Re:Littlewood’s Law and the global media
by api on Friday February 14, 2020 @10:49AM
(#22327503)
A TL;DR from my reading of this:
As the world becomes more interconnected and both population and per capita wealth grow, the amount of information flowing into the global discourse becomes so large that "miracles" (highly anomalous events of one form or another) become commonplace. One should expect to see a shockingly bizarre coincidence, "black swan" event, unexplained observation (e.g. UFO sightings), rare crime or terror attack, etc. virtually daily.
Now add to this the fact that some percentage of people are trolls and will create hoaxes and pranks, which means not only are there many anomalies but at least some of them are entirely non-existent and you have no way of knowing which.
This is epistemologically and perhaps psychologically hazardous because we did not evolve to cope with this amount of information or breadth of sensory input.
As the world becomes more interconnected and both population and per capita wealth grow, the amount of information flowing into the global discourse becomes so large that "miracles" (highly anomalous events of one form or another) become commonplace. One should expect to see a shockingly bizarre coincidence, "black swan" event, unexplained observation (e.g. UFO sightings), rare crime or terror attack, etc. virtually daily.
Now add to this the fact that some percentage of people are trolls and will create hoaxes and pranks, which means not only are there many anomalies but at least some of them are entirely non-existent and you have no way of knowing which.
This is epistemologically and perhaps psychologically hazardous because we did not evolve to cope with this amount of information or breadth of sensory input.