Availability Cascades Run The World
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” -- H.L. Mencken
The most important idea and paper I’ve encountered in the last 20 years is “availability cascades”. The paper is here: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=public_law_and_legal_theory ; the authors are Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein. What’s an “availability cascade”? It’s a combination of: “Availability” — short for “availability heuristic or availability bias, a pervasive mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which its occurrence can be brought to mind”. “Cascade” — short for “social cascades…
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related reading
- Attention Traps - by Varun Shenoy - Varun's Notesvarunshenoy.substack.com
- Availabilityreadthesequences.com
- Availability Heuristic - The Decision Labthedecisionlab.com
- Information cascade - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- Cascading Behavior in Networkscs.cornell.edu
- What Are We Trying to Do?katechon99.substack.com
- Social Cache Busting — The Autodidactsautodidacts.io
- Information Cascades by Jon Kleinbergcs.cornell.edu
- Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity; trust is an adaptation to abundance — LessWronglesswrong.com
- Your Attention Is Not a Resourcetheconvivialsociety.substack.com
- Your Attention Is Not a Resourcetheconvivialsociety.substack.com
- What's a Bias? — LessWronglesswrong.com