3/ Pet rocks and tulip manias are two extremes on a spectrum of there being no there there economically
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4/ The pet rock was a non-generative innovation and afaik, the sociology around it wasn't too interesting either
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5/ It was not just an evolutionary cul de sac... it didn't even do much exciting twisting and branching on the way to a dead end
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6/ Tulip manias otoh are complex... there's a lot of excitement, and _apparently_ a story to tell, with events, players, developments, news
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7/ But like a ponzi scheme, when you dig, you find the root cause fundamentally underwhelming. You can't dig deep because there's no depth
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8/ The challenge posed by is to distinguish members of the set {Pet rock, Tulip manias, actual Revolutions} or {P, T, R}
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9/ If there are no complicated branchings and twists and turns to the story it's a pet rock. Test: it's a wikipedia 1-pager.
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10/ Go read Wikipedia page on pet rocks. Unlike more interesting stories, it won't suck you down big bunnytrail en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
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11/ We're left with distinguishing tulip manias and the real deal. Here the test is equally simple: learning never gets seriously difficult
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14/ Information/stories about tulip mania type things are like this: the going never gets hard, ever. You can endlessly explore fun trails
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15/ Whereas for "real deal" topic, you will invariably run into a difficulty wall where you realize you have to do hard thinking to proceed
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