Erin Fitz

For those of you who want a break from monitoring the situation, our (@profgoose) three-study paper on the behavioral stages of bitcoin/crypto adoption in the US is officially out. Read the paper here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mhPF3SU%7EW… Or click around the interactive summary here: erinbfitz.com/crypto

cough @profgoose cough

Well, I did a thing. I hope it's useful. I mapped every four-year college in the U.S. higher education along two dimensions — institutional resilience & post-college market position — using eight indicators from federal data along with a new measure of institutional AI exposure.

The happiest countries in the world tend to have the most heavy metal bands. stevestewartwilliams.com/p/political-bi…

Jürgen Habermas died recently at 96. He spent his career defending the idea that rational dialogue could ground democratic legitimacy — that the better argument could win. Then AI made argument and knowledge production cheap. I wrote about what happens when a technology simultaneously fulfills Baudrillard's prophecy about simulation AND empirically challenges the constructivist epistemology that's dominated humanities departments for fifty years. The short version: the vocabulary we use to criticize AI — hallucination, bias, error — quietly presupposes that there's a reality being violated. Every critique is a covert realist claim. This piece is about the fifty-year intellectual war underneath the AI panic in academia, and why the reckoning is practical, not philosophical. 🔗 open.substack.com/pub/kylesaunde…

The “Everyone is 12 now” theory truly is foundational for our times.

In other words, alpha is a good early diagnostic check to see whether certain items behave similarly in your data, but it's not evidence that a scale is good. Researchers will often report alpha in the main paper just as a best practices signal but put FA and other validity test results in an appendix because it's usually a LOT of information that's not directly relevant to the main text.

this post exists because I was personally victimized by a horrible 344 item survey i had to take last week

I hope you'll share our "one pager" for our bitcoin/cryptocurrency study about the differences between those who own, consider, and reject digital assets. I will link to the paper itself, a separate "explainer" site, and a picture of the abstract in the first reply. Thanks!

Paper with @profgoose here, ICYMI: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mhPF3SU%7EW…

@nataliemj10 Socks + Mary Poppins + American Girl dolls is my origin story.

I ❤️ Socks.

My research tests an alternative approach

Tricky, yes! So let me try to explain: The graph is showing probabilities of being in *one* of the rejecting, considering, or owning groups. The baseline for rejecting is always largest because most people (~60%) reject, rather than consider (~20%) or own (~20%). But if the probability of being in a certain group changes because of some factor, like Need for Chaos, the other probabilities have to change so everything still adds up to 1. So here, Need for Chaos doesn't change whether or not someone rejects--that "baseline" of 60% stays the same. But Need for Chaos increases the probability of owning, rather than considering (note how the green shaded area is above the baseline, while the yellow shaded area is below the baseline, together showing that shift in probability from one group to the other).

@thetrocro @itserinfitz @profgoose Is the graph telling us that rejectors have even a greater need for chaos than owners? And therefore when the need for chaos is too high, the probability of ownership decreases?

Why are we stuck at the chasm of adoption? Maybe because people who own bitcoin “need chaos” and those who do not own bitcoin but are open to it very much do not. This from the brilliant new study by @itserinfitz and @profgoose.

everyone I know right now

@SOUTHSIDE263 @thetrocro Inb4 "and I knew Rivers Cuomo in pre-k"

@itserinfitz @thetrocro I used to listen to rap and skateboard in the late 90s, when it wasn’t cool at my high school 🧠

Also worth adding that, in terms of the adoption curve, adoption wouldn't just represent owning in this case. It also represents acceptance, too--meaning there will always be some folks who are good with the idea of something like bitcoin existing and other people using it, they just might never actually use it themselves. Both acceptance and actual adoption determine whether it makes it farther down the curve.

I'll add too, as @thetrocro mentioned and we briefly talk about in the paper, that motivations/interests/incentives change all along the adoption curve. We've seen this in pretty much every innovation over time, e.g., the first people to use the internet or cell phones or whatever were not initially motivated by the more general use cases today. So it's a difference between rejecting, considering, and owning at the individual level at specific points in time, but also the difference between rejecting, considering, and owning at the collective level across time.

@thetrocro Homogeneous preferences for thee, but not for me.

People are so difficult. The machines understand me! People don’t get bitcoin, let’s give them yield, premised on bitcoin but under layers of financial engineering. Sure sure sure. But listen to yourself. Have you ever kissed a girl?

The “agents will use bitcoin” narrative as well as the “people don’t need bitcoin, they’ll get yield on preferreds and Saylor will buy it for them” both reveal weakness. Even if true, they’re often an autist way giving up on the idea of people just stacking sats.

Something else we don't discuss in the paper (but have looked at in other work) is that Need for Chaos is also associated with greater willingness to take risks. Risk-taking is a relatively stable psychological trait, whereas NFChaos is more contextual (i.e., it captures underlying traits that may emerge under certain conditions). So there's potentially an interaction between risk-taking (another factor we look at in the paper) and chaos, too. One thing we're working on now is whether people own *because* they're higher in for NFChaos, or NFChaos emerges *because* they own. As you mentioned, motivations often change as we collectively progress along the adoption curve, but the idea tracks either way.

What is the need for chaos? A mindset where people have a deep desire to disrupt, dismantle, or "burn down" the established institutional order. It tracks, doesn’t it? That messaging will NOT land with the next wave.

@thetrocro @profgoose Always the hardest part!

@itserinfitz @profgoose Thank you for the incredible work to put it together. I hope the community and industry players can hear what the data are saying.