnist  from the New York Times talks about the obsession with low-fat diets and weight-watching. The columnist is reflecting on a book that has just disproved the common belief that low-fat diets prolong your life.  The article references an economist at Brown who states that most choices are binary.  He says that people either choose to do something or not to do it. This economist, Dr. Welch, explains that logically people reach the truth of low-fat diets by acting on their beliefs. However, because of this binary “accept-reject” state of mind, he further explains, people have no option to show their belief but only to illogically accept or reject the current belief of the correct amount of fat in a diet.

            There are many other aspects about diets that have cascading effects.  I remember a long time ago when scientists argued that chocolate was actually good for you.  People didn’t care about the real information, they could either accepted this information and eat all the chocolate they wanted or reject and not change.  People wouldn’t care about the fact that this new finding only refers to dark chocolate and that it lowers blood pressure and has healthy antioxidants.  They wouldn’t realize that the sugar in such chocolate is still not good for you and there are other ways to have the same helping effects. 

This is the same as the “accept and reject” aspects of information cascades that we have studied in class.  This binary response is the cause of such illogical blunders that occur in cascades.  This kind of decision-making causes people to ignore the information and to not choose for themselves.

            Welch finally also comments on the power of  “entrepreneurs”.  He says that these a re special people who usually have enough knowledge to follow their own beliefs and make their own decisions.  Welch says they are valuable because they are able to overturn certain cascades in society.  I, however, can also see them as a potential threat to creating even more cascades.  Suppose an entrepreneur makes a mistake or a crowd misunderstands his decision, it is like to cause even more cascades.  

 http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/how-the-low-fat-low-fact-cascade-just-keeps-rolling-along/