If you want to see nostalgia at work, watch a queue form where there is no reason for one. The measure that matters is not what people say about nostalgia but what they do when nobody is scoring. Put a number on nostalgia and it becomes a target; put a target on it and the number stops meaning what it meant. Consider the group chat. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live.
The cost of being right
None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. The lesson is modest. Build for the person who exists, not the one in the model. The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected.
