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Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media · Gwern.net

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insight porn, epistemology, politics, cognitive bias, psychopathy, Lizardman survey constant, parasociality, scientific bias Selection effects in media become increasingly strong as populations and media increase, meaning that rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything at all and must be ignored. At scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times. On­line & main­stream media and so­cial net­work­ing have be­come in­creas­ingly mis­lead­ing as to the state of the world by fo­cus­ing on ‘sto­ries’ and ‘events’ rather than trends and av­er­ages. This is be­cause as the global pop­u­la­tion in­creases and the scope of media in­creases, media’s urge for nar­ra­tive fo­cuses on the most ex­treme out­lier dat­a­points—but such dat­a­points are, at a global scale, deeply mis­lead­ing as they are dri­ven by un­usual processes such as the men­tally ill or hoax­ers. At a global scale, an

--- title: "Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media" description: Selection effects in media become increasingly strong as populations and media increase, meaning that rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything at all and must be ignored. At scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times. created: 2018-12-15 modified: 2022-01-02 status: finished confidence: highly likely importance: 5 css-extension: dropcaps-kanzlei ... > Online & mainstream media and social networking have become incr

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