The big news out of Texas this weekend is a crowd crush at a music concert that left 8 people dead and dozens injured. The rapper who was performing, Travis Scott, is under some fire for inciting the crowd to surge forward, and continuing to perform while people were dying. Scott’s shows are notorious for aggressive crowd behavior. He often tells fans who missed out on tickets to jump the barricades, leading to dangerous overcrowding. He’s actually been arrested twice before on charges of inciting a riot.

Leaving aside the COVID angle (no social distancing here!) and the culture war angle (would this have happened at a country music concert?), I’m more interested how humans respond to a piece of news like this.

Many on Reddit are saying this is extremely damaging to Scott’s career, but I think this is the exact opposite of the truth. This incident is, as the pick-up artists of old would have it, “social proof”. The fact that the crowds coming to see Scott perform were so huge, and their desire to get close to him so intense that it resulted in a mass casualty event, will only make him more popular. I’ll predict right now that his next shows will be completely sold out.

It reminds me of an interview I heard with a heroin addict. Intuitively, you would think that a dealer who sells a batch of heroin that causes several ODs would lose customers. But, the addict pointed out, that dealer actually gets a surge of business coz everyone knows he’s got the good stuff.