I have been digging more into the subject of informational cascades as I work on editing my submission to eLearn on “emergent learning” (which I’m going to refer to as social learning instead, given the current lack of agreement about what “emergent learning” means). The more I dig, the more excited I get. There’s some deep and important stuff here.
Many of the best insights are buried in heavily mathematical academic papers on efficient market theory; but every once and a while you run across a gem that’s written to a broader audience. As William Dulker points out in his Full Context weblog, Slate’s William Saletan provides a wonderful, easy-to-understand example of an informational cascade in the Democratic primaries.