
Littlewood’s Law and the global media - Symmetry
https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood
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btilly
If the bias was random, this would be less worrisome. However the bias is not
random at all.

In particular we are biased towards stories that grab our attention. Which
means that they scare us, they outrage us, they confirm our biases, and so on.
Media is then incentivized to present them because those are the stories that
get clicks.

A wonderful book laying out the incentives in detail is, _Trust Me, I 'm
Lying_ by Ryan Holiday.

And a wonderful book demonstrating how our world view gets twisted by this is
_Enlightenment Now_. Despite most of us feeling that the world is a dangerous
place and getting more so, on every measure that we can find, it has never
been so good. Someone blows up a bomb on a bus? Everyone gets scared. A
quarter million people are lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday? Nobody
hears about it.

In fact blowing up a bomb on a bus is rare. A quarter million people lifted
out of extreme poverty in a day is common place - that was the average for
every day across a the last couple of decades.

So you can't just discount rare events. You also have to understand how the
reporting and your mind is biased and actively work to bring it back to
reality.

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Lio
This is fascinating to me.

Basically with massively large numbers of people online statistically
improbable things come up with regularity and it's hard to trust the validity
of a lone voice.

One of the themes I really liked in Neal Stephenson's Anathem was the role in
of the Ita in filtering information and rating sources.

Obviously it's a work of fiction but the idea that you reach a point in time
where nothing can be trusted on the internet with very sophisticated filtering
is really interesting.

I note that where we used to rely on media corporations to filter out bad
information that's now sacrificed for entertainment value. e.g. Netflix allow
Gwyneth Paltrow to show here "wellness" show because it's entertaining event
though it's clearly bollocks.

If you know it's just "entertainment" then that's fine you can judge it as
such but there's a lot of people that will hear it and say something along the
lines of "Western medicine doesn't know everything" and assume it's OK to put
jade eggs where the sun doesn't shine.

~~~
pjc50
We almost filter _in_ bad information because it's entertaining. It's as if
the world has got bored of living in a safe, reliable, technocratic, boring,
opaque society, and instead decided to incite someone to stab it to death like
the boy in the story.

People talk about media bubbles, but I think these days we're far less bubbled
than we were in the past - anything "big" enough goes global, it's just the
spin on the coverage that varies.

I do wish it was easier to avoid consuming so much US news and current affairs
in the UK; it leaks all over both social media and other media. It's much more
likely that you'll be told what's happening in Iowa than in Birmingham (UK),
and I think this is increasingly a problem.

~~~
ksdale
I've often had an experience, when reading or watching a fictionalized account
of some dramatic thing from history, where I feel exasperated that they didn't
just use the real story - "Why would they make this up?? The thing that
actually happened was just as crazy, except it was real!" I scream inside my
head. So people end up thinking history is boring and needs to be spiced up.

As you say, people are bored, but my opinion is that it's mostly because we
_think_ the world (and history and science, etc.) is boring, not because it's
actually boring.

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api
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.

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spoovy
This worries me to be honest. The mainstream media was clearly always spinning
to us long before the internet came along, but at least when people broadly
trusted the same sources they also broadly bought into the same spin, so at
least there was agreement within the group and a degree of social cohesion as
a result. The BBC and 20th Century Britain springs to mind.

This seems to be breaking down at a rapid rate though, when it's very hard to
have any idea where people will stand on hugely important subjects such as
climate change, geopolitics etc until you speak to them. People's opinions
vary wildly seemingly based mainly on which sources they happen to trust.

~~~
Nasrudith
I have always maintained that social cohesion isn't a real goal for any but a
dictator or manipulator. It has always essentially been manufactured consent
in one way or another from when unified battle lines mattered more than pesky
things like "the first three ranks of soldiers will almost certainly die",
"that mentality will lead to domestic problems and stunt growth" because a
rout noe would ensure everyone gets either captured and enslaved, exiled with
nothing, or killed. Except it has been centuries since machinegun fire makes
"cohesion" a pointless slaughter brought about because they were lead by
absolute idiots. And we had plenty of proverbial ones from bad decisions.

It doesn't spare us from mass delusions and disasterous decisions and is in
fact a delusion in itself. It lost its few virtues so it is time to toss the
once useful lie of a cohesive monoculture onto the ash heap and move on.

