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 Our agency and our idiosyncrasies average out. We all want to eat, be warm and dry and have rewarding careers. That we all do about this in subtly different ways doesn't much matter. Until it does
-For there is a ''third'' order of dissimilarities. In times of stress in the market the behaviour of other people in the market ''directly'' and ''directionally'' affects your transaction, and yours affects others.
+For there is a ''third'' order of dissimilarities. In times of stress in the market the behaviour of other people in the market ''directly'' and ''directionally'' affects your transaction, and yours affects others. This is not the ''irrationality'' of panic — if each decision were irrational, the effect would be random and [[Brownian motion|Brownian]] — but an instinctive imitation of the surrounding community — this is “memesis”. Most of the time, through the Dunning Krueger effect or otherwise, we presume the perspective we can bring to the information we have gives us an edge over the crowd, and we are happy to make our own decisions, whose individual variances boil off into Brownian randomness that can be neatly fitted to a standard deviation from the mean.
+But there are moments — by nature unexpected — when that confidence vanishes. Suddenly our conscious models, theories and [[nomological machine]]s are less valuable than the tacit information we gather from the changed behaviour of everyone around us. ''There is something important we don’t know''. It is better to mimic the behaviour of those around us. We presume they know — or that they are imitating the behaviour of someone else who knows.
+This is the extraordinary behaviour of fish when a shark bursts through the school. This is the bewitching murmuration of starlings. Suddenly that entropic normal distribution of Brownian motion disappears and everything particle heads magically in the same direction.
+This cannot happen to a cup of tea.
 When the planet has suddenly gone into total lockdown as a result of an unexpected global pandemic, buying habits for toilet paper and, oddly, lentils, suddenly ''change''. The fact that there is only three tins of lentils left on the shelf leads you to grab them. The fact that there are none leads to a nation wide run on tinned pulses people don't, in normal times, much like.