Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
by Robert H. Frank · 31 Mar 2016 · 190pp · 53,409 words
spurred me to learn more about how such events shape career trajectories. The influence of even seemingly minor random events is often profound. Is the Mona Lisa special? Is Kim Kardashian? They’re both famous, but sometimes things are famous just for being famous. Although we often try to explain their success
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those earlier steps had been different, the entire trajectory would almost surely be different, too. Watts illustrates his point with the interesting history of the Mona Lisa, easily the most famous painting in the world. During a visit to the Louvre, he noticed the ubiquitous throngs jostling for a closer look at
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gallery. To Watts, the Mona Lisa seemed no better than those other paintings. Curious, he did a little digging and discovered that it had languished in obscurity for most of its early life. What pushed the painting into the spotlight was apparently its theft in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian maintenance worker at
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it, making it the first work of art to achieve global fame. From then on, the “Mona Lisa” came to represent Western culture itself.3 As Watts writes, “We claim to be saying that the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has attributes X, Y and Z. But
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really what we’re saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.”4 Consider also the career of Al Pacino, one of the most celebrated actors of the past forty
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.3 (1949): 377–404. 2. Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious* (*Once You Know the Answer), New York: Crown, 2011. 3. See Ian Leslie, “Why the Mona Lisa Stands Out,” Intelligent Life, May/June, 2014, http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/overexposed-works-art. 4. Watts, Everything Is Obvious, 59. 5. See
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, 102 Mechanical Turk, 95, 137 meritocracy, xi, xii Merton, Robert K., 24 Mialon, Hugo, 14 Microsoft, 34, 35, 44 Milanovic, Branko, 7 Mlodinow, Leonard, 35 Mona Lisa, 9, 22–23 Morocco, 87 motivated cognition, 72 MS DOS, 35 Munger, Charlie, 39 Murphy, Liam, 97 Music Lab, 30, 45 Nagel, Thomas, 97 naïve
The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
by Aja Raden · 10 May 2021 · 291pp · 85,822 words
can tell the difference—how can you be so sure that there even is one, let alone so certain that it matters? Many Lisas The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is arguably the most famous painting in the world. It’s inarguably a masterpiece, so I’m told. And I went
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a masterpiece because everyone agrees it is so. But let’s skip over that for now. What if the Mona Lisa is only the Mona Lisa because everyone agrees it is? In 1911, a man named Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian janitor at the Louvre Museum in Paris, took the famous painting from its frame and simply
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of patriotism—which never made much sense, because the Louvre was full of paintings by Italian masters, many more famous or more valuable than the Mona Lisa at that time—and ultimately he went to prison for about six months.3 That’s the part of the story of the infamous theft
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of the Mona Lisa that everyone knows. Here’s the part they don’t: in 1908, several years before the Mona Lisa was stolen, an Argentine art swindler, Eduardo de Valfierno, used multiple aliases to gain entry to the
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possessed of a certain amount of moral flexibility. He told each of them—separately—that he might be able to obtain (i.e., steal) the Mona Lisa. Each one agreed to buy the painting if he could indeed get his hands on it—for an astronomical sum, of course.4 In the
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meantime, Valfierno commissioned a French art forger named Yves Chaudron to make six perfect copies of the Mona Lisa. When Chaudron was finished, the copies were shipped to Valfierno. Finally, for the finishing touch: in 1911 Valfierno paid Peruggia to steal the painting from
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the Louvre.5 That’s where the story starts over at the beginning: the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre in a spectacular theft, which remained mysteriously unsolved for several years.* During that time, Valfierno sold each of his copies to
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eventually be “returned” to the museum, to reduce their chances of being implicated. Still, he advised each buyer to stay quiet; they could own the Mona Lisa, but they could never tell anybody they had it.7 This explains why Peruggia stole the painting from the Louvre in the first place (“patriotism
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the other modern authentication techniques now employed. And more to the point: If you were Valfierno and you had successfully engineered the theft of the Mona Lisa, after commissioning—and selling off—a number of perfect replicas, what are the chances you’d actually give back the original? In fact, we know
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he saved one “Mona Lisa” for himself, because he repeated the scam twenty-five years later and closed five more sales to eager collectors.8 The only twist? This time
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, he informed his would-be buyers that he’d kept the stolen Mona Lisa and returned a fake to the museum. Knowing nothing of the previous six sales (or one another), each buyer believed him when he said he
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willing to sell the authentic stolen painting … to each one of them, of course. So, where’s Lisa really? It really doesn’t matter. The Mona Lisa is in at least a dozen different very private collections right now, not even including the Louvre. At best, the painting in the Louvre has
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a one in twelve chance of being the original. But here’s the truth: the Mona Lisa—the one that exists in your mind—isn’t anywhere, because you made it up. At this point, the Mona Lisa is an idea every bit as much as it is a painting. We all know it
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underwhelmed by it, or bought a postcard in the gift shop so they could remember the time they’d gone to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa. All that mattered was they believed they had. Con Artistry That there are an abundance of forgeries accepted as authentic is not a modern problem
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box.12 The money-box con worked as follows: Lustig would identify wealthy, and unscrupulous, marks (probably the same demographic interested in buying the stolen Mona Lisa—and, in fact, he was running this con around the same time, throughout the 1920s and ’30s). Eventually, when he had won the mark’s
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goats, thank God, but ultimately impossible to authenticate. How do we know whose body they really belonged to? The answer is that, like the many Mona Lisas, it doesn’t remotely matter. If it did, fearless Parisians wouldn’t have run into Notre Dame while the cathedral was engulfed in flames and
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the most vital, if tacit, clause in the social contract. If 99.9 percent of people believe paper money has intrinsic value or that the Mona Lisa is priceless (and actually in the Louvre), then it makes no practical difference if these things are factually accurate: they are accepted as true and
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) Rasputin spiritual advisor to Alexei (Tsarevich) Rasputin miracle healing of Ammon, Robert Angelou, Maya Animal Planet mermaid documentary anticipatory response Arnold, Philip art forgery of Mona Lisa art forgery of Revere of Sleeping Eros Asimov, Isaac attention change blindness in inattentional blindness in authority bias Bailey, William Bait and Switch cat’s
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documentary, of Animal Planet Mesmer, Franz Anton mesmerism Michelangelo Milgram, Stanley Miller, William Franklin “520 Miller” mirror neurons, Gauchais effect of MLM. See multilevel marketing Mona Lisa, by da Vinci money. See also 2008 financial crisis counterfeiting of Guru Con cost of memory and competition over PTL Club donation requests seed, magical
Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts · 28 Mar 2011 · 327pp · 103,336 words
five hundred years later that painting has made her face about the most famous face in all of history. The painting, of course, is the Mona Lisa, and for those who have lived their entire lives in a cave, it now hangs in a bulletproof, climate-controlled case on a wall all
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nearly $700 million—far in excess of any painting ever sold—but it is unclear that any price could be meaningfully assigned to it. The Mona Lisa, it seems fair to say, is more than just a painting—it is a touchstone of Western culture. It has been copied, parodied, praised, mocked
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just walked by in the previous chamber, and to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention. As far as I could tell, the Mona Lisa looked like an amazing accomplishment of artistic talent, but no more so than those other three. In fact, if I hadn’t already known which
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to other art experts throughout history. And yet, as the historian Donald Sassoon relates in his illuminating biography of the Mona Lisa, nothing could be further from the case.3 For centuries, the Mona Lisa was a relatively obscure painting languishing in the private residences of kings—still a masterpiece, to be sure, but
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of painting, like Titian and Rafael, some of whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the Mona Lisa. In fact, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the Mona Lisa began its meteoric rise to global brand name. And even then it wasn’t the result of art critics suddenly
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burglary. On August 21, 1911, a disgruntled Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia hid in a broom closet until closing time and then walked out of the museum with the Mona Lisa tucked under his coat. A proud Italian, Peruggia apparently believed that the Mona Lisa ought rightly to be displayed in Italy, not France, and he
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was arrested while attempting to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But although he failed in his mission, Peruggia succeeded in catapulting the Mona Lisa into a new category of fame. The French public was captivated by the bold theft and electrified by the painting’s unexpected recovery. The Italians
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the patriotism of their countryman, and treated Peruggia more like a hero than a criminal—before the Mona Lisa was returned to its French owner, it was shown all over Italy. From that point on, the Mona Lisa never looked back. The painting was to be the object of criminal activity twice more—first
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, all these different people—thieves, vandals, artists, and advertisers, not to mention musicians, moviemakers, and even NASA (remember the crater on Venus?)—were using the Mona Lisa for their own purposes: to make a point, to increase their own fame, or simply to use a label they felt would convey meaning to
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other people. But every time they used the Mona Lisa, it used them back, insinuating itself deeper into the fabric of Western culture and the awareness of billions of people. It is impossible now to
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imagine the history of Western art without the Mona Lisa, and in that sense it truly is the greatest of paintings. But it is also impossible to attribute its unique status to anything about the
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painting itself. This last point presents a problem because when we try to explain the success of the Mona Lisa, it is precisely its attributes on which we focus our attention. If you’re Kenneth Clark, you don’t need to know anything about the
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circumstances of the Mona Lisa’s rise to fame to know why it happened—everything you need to know is right there in front of you. To oversimplify only slightly
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, the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it is the best, and although it might have taken us a while to figure this
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out, it was inevitable that we would. And that’s why so many people are puzzled when they first actually set eyes on the Mona Lisa. They’re expecting these intrinsic qualities to be apparent, and they’re not. Of course, most of us, when faced with this moment of dissonance
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good, or even better. Of course, one can always get around this problem by pointing out that it’s not any one attribute of the Mona Lisa that makes it so special, but rather the combination of all its attributes—the smile, and the use of light, and the fantastical background, and
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so on. There’s actually no way to beat this argument, because the Mona Lisa is of course a unique object. No matter how many similar portraits or paintings some pesky skeptic drags out of the dustbin of history, one
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justify the known outcome in a way that seems rational and objective. But the result is circular reasoning. We claim to be saying that the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we’re saying is that the
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Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else. CIRCULAR REASONING Not everybody appreciates this conclusion. When I explained the argument to an English literature professor at
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there. And if I hadn’t, it would have been my failing, not Shakespeare’s—because Shakespeare, like da Vinci, defines genius. As with the Mona Lisa, this outcome may be perfectly justified. Nevertheless, the point remains that locating the source of his genius in the particular attributes of his work invariably
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philosophical position goes by the name of methodological individualism, which claims that until one has succeeded in explaining some social phenomenon—the popularity of the Mona Lisa or the relation between interest rates and economic growth—exclusively in terms of the thoughts, actions, and intentions of individual people, one has not fully
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that even identical universes, starting out with the same set of people and objects and tastes, would nevertheless generate different cultural or marketplace winners. The Mona Lisa would be popular in this world, but in some other version of history it would be just one of many masterpieces, while another painting that
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give for its success are less relevant than they seem. Facebook, that is, has a particular set of features, just as Harry Potter and the Mona Lisa have their own particular sets of features, and all of them have experienced their own particular outcomes. But it does not follow that those features
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caused the outcomes in any meaningful way. Ultimately, in fact, it may simply not be possible to say why the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world or why the Harry Potter books sold more than 350 million copies within ten years, or why
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cascades of retweets in the past were more likely to be successful in the future, individual cases fluctuated wildly at random. Just as with the Mona Lisa, for every individual who exhibited the attributes of a successful influencer, there were many other users with indistinguishable attributes who were not successful. Nor did
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. Teachers cheated on their students’ tests because that’s what their incentives led them to do. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has all the attributes of the Mona Lisa. People have stopped buying gas-guzzling SUVs because social norms now dictate that people shouldn’t buy
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identify the attributes of great art. Even if it’s true that prior to the twentieth century, it might not have been obvious that the Mona Lisa was going to become the most famous painting in the world, we have now run the experiment, and we have the answer. We may still
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not be able to say what it is about the Mona Lisa that makes it uniquely great, but we do at least have some data. Even if our commonsense explanations have a tendency to conflate what happened
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Afghanistan, and one must therefore be cautious in applying the lessons from one to another. Likewise, nobody thinks that by studying the success of the Mona Lisa we can realistically expect to understand much about the success and failure of contemporary artists. Nevertheless, we do still expect to learn some lessons from
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possible to attribute the outcomes the next day to the intrinsic attributes of the two men than it is to attribute the success of the Mona Lisa to its particular features, or the drop in violence in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq in 2008 to the surge. Rather, people like Revere, who
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and Bacon. Cialdini, Robert B., and Noah Goldstein, J. 2004. “Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity.” Annual Review of Psychology 55:591–621. Clark, Kenneth. 1973. “Mona Lisa.” The Burlington Magazine 115 (840):144–51. Clauset, Aaron, and Nathan Eagle. 2007. Persistence and Periodicity in a Dynamic Proximity Network in DIMACS Workshop on
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Press. Rice, Andrew. 2010. “Putting a Price on Words.” New York Times Magazine, May 10. Riding, Alan. 2005. “In Louvre, New Room with View of ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” New York Times, April 6. Rigney, Daniel. 2010. The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage. New York: Columbia University Press. Robbins, Jordan M., and
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Do? New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. Santayana, George. 1905. Reason in Common Sense, Vol. 1. New York: George Scribner’s Sons. Sassoon, Donald. 2001. Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon. New York: Harcourt, Inc. Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
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3: THE WISDOM (AND MADNESS) OF CROWDS 1. See Riding (2005) for the statistic about visitors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa for other entertaining details about the Mona Lisa. 2. See Clark (1973, p. 150). 3. See Sassoon (2001). 4. See Tucker (1999) for the full article on Harry Potter. See
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effectively becomes a substitute for merit itself. But even more than that, it is merit that cannot be easily questioned. If one believes that the Mona Lisa is a great piece of art because of X, Y, and Z, a knowledgeable disputant can immediately counter with his or her own criteria, or
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point out other examples that ought to be considered superior. But if one believes instead that the Mona Lisa is a great piece of art simply because it is famous, our pesky disputant can come up with all the objections she desires and we
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can insist quite reasonably that she must be missing the point. No matter how knowledgably she argues that properties of the Mona Lisa aren’t uniquely special, we cannot help but suspect that something must have been overlooked, because surely if the artwork was not really special, then
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson · 7 Feb 2017 · 416pp · 108,370 words
Press, and the Laugh Track INTERLUDE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TEENS PART II: POPULARITY AND THE MARKET 7. ROCK AND ROLL AND RANDOMNESS Featuring the Mona Lisa, “Rock Around the Clock,” and Chaos Theory 8. THE VIRAL MYTH Featuring Fifty Shades of Grey, John Snow, and Pokémon GO 9. THE AUDIENCE OF
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he’s very good at explaining the pitfalls of sentimental explanations. One of his best attacks on wooly-headed thinking is his take on the Mona Lisa as the most popular painting in the world. Today there is little doubt about the rarefied air of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait. The
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Mona Lisa is the world’s most treasured painting, literally: It holds the Guinness World Record for the most expensive insurance policy on any art piece. In
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1973, the art critic Kenneth Clark called the Mona Lisa the “supreme example of perfection,” saying it deserved its title as the most famous painting in the world. But in the nineteenth century, it wasn
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’t even the most famous painting in its museum, the Louvre in Paris. The historian Donald Sassoon reported that, in 1849, the Mona Lisa was valued at 90,000 francs. That’s a tidy sum, but not even close to Titian’s Supper at Emmaus (150,000 francs at
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Family (600,000 francs), which hung in the same museum. The Mona Lisa’s fame got an assist from a dim-witted thief. On August 11, 1911, a Monday, Vincenzo Peruggia, an unemployed Italian painter, walked into the Louvre and left with the Mona Lisa. French newspapers were aghast at the theft and indignantly proclaimed the
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painting’s historic significance. The Mona Lisa went missing for several years, until Peruggia—stuck with an expensive
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artwork whose sale would inevitably lead to his apprehension—tried to hawk the painting in Florence and was duly apprehended. The recovery of the Mona Lisa and its return to France was an international sensation. Several years after the painting’s recovery, in 1919, the modernist Marcel Duchamp made a replica
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of the Mona Lisa with a mustache. He called it L.H.O.O.Q., which, if you pronounce the letters in French, is a homophone for something naughty
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.41 Defiling the placid smile of the Mona Lisa struck a lot of other painters as an inexhaustibly funny idea. So in the last century some of the most famous painters—including Jasper Johns
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, Robert Rauschenberg, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol—made their own Mona Lisa parodies. Her face is everywhere now—on coasters, magazine covers, book covers, movies posters, and trinkets. Critics explaining why the
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Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in history often don’t account for the fact that, for most of its history, it wasn’t. As a
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result, they end up saying something like: “The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has all of the qualities of the Mona Lisa.” This is the sort of explanation that drives Watts truly bonkers. He bemoans the many analysts, trend
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have time: Jim Dawson, e-mail message to author, July 12, 2015. just seventy-five thousand records sold: “Bill Haley,” Billboard. his take on the Mona Lisa as the most popular painting: Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer (New York: Crown Business, 2011). the most expensive insurance policy
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, 42 Metcalfe’s law, 220 Miller, Dave, 164 Millet, Jean-François, 312n22 Minecraft, 58–59 mobile technology, 11–12, 67 Model T cars, 48, 133 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), 168–69 Monet, Claude and art dealer, 251–52 and Caillebotte’s bequest, 22, 23, 24, 312n22 Caillebotte’s friendship with, 21
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, 291–92 Warren, Caleb, 146–47 Watts, Duncan and chaos theory, 170–71, 183 and information cascades, 170–71, 179, 183 and Leslie, 306 on Mona Lisa, 168–69 and music rankings, 205–6 on small networks, 223 on spread of ideas, 221 “We Are Young” (Fun), 134 Weiner, Matthew, 244, 252