
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon - joubert
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/
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xianshou
This is a complete troll, but a very pleasing and cleverly written one. If you
search "Baader-Meinhof", you get the militant group, this article (from 2006),
another article referencing the same definition without citation (from 2013),
and an Urban Dictionary entry with this definition.

But the question is, by simply naming the phenomenon, even as a joke, has he
created it in earnest? If you see this referenced again, then it's the
behavioral psychology equivalent of the sentence "This sentence, by xianshou
on Hacker News, has only been typed once in the history of creation." \- a
statement that remains false until it is made.

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ska
From said search:

"The considerably catchier sobriquet Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was invented in
1994 by a commenter on the St. Paul Pioneer Press’ online discussion board,.."

from: [http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/theres-a-name-for-
tha...](http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/theres-a-name-for-that-the-
baader-meinhof-phenomenon-59670)

Not sure if that's the earliest reference, but I've certainly heard it called
that years before 2006.

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pflats
Weird. I've only heard about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon recently, but I'm
an expert on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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joshuapants
Well here's a weird example. Last night I watched the movie _Three Days of the
Condor_ , which has a character named Joubert. And here we have a post on the
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon by a poster named joubert. Welp.

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frandroid
I've been thinking about this phenomenon since I was a young teenager, a
couple decades ago... (Not knowing that it had a name, if that name was even
coined back then.)

My thoughts on this go two-fold: 1) When we see the same concept multiple
times, it often has to do with things being trendy, and media looking to other
media for coverage. Other than breaking news, most publications publish
iterative rather than totally original content. Even when a thing is not super
trending, you can often find that multiple occurrences of the same concept
have their root in the same origin. Now that we publish on the web and that
most writers aren't greedy with crediting their stories' ancestors with
backlinks, you can often tell that this has been the case.

2) Survivor bias. We are exposed to dozens of new concepts every day, many of
which will linger on in our minds for a few days or weeks, depending on their
salience. When we see a second occurrence, our brain creates a link/links with
the previous one, and suddenly the original idea gains in salience in our mind
along with the new one. But what about the other 15 unique ideas that I was
exposed to yesterday, the day before, and all other days before that? They go
on to be forgotten. When one original concept re-appears from a different
channel, we're delighted, but really, this is all our brains do for a living,
connecting things from disparate origins for what they have in common.
Nowadays I'm more upset at not being able to link more information to my
existing mental super-structure than I'm excited at connecting things in the
schema. :P

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fredfoobar42
Not to be confused with the Baader-Meinhof Gang:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction)

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sjcsjc
Since we're on the subject, there's a film about them which I'm pretty sure I
saw on Netflix (in the UK). Fascinating and rather depressing story.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baader_Meinhof_Complex](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baader_Meinhof_Complex)

~~~
frandroid
And don't forget this humorous take on the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Raspberry
Reich
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390418/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390418/)
(film cover slightly NSFW, film DEFINITELY NSFW)

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MrDosu
Humans are just very good at seeing patterns in random events, while ignoring
the events where they don't see a pattern.

Think about all the times it did not occur...

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test1235
I was only talking to someone about this the other day, and I couldn't
remember the name of it!

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ubersubtle
That's so weird, I just heard about that the other day!

