Posted this out of curiosity -- does anyone know what "patient zero" is for this meme? It's a meme that I find possibly harmful, since it amounts to the idea t

Posted this out of curiosity -- does anyone know what "patient zero" is for this meme? It's a meme that I find possibly harmful, since it amounts to the idea that herd effects and other forms of social confirmation bias are a good thing and that these biases should be intentionally built into the decision making process. It also carries some other questionable baggage / corollaries: - Secrets do not exist, hence trade secrets and contrarian business models or scientific ideas are rare or nonexistent. - Markets are almost perfectly efficient -- including the marketplace of ideas. - Conceptual thought and first-principles reasoning are very unreliable. - In addition to intellectual biases toward cargo cultism and herd effects, it also introduces a powerful bias toward cronyism and "old boy networks." I'm also curious if the original idea was possibly more nuanced than that. It's very common for a nuanced idea (e.g. disruption) to get very dumbed down by the game of telephone. Related: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-conventional-wisdom-on-oil-is-always-wrong/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-conventional-wisdom-... Social proof would seem to be an intrinsically bad thing in investing -- so why is this concept so popular among investors?