[HN Gopher] Connecticut and the 1 Kilometer Effect
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Connecticut and the 1 Kilometer Effect
Author : speckx
Score : 33 points
Date : 2026-03-19 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alearningaday.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (alearningaday.blog)
| grantpitt wrote:
| Somewhat analogously the best predictor of if I read a book on a
| given day is if I read the day before, I'd guess.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _People who prioritize their health are more likely to have
| friends who prioritize their health. And so on._ > > _We become
| like the people we choose to be around._
|
| I'm not convinced that that's it. It's more likely that the first
| person who got solar installed talked to their neighbors about
| it, and the neighbors were convinced. It's not like after you
| move to a neighborhood, you're really choosing anything after
| that point about your neighbors.
| Bjartr wrote:
| You're not actually disagreeing with what you've quoted.
| Learning about things from those you are near to is one
| mechanism for we become like those we choose to be around.
| worik wrote:
| This reminds me to get solar.
|
| Proximity is not just geographical.
| skyberrys wrote:
| A short and sweet message in this little learning of the day
| post. You tend to learn from your geographic neighbors. It makes
| sense! Can we see the same thing for ebikes, and low water lawns?
| xg15 wrote:
| Kind of reminds me of "nucleation sites" in physics.
|
| I think one factor that's missing from the explanation is the
| extensive media and political coverage that solar panels got:
| There are probably very few people by now that don't know what a
| roof solar panel is or who don't have an opinion on them.
|
| So my guess is that most of those neighbors who "suddenly"
| decided to also get a panel, were already interested or at least
| curious about getting one. (In the sense of "I should totally be
| getting one some time, but I have no time/now idea how to
| start/other things are more important/etc")
|
| Maybe the early adopter was then what changed peoples' stance
| from a vague idea to a concrete plan.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Whether solar is economically reasonable is a matter of the
| variables of your location. You need strong retail power parity
| laws, for example. If solar makes sense for one person it makes
| sense for the other people in the area. Why does there have to be
| a "catching on" effect?
| teddyh wrote:
| Theoretically, if solar did not make much economic sense at
| all, it would be purely a signalling thing. And _those_ kind of
| things _do_ spread by the "catching on" effect. People might
| then get solar panels just to be seen as the kind of people who
| have solar panels, i.e. not the wrong kind of people.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Good point.
| dragontamer wrote:
| How about an alternative explanation?
|
| What if a substantial amount of local solar contractors are doing
| door to door sales? Or other locality/proximity based sales
| (signs, driving a car with ads on it, and the like?)
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Is there evidence for this?
| cyberax wrote:
| I worked at a company that made a product just for this
| purpose: making estimates for solar panels for door-to-door
| sales. It was pretty popular.
| jandrese wrote:
| Some of it may also be neighborhoods where solar contractors went
| door to door selling the systems. Even if you don't buy from that
| salesman you get the numbers in your head and start to realize it
| isn't some exotic tech for elite weirdos.
| bitwize wrote:
| My sister was just such a representative going door to door in
| Connecticut. This was likely a factor. The southern coast of
| Connecticut, being in the shadow of New York and thus dense
| with rich exurban homeowners, is a prime market for such
| contractors.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| a/k/a "Keeping up with the Joneses"
| heisenbit wrote:
| Hmm, this actually could have policy implications. If one wants
| to subsidize a new technology and allocated a limited budget
| often the first movers are getting it and those first movers may
| be clusters which is not ideal driving broad adoption. So
| creating very small geo buckets for adoption oriented subsidies
| would make sense.
| jasonhong wrote:
| Two concepts that help explain the original article are Diffusion
| of Innovations and Social Proof.
|
| Diffusion of Innovations is a widely cited theory explaining why
| people do or don't adopt any kind of innovation, from boiling
| water to eating limes on British ships to installing telephones.
| The concept of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters
| comes from this theory. More relevant to this post is that this
| theory posits five factors contributing to adoption, one of which
| is Observability: you can easily see other people gaining benefit
| from an innovation. The more Observable an innovation, the more
| likely it is to be adopted.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
|
| The other is Social Proof. Seeing what other people are doing,
| especially those that are similar to you in some way, can help
| steer your behavior, often in subtle and unconscious ways. There
| are studies about how simple signs like "people who stayed in
| this hotel room re-used their towels" or "most of your neighbors
| are reducing their electricity usage too" can shift people's
| behaviors, even without people explicitly realizing it.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
|
| My colleagues and I used these concepts in several pieces of
| research on what we called Social Cybersecurity (joking that the
| term "Social Security" was already taken). The insight we had was
| that cybersecurity has very low observability, making it hard for
| innovations to diffuse through one's social network. That is, I
| don't know what your cybersecurity practices are, and vice versa,
| making it hard for best practices to be adopted.
|
| One intervention we did was a large-scale intervention on
| Facebook to improve observability, showing that simple messages
| like "108 of your friends use extra security settings" did
| increase clickthru and adoption rates of those settings.
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660267.2660271
|
| We also have many other studies along similar lines, e.g. many
| triggers for talking about and adopting security are social in
| nature (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2014/
| sou...), that security settings that are more social in nature
| are more likely to be adopted
| (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2675133.2675225), and more.
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| Nearly 20 years ago after reading Diffusion of Innovations I
| decided to use everything in the book. The company ran off a
| few svn servers (formally cvs) and so I ran a handful of Git
| courses at my work to help us ultimately migrate to Git (this
| was early days of Git). I explicitly tried to find folks not
| just near me, but physically around the office building across
| all of the floors, teams, and orgs. They were my early adopters
| and when random folks would come to me either curious or for
| help I would bring them to the "local" expert and together
| solve their problem, from there they had a local expert and
| little hubs sprung up. We had the standard svn => git mirror
| going when the time came to convert to Git full time in the
| office it was very painless and a complete success.
|
| I was too young to understand that this is how you run a
| successful "transformation project", I simply was having fun
| using every trick from that book and done the same playbook a
| number of times over my career.
| orev wrote:
| For solar panels, many people might be interested but also
| concerned how they look. When another neighbor gets them, people
| will get used to how they look, realize it's not so bad, then be
| more likely to get them.
|
| I don't think the final conclusion necessarily follows, not with
| this example. Solar panels are big and obvious on top of the
| house. It's not the same thing as other types of values spreading
| through a community. The house of a healthy person isn't any
| different than that of an unhealthy one.
|
| It could be simply that the door to door solar panel salesperson
| was covering that 1 km area.
| toss1 wrote:
| Assuming this is as reliable effect as implied in the article, a
| cost-effective method to jump start solar install rates would be
| to map out roughly 1km wide zones and provide a high and
| declining subsidies for the first/early people to get solar
| installed. E.g., go to map and find your house and zone, if five
| haven't signed up in your zone, it's open, the first to put
| deposit on install contract gets a $15k subsidy when install
| complete, $12k for second, $9k for 3rd, $6k 4th, $3k 5th. Adjust
| zone sizes and/or subsidy amounts for subsidy budget, population
| density, etc.
|
| Probably a lot cheaper than a $3k subsidy for everyone, as this
| is only 15 $3k subsidies in each zone. Also probably a lot better
| to do this with everyone gets a $2.5k subsidy and the first five
| get the higher incentives.
| youknownothing wrote:
| > Early adopters of solar panels tend to be people who are
| interested in innovative technology, who find an installer they
| trust, and who think having solar panels will benefit them.
|
| Also, conspicuous conservation, people like to signal how green
| they are:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442...
| kalinkochnev wrote:
| It's cool to see CT mentioned on HN. I haven't seen any mentions
| until today.
|
| My family has installed solar on every house we've lived while
| there. There is a strong economic incentive. CT has some of the
| most expensive avg. electricity cost in the country (a few cents
| cheaper than California for comparison). And Eversource, the
| utility company, is universally hated. Most people want to switch
| from their terrible service and are looking for any reason to.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| CT is too far north for solar PV to save on the CO2 generated.
| The solar albino there is less of .25.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I wonder how effective the UK "green flash" plates
| (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/road-to-zero-in-sight-as-...)
| have been at EV marketing. I'm making a habit of looking out for
| them since I'm considering getting an EV myself.
|
| Nobody on our street has one. I wonder if I get one it will spark
| a trend.
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