On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:20:41 -0400, Bill Truesdell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I think we are back in the multiplier effect that we encountered when
>CCD first started. You have a report (one, two or three with CCD
>symptoms) and they are reported and re-reported again and again until
>the couple of actual reports is amplified into the "80% of all East
>Coast bees".
Perhaps CCD is history repeating itself........
A popular book in many college finance classes is titled "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds" . The book is not about the stock market but about how people accept ideas
as fact. Rumors and fear drive the stock market some times.
I see a potential for this same kind of human behaviour in the CCD phenomenon. History may
remember CCD as not the Great Honeybee Loss of 2006-2007 but as a sideshow to Global
Warming and the public looking for reinforcing symptoms of environmental catastrophe.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
excerpt from:
Preface to the 1852 Edition
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their
peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We
find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit;
that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till
their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation
suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory;
another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering its
senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by
its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the
Sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land: another age went mad
for fear of the Devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of
witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the Philosopher's Stone,
and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a venial offence in
very many countries of Europe to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have
revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of
gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices,
became quite fashionable. Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for
ages, flourishing as widely among civilized and polished nations as among the early barbarians
with whom they originated, -- that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and
divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate entirely from
the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober
nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the
turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the
object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go
mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
In the present state of civilization, society has often shown itself very prone to run a career of folly
from the last-mentioned cases. This infatuation has seized upon whole nations in a most
extraordinary manner. France, with her Mississippi madness, set the first great example, and was
very soon imitated by England with her South Sea Bubble. At an earlier period, Holland made
herself still more ridiculous in the eyes of the world, by the frenzy which came over her people for
the love of Tulips. Melancholy as all these delusions were in their ultimate results, their history is
most amusing. A more ludicrous and yet painful spectacle, than that which Holland presented in
the years 1635 and 1636, or France in 1719 and 1720, can hardly be imagined. Taking them in
the order of their importance, we shall commence our history with John Law and the famous
Mississippi scheme of the years above mentioned.
see link for more
http://robotics.caltech.edu/~mason/Delusions/epdatmoc.html
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