April 9, 2025. Herd Behavior.

Have you noticed what's happening with the "Liberation Day" tariffs? Yesterday I was looking through my social media, and something caught my attention. Everyone was suddenly an economics expert overnight. People who never discussed trade policy before were now confidently explaining what Trump's tariffs would mean for the economy.

And they were all saying almost the same thing, just using different words. 

Some were predicting disaster, others were celebrating. But within each group, the opinions were nearly identical.

I realized I was watching herd behavior unfold in real time.

This isn't just about tariffs. 

I keep seeing this pattern everywhere, in how we invest, how we form opinions on complex issues, how we react to world events. We have all these possibilities for independent thought, but somehow we end up clustering into the same predictable patterns.

Look at what's happening with the "Liberation Day" tariffs announcement. Since April 2nd, the markets have lost about $5 trillion in value. The Dow dropped 2,200 points. Major financial institutions are making dramatic predictions.

But why? Did everyone carefully analyze what a 10% tariff on imports actually means for the economy? Did they examine the data and reach independent conclusions?

Probably not. What happened is that when some people started selling, others saw them selling and did the same. No one wanted to be the last person holding on while everyone else was getting out. This created a chain reaction.

Someone said something really insightful recently: "When there's lots of noise, calm down and look for actual signals." Most of us struggle to tell the difference between meaningful information and just noise. 

When we feel uncertain, our first instinct isn't to analyze carefully. It's to follow what others are doing.

Under all the surface-level reactions, I believe there are deeper patterns and intentions to discover. While everyone is panicking and reacting, something more significant might be happening that most people aren't noticing.

Remember the cryptocurrency boom in 2021? One day, it seemed like everyone suddenly became an expert. People who had never invested before were confidently explaining blockchain technology. Then when prices started dropping, the same crowd started explaining why crypto was doomed. Both waves weren't based on deep understanding, they were based on following what everyone else was doing.

I find it fascinating how this connects to patterns in nature. 

In nature, individual animals following simple rules create amazing group behaviors. Ants aren't individually intelligent, but an ant colony can solve complex problems. Fish aren't strategic on their own, but a school of fish can move together to avoid predators. 

These are positive examples of group behavior.

Human groups, though? That's where things get complicated.

Remember GameStop in 2021? A group of individual investors on Reddit pushed a struggling company's stock price incredibly high, costing some hedge funds billions of dollars. For a moment, it seemed like collective action could challenge the financial system. But what happened in the end? Many small investors who joined late lost money when the price eventually fell. 

The group gave power, and then the group took it away.

Or think about the housing market in 2008. Millions of people bought homes with loans they couldn't afford because "real estate always goes up" and "everyone is doing it." Banks kept making these loans because other banks were doing it. Rating agencies kept saying these investments were safe because that's what everyone expected. The result? A global financial crisis that hurt countless people. 

The group walked off a cliff together, taking the global economy with them.

Looking at the Liberation Day tariffs, we're seeing similar patterns. Reports suggest each American household might face an additional $5,000 in yearly costs. Companies announcing job cuts. But opinions show the country almost evenly divided - about half oppose the tariffs while a third support them. It's interesting how the same event can create two different groups moving in opposite directions, each believing they're right.

We see this with misinformation too. One person shares something false, a few others spread it, and suddenly millions believe something untrue simply because everyone in their circle believes it. 

I've watched entire communities become convinced of strange theories this way. The more people believe something, the more believable it seems, regardless of whether it's true.

Even in technology, where I'm building Seraphim, I see this behavior constantly. Every few months, there's a new approach everyone says you must use. Companies change their entire strategies to match whatever the big tech companies are promoting, even if it doesn't make sense for their specific situation. 

Remember when everyone said blockchain would solve every problem? Then AI became the answer to everything? How much time and resources have been wasted chasing trends just because everyone else was?

I'm not saying group behavior is always bad, though. Sometimes the group gets it right. 

Open-source software is a great example – thousands of developers contributing to projects like Linux or TensorFlow, creating something much better than any individual could build alone. That's group behavior directed toward something truly valuable.

Or think about responses to natural disasters. When communities quickly organize to help during emergencies, that's group behavior serving an important purpose. Information spreading rapidly can help warn people or coordinate large-scale evacuations, potentially saving thousands of lives.

The scientific community also functions as a group in some ways, researchers building on each other's work, following promising directions, collectively advancing human knowledge. But even here, group thinking can lead entire fields down unproductive paths for decades because no one wants to challenge the consensus.

The question that keeps me thinking isn't how to avoid group behavior entirely. It's how to be intentional about when to follow the group and when to go your own way. Because complete isolation isn't the answer either. No one builds anything meaningful completely alone.

Working on MIKE-AI at Seraphim has taught me this balance the hard way. There are times when I need to ignore what everyone says is the right approach and trust my own understanding, like when everyone claimed specialized AI was dead and general models were the only future. But there are also times when the collective knowledge of the AI community saves me months of wasted effort.

Maybe the key is developing what I call "group awareness", the ability to recognize when you're being carried along by collective movements rather than making conscious choices. 

It's about asking yourself: "Am I doing this because I've thought about it carefully, or because everyone else is doing it?"

With the Liberation Day tariffs, most investors didn't have time to develop thoughtful responses before panic set in. The tariffs were announced April 2nd and set to start just days later. That timing almost guaranteed an emotional rather than strategic response. 

But I wonder what if more people had paused before selling? What if they'd recognized the group behavior for what it was and maintained independent thinking?

As I wrote in my "Death of Individuality" post last December, we're living in a time where algorithms push us toward predictable patterns, smoothing out our unique characteristics into something more average and manageable. Each recommendation, each auto-suggestion, each "trending" topic nudges us toward the statistical average of human experience. And we can see this clearly in how we respond to economic shocks like the Liberation Day tariffs.

Yet as the world moves toward AI-driven solutions, our humanity becomes our greatest advantage. Our intuition, emotional intelligence, and consciousness, these uniquely human qualities can help us see beyond the group.

I believe the future belongs to those who can navigate between individual thinking and collective action or one who know when to move with the group and when to chart their own course. The most innovative solutions won't come from just conforming or just rebelling, but from finding the right balance between the two.

As we enter what some call "an era of human refinement," where our distinctly human qualities become our advantage in the age of AI and automation, this ability to resist group thinking becomes even more important. While the situation looks difficult, history shows us that necessity creates innovation. Each economic downturn has transformed industries and created opportunities for those who could see beyond the immediate panic.

The group isn't always wrong. But it isn't always right either.