Bored Panda got in touch with the man behind the curious and wholesome question transporting everyone to their childhood. Scott, who is a professor in the economics department at Baylor University, is a compulsive consumer and producer of social media content, and has been basically his entire adult life. “I tweet at @causalinf and mostly interact with other economists and social scientists. I recently published a book called 'Causal Inference: the Mixtape' with Yale University Press and in my day job, write about the field of applied econometrics, particularly sex work, drug policy, and mental healthcare, as well as occasionally topics in crime and abortion policy. I have three kids and am married, one neurotic dog, and two little kittens.” He loves Ted Lasso, HBO, rap music, and laughing with friends and family.
“That tweet shows how random the internet can be. I write stuff like that almost daily as a way to just engage with people on Twitter, never really giving any of it any thought. I am a very nostalgic person is all. I grew up in a small town in Mississippi called Brookhaven and just have nothing but extreme fondness for the childhood I had. And so as a result, I occasionally talk to people on Twitter about childhood. I love hearing other people’s stories, and love sharing stories of my own.”
“The other day it occurred to me that as a kid, there’s all these little things you got from your parents you never really even had thought about before,” shared Scott. “Everyone has a story like it, even if not exactly it, and I was curious what my friends and others might share.” He also added that “People engage in work first to survive, second to accumulate wealth, and maybe then to provide various 'perks' to their kids. But perks occur anyway because we live in such close proximity to our parents' lives. And sometimes we experience spillovers from their jobs, even though parents weren’t necessarily choosing it.”
Scott didn’t expect the tweet to go viral as he has been on Twitter for many years and nothing he has written before has gone totally crazy with likes and quote tweets. “This one was weird because it was this huge ratio of quote tweets to everything else caused not by anger, but by a desire to share similar though distinct stories about the gifts their parents inadvertently gave them as simply a function of growing up around them and their jobs. I never thought that was such a generally interesting thing, but it clearly is, probably because we aren’t always sharing those details with others. I actually don’t think I’d ever talked to anyone about those computer games and Coke machines before, not even to my wife, maybe not even to my parents, but man, was it special to me then and really even special to me still.” But the worst thing about Scott's success with his viral post is that he has no clue how to reproduce that. “They say in statistics 'with enough trials, anything that can happen will happen.' Meaning even rare probabilities will materialize with enough time and repeated effort. Well, I’ve tweeted way over 100,000 times, I bet, and one of them can go viral, theoretically, so eventually one did. I expect another one will when I hit 500,000!”
