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The Mathematics Behind Hipsters

posted by n1 on Wednesday November 05 2014, @07:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the uncool-before-it-was-cool dept.

tonyPick writes:

At Mic is an article on research on the statistics behind why all hipsters look the same, reporting on a paper by Jonathan Touboul, a mathematical neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris.

Touboul argues that statistical physics explains how the anticonforming unintentionally become the expected. Although we all suspected that any one locally sourced-coffee-sipping hipster is pretty similar to another, Touboul puts it into scientific language.

[...] Aside from applying his findings towards French hipsters, a particularly ironic crowd, Toubol believes his work could also shed light on correlations in other statistical models, such as making financial decisions like trading stocks against the majority trends to make serious profits.

The paper is available on arXiv; The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same [PDF].

Originally spotted via Science news.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Cowherd on Wednesday November 05 2014, @08:51PM

    by Anonymous Cowherd (3699) on Wednesday November 05 2014, @08:51PM (#113353)

    It's a little more than that. You rely on your peers to get cues on what mainstream is, not directly. Imagine if you're a hipster, you hang out only with hipster friends, so you're insulated from mainstream society to a large extent.
    This paper claims through simplified statistical models that the delay involved in propagating these cues leads to similarity. I admit I don't fully understand how that happens, but it's fascinating and don't believe it can be summarized neatly into a one liner.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday November 07 2014, @03:19AM

    by TheLink (332) on Friday November 07 2014, @03:19AM (#113732) Journal
    I think it's simpler than that. Like it or not a large majority of people conveniently fall into various stereotypes (not for everything but close enough). This is probably because of genes and culture they are exposed to. Some dogs are always going to be yappy dogs and other dogs tend to be rather quiet, similar for humans but to a lesser extent - due to a less focused breeding programme ;).

    And hipsters are merely a bunch of similar people who have the same urge to be different from the "mainstream" and since they are actually similar people to each other they end up being "different" in similar ways. And that's why they are fairly easily identifiable.

    Just because you want to be different doesn't make you different from others.

    • (Score: 1) by TheLink on Friday November 07 2014, @03:23AM

      by TheLink (332) on Friday November 07 2014, @03:23AM (#113735) Journal
      I should say: Just because you want to be different doesn't make you unique. Since hipsters do end up different from "mainstream"

      Also humans are social animals - thus people will tend to form groups (and thus start sharing behaviours and culture).