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How the Internet Makes the Improbable Into the New Normal
Hugh Pickens writes "A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark. Now Kevin Kelly writes that in former times these unlikely events would be private, known only as rumors, stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed but today they are on YouTube, seen by millions. 'Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we'll see or hear about today,' writes Kelly. 'As long as we are online — which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.' But when the improbable dominates the archive to the point that it seems as if the library contains only the impossible, then the 'black swans' don't feel as improbable. 'To the uninformed, the increased prevalence of improbable events will make it easier to believe in impossible things,' concludes Kelly. 'A steady diet of coincidences makes it easy to believe they are more than just coincidences.'"
... as the first post? ;-)
Does this hail the rebirth of religion? Or perhaps the renaissance of sci-fi in 5-10 years?
silly example, kinda brings into question the premise of the article
Sent from my ENIAC
It is interesting that the age of enlightenment was about rational certainities, it is printed in black and white after all, but the information age allows an older style of open view of the world, which can only be a good thing in my humble opinion. However, there are always people doing stupid things and equally stupid people (like me) like to laugh at them.
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derp?
Bill's Hat is blown onto Kahn's Head.
True Story.
Or it will train people to stop believing that those coincidences are meaningful. You know, like every rare occurrence that we already know that is actually common and unrelated.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Arduinopentamillenuova-5007 Sub-Microcontroller to a Markov chain generator driven by a strong RNG (say, a nice lava lamp and a photodetector) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to acquire a first round of venture funding by photoshopping all the pixels in the hostess's undergarments simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance to the theory of Rule 34.
Many respectable developers said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because Web 2.0 was a debasement of technology, but mostly because they didn't get hired by those sorts of startups.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to propagate a meme across the bandwidth-draining distances between the farthest minds, and at the end of the day they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, an intern who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful startup found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to virtualize one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh round of really hot funding... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Y Combinator 2013 Prize for Extreme Agility, he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable developers who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass.
Therefore, I will gain the power of flight.
I'm not going to argue that humans aren't good at rational analysis of probabilities - there's reams of data to show that our instincts which kept our ancestors safe in the wild actively work against us when it comes to rational, long term decisions. It also shows us that the associations we make are usually shallow and immediate. The knowledge of one improbable thing only impresses upon us that that same improbable thing is not as improbable as we once thought.
So the knowledge that someone won the lottery may make it more likely for an individual to decide to buy a ticket, but they won't consider super-powers any more likely than they did before.
Promote open mindedness vs skepticism. Both have their pro-'s and cons.
But many skeptics are getting the opportunity to hone their skills on youtube anyway. So there is no net gain or loss in human stupidity.
The biggest threat to mankind the internet poses now is the top 25 results in google becoming normal or accepted as defacto.
First, hear Tim Minchin on the subject of improbable events and how many things there are in the universe. This phenomenon may show people that wondrous occurrences are common, and they may then stop attributing those occurrences to supernatural causes.
The Internet makes stupid people more stupid..
What were the odds?
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
But with modern CG and video-editing, you can't just trust any video on the internet.
For example, see the recent Eagle Baby Attack video.
And now use it for reference and research.
This may be one of the times where we underestimate the ability of the masses to cope with selective information. After all, America's Funniest Home Videos has been on the air for over twenty years and people have adjusted to not having grooms collapse at every wedding and nutsacks being pummeled by every wiffle ball hit.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We could always just switch over to exclusively showing videos of normal boring everyday stuff.
Along those lines, news would cover the same junk that always happens. Today at 4, traffic goes past the elementary school and cats spend most of their time sleeping. For our late edition at 11, old people playing bingo and tomorrows weather report.
Then again, who wants to waste the time watching that, or even uploading it.
Whenever I hear of things like this, especially on the internet, I always remember:
1) believe none of what you hear
2) believe half of what you see
And since that saying was coined many years ago, it may need to be adjusted to meet today's world. Many things can appear real, but be false. In this way, the truth is even more hidden, because "...yeah yeah, it's real, I saw it on youtube". I've posted false stuff on youtube before, you can too. Of course, I'm anonymous though. Maybe if it's real people.... please.
With Video Editing and Rendering software being ubiquitous , now we have to ask, "Is it real, or is it CGI?". There are plenty of examples on YouTube that look real, but are 100% fake. So the paradigm has shifted from "Is the rumor real" to "Is the video real".
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The book "The Science of Fear' calls this the example rule. The rule that somehow because something just happened, that it is now likely to happen again. People are wired such that they usually act this way(gut), only your head can override your gut when you know you are following this rule.
I didn't read the article, but the bloopers keyword in the subject reminds me: in the last one or two centuries we had National Geographic, Ripley's Believe it or Not, and the Guiness Book of World Records. Our analogue forebears would know viscerally that there were women with discs in their lips the size of coffee can lids; they might have believed thirty percent of the Ripley's books; and they would have photographic proof that the heaviest twins went riding on motorscooters and the tallest man could look down on a "no parking" sign.
Their they're doing there hair.
you just described porn
half the crazy shite you see in porn movies is edited from different takes with lots of breaks
But if it does, I think people will turn against faith rather than towards it.
When so many improbable things are possible, what makes any particular faith more correct?
A burglar gets stuck in a chimney
A truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away
A wild antelope knocks a man off his bike
A candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire
Someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark
That's what this kind of information encourages, but only among those who do not understand statistics. However, magical thinking has already been around for so long (just think of all the world's religions) that I doubt YouTube can make things any worse.
I've been meaning to write a blog on the "Media Magnification of Unlikely Events" for some time now but never really got around to it. Looks like someone beat me to it. Oh well.
... in a study that applied this concept to things like lottery winnings (would people buy lottery tickets as much if they didn't know anybody who won?) fear-based behaviors (would people be avoiding running in parks so much if they very rarely heard of related crimes?) dishonesty/narcissism (would people try so much to 'get ahead' by dishonest means if they didn't think that 'everybody does it' which is validated by watching the national news?) etc. etc. etc.
It seems that we spent many, many, many hundreds of years being routinely exposed only to a very small set of other people (the ones living in our village) which gave us a push towards conformity with our limited surroundings and its values and calibrated our 'probability meter' with that amount of 'throws of the dice' in mind. Nowadays no matter what you want to think/believe it is trivial to find many people sharing your point of view and/or finding events that validate your belief/magical thinking.
As I was saying before, if you had never ever met anybody in your life who won a lottery, you would be a lot more likely to look at lottery tickets as a very frivolous use of money, while nowadays where every few weeks you see in the news (with a special interest story, that makes you think you "know" these people) somebody wins a significant amount of money somewhere it's a lot easier to 'magical think' that lottery tickets are instead a lot more worth it (in statistical terms) than they really are.
Just like a lot of people I know that will not run alone in a park because somebody somewhere was victim of a crime and so they are afraid of doing so (without obviously realizing how low the probability that something like that would happen to them, much lower than the probability of them being run over by a car when they run along a road instead).
I don't think that we are equipped to extrapolate probabilities from the small to the large: when it comes to 50 people we are fairly capable of distinguishing normal occurrences, low probability occurrences and once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences, but when it comes to several hundred millions we really can't cope and cannot relate how something that happens to 10 people on a nation-wide level (say, win a lottery jackpot of 100+ millions) is way, way, way unlikely that will happen to us or to somebody we know personally. This is definitely affecting most people's behaviors, in some cases positively (say, rare disease sufferers can find somebody else somewhere that has their same symptoms and can get care, instead of being dismissed) but in many cases not overly so unfortunately.
-- the cake is a lie
Like mass media generally, videos are uploaded on the internet with the hope of maximizing views. Thus, not only the unusual is encouraged, but also things that provoke an emotional response. Fear is one of the easiest responses to provoke, hence the 24 hour news coverage of events like mass shootings can discourage rational discourse about such things while at the same time increasing the amount they are present in our minds. Even though violent crime generally has been largely on the decline in the U.S. since the early nineties, the average person is made to feel as though there is a recent epidemic of violence. And now a word from our sponsors...
Columbine shooting was 15 years ago. But I don't suppose you heard of them, they barely made the news.
Want to try again?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The kids chant "video or it didn't happen" when some improbable claim is made. Always have a means to record video. Without video you won't be believed.
Youtube is raising the kids. Wonder how that's going to work out.
That someone will be knocked off their bike by an antelope -somewhere in the world- is not improbable.
If the sample size is reduced or specific by reference to the actual case at hand, such as dreaming of being knocked off your bike by an antelope, and then a week later, it actually happening, it becomes extraordinarily improbable.
Most people are not confused by this, even if it serves skepticism to insist they are. Few are unclear on the distinction in probability between "someone will win the lottery" and "you will win the lottery".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This is especially true when the improbable are human achievements. It shows us exactly what the human body is capable of even when constrained by physics. If anything, this wealth of data allows us to be more critical and logical to discern what exactly is going on.
The human brain is an awesome knowledge digester, if you feed it truth, it's not going to produce untruths. For example, athletes viewing recordings of themselves or of competition. There is a tendency in olympic sports to standardize on certain technique aspects that have been proven to work for others. There is a higher congruency of movement in athletes today than there was in the early filmings of the olympics, and higher inter-disciplinary congruence as well as we discover the simple physical truth. Humans are subject to the laws of physics, as such there are optimal paths for the human body to be all it can be.
Of course, there's always people too stupid to recognize they do not have the necessary knowledge and control to execute a movement and there's thousands of compilations of these failures. That's a good thing though, just more data to feed into the path optimizer.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
a Guy Opening his Ass To Show Everyone
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
nothing new here
Not only is there the improbable out there, there are also outright slanders. Particularly against Israel and the US. All sorts of conspiracy junk that blames them for the world's ills and based on falsehoods that are trivially easy to disprove with facts. However, idiots lap it up. Just wait for the flames in reply to this post - and watch how people with froth at the mouth based on cherished falsehoods rather than quoting actual *facts*. It is incredible just how backward the world has become, that people will hate blindly without ever checking any facts whatsoever (accepting false *facts* from propagandists instead). Cue the rants ...
you just described porn
half the crazy shite you see in porn movies is edited from different takes with lots of breaks
Guess I better do some further "research" to confirm or deny this...
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A similar comment was made when British newspapers started publishing minor news items telegraphed from far away places in the 19th century. There's a classic quote on this which I can't find at the moment. Must be a slow day at the meme factory.
You're saying that 60% of drives ending in car wrecks and drunken debauchery in Russia is the "New Normal?"
Okay then. Off to the liquor store at 50kph over!
Simple, common-knowledge answers to all of these scenarios:
A burglar gets stuck in a chimney
- Photoshopped.
a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away
-- easy. He was driving with a cat strapped to his head. Strapped to that cat was a slice of buttered bread.
a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike
- even wild animals know that cyclists are douche bags.
a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire
- b*tch chose "My Heart Will Go On" for "their" wedding song. Should have chosen "Back in Black" like the groom wanted. All of this could have been avoided.
someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark.
Imagine what's next. Real-time, 24x7 monitoring of the entire solar system, as well as the interior of our bodies, including our minds. We'll need custom programs to keep out the vast majority of information beyond our ability or desire to process, but we'll have a much better awareness of our precise situation, which will improve our evolutionary survivability. I wonder if any tech companies are looking this far ahead.
So then we are saying that "anecdotes are not data" (the improbably things), but that we "believe six impossible things before breakfast".
hard to reconcile the two isn't it? Of course improbable isn't impossible (although it is often thought of that way), just as unlikely isn't quite improbable. So these videos are making us more likely to consider outliers as data - not good. Apparently we are wired that way though - we tend to value things we can see as evidence and some numbers on a page as balderdash.
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
Terry Pratchett, Mort
So the internet has made Pratchett's rule a reality. Now all I want it to do is give us giant turtles and ambulatory luggage.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
This has always been a problem when looking at minerals in museums. One sees only the very best examples, which are typically far from typical.
Hogwash! It doesn't matter how many improbable things appear online. It won't actually change the probability of something that is improbable happening. If the likelihood of being thrown through the windshield and landing on your feet and running away is 1 in 1,000,000,000, then it is still the same probability regardless of how many people saw a clip of it on you-tube.
So, unless the original post is positing that somehow observing the improbable event by millions of people on you-tube is going to cause a quantum change (which would be an interesting discussion), the probability remains unchanged.
When a /. article on an Infowars article by Alex Jones pointed out a conspiratorial exchange of email which was obtained by Anonymous and received by Alex in an unsolicitated manner, quiet improbably I might add since Alex is more often on the digging end of the dirty-stick, however the email chain indicated the allegedly-respectable rampaging developers had been crowd-sourced organized and fuel and RV-funding provided by a shadowy group known only as The League of America First Inventors Travelling Road Show.
Suspicious, and now relatively out-of-reach of Belizian authorities, and smelling the fresh opportunity to combine 3rd-world booty with spying, adrenaline ran hot in John Macafee's vein (singular intended.) He quickly assembled a crack (*cough*) team of sexually-experienced sluttateous whoring gold-diggers and trained them in special insertion operations (*cough*) and counter-espionage and planted them deep in enemy territory (x-citation needed.)
John's blogging of the tail trail left the media baffled, since he neither exposed himself nor the fem-bot network he controlled, yet left his tantalizing clues dangling in the open. Was the League of America First Inventors a red-flag operation by France to attempt to make a mockery of the good name of the USPTOs first-to-invent constitutional amendment? Or was it a clandestine effort by the Church of Scientology, now that they were being persecuted in Belgium, to reinvent their image as respectable developers wronged by the improbability of the invention of an improbability generator? Was Tom Cruise going to reprise the role of the aging Luke Skywalker in the post-prequel sequel? Or was the Russian team at Lake Vostok somehow involved, determined to obtain pre-cambrian bio-weaponizable pathogens? It is improbable that no-one knew, but there the danglings were.
Sent from my ENIAC
AWESOME! MOD PARENT UP!
If you believe the premise of the QP, then you must also accept that the prevalence of violence in video games makes it seem normal, too.
We need more of these videos! And whales.
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Infinite_Improbability_Drive
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Yep, from what I have seen so far the internet is where religion comes to die. Religions and cults works best when the brainwashing targets are young and don't have any alternative sources of information. Most of the kids at "Jesus camp" will grow up just like their parents, a handful will "read too much" and abandon their childhood beliefs.
Thing is when you run a "Jesus camp" there will be video of your brainwashing methods all over the internet. What was previously difficult information to obtain is now difficult to conceal and the camp receives a lot of unwanted attention from "non-believers", strangers will try to un-wash the brains of these kids for no other reason than they feel it is the "right thing" to do.
Over the last 50yrs there has been a significant move away from organized religion, over the last 10yrs the pace has accelerated, I believe (but cannot prove) the shift is due to mass communications, first the TV and now the internet. I don't expect people to change the way they sort fact from fiction or stop imprinting their children with their world view, but I do expect more and more people will start putting ancient scripture in the fiction section.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is essentially the same phenomenon that TV news has been performing, and which has convinced many people that there is an epidemic of child abductions and other violent crime in our society. (And there is not.) The improbable events of 7 billions lives are being condensed into our individual (vicarious) experience – but with the average person being unable to instinctively grasp that vast context – and we're losing our sense of perspective. Little wonder that people are locking themselves and their children inside gated, armed enclaves.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark
Links or it did not happen
The Guinness books really have gone downhill. Now they're big "coffee table" books, and IIRC, have way less overall information than the packed paperbacks. I'm not even sure if they still have the "heaviest twins went riding on motorscooters" pictures anymore, but those you mention (and the "coffin the size of a piano case") are the ones we mention from the long ago Guinness Books of Records.
I second that. We see all kinds of improbable things but yet nothing of space aliens, bigfoot, etc. All that's new these days is better CGI along with crappier TV shows.
Actually we see "aliens" all the time (who else cooks your food, does landscaping, and mops the floors).
I do have a audio recording of Bigfoot, NORAD Western Area Defense Sector callword, someone recorded off 271.0 and posted an mp3 on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/baymilcom. "Bigfoot" was giving squaks and vectors to a KC-135.
mfwright@batnet.com
Unlike other animals we have some specialized biological equipment to handle very low probability events, but then we are special. If you're a nematode worm you're pretty much restricted to "Death learning" aka genetic learning where the species learns by individuals being ejected from the gene pool. Over time the species comes up with a time-integrated behaviour function that produces optimum responses to what the environment is chucking at you. So you tend to eat the right foods, mate with the right guys and avoid the nasty guys. The behaviour function is strongly weighted to the probable events, for obvious reasons. Rare events can kill you, but not as often as probable events.
The next big step up the evolutionary ladder is "Suck It and See Learning" where the individual modifies behaviour based on its past experience: that stung me, this tasted good, etc. The individual no longer has to die to learn something. Progress. An extension of this mode is learning not just by personal trial and error but also by watching other members of your species, usually mom and or dad. A baby bird learns how and where to catch worms not just by endlessly scratching around in random patches of dirt until it jags a worm, but by doing the rounds with its parents. It can also learn signs of danger so it doesn't need to be eaten by a cat to find out why cats are interested in birds.
Humans add another even more sophisticated layer on this, which might be called Narrative Learning. This is basically creating and swapping stories. It might also be called knowledge, but isn't knowledge just stories that happen to be true, or true enough to be useful. This is what allows us to handle very low probability events, things that might occur once a year, once in a lifetime (water flowing underground) or even once in several generations. If you happen to be living out on the plains of Africa half a million years ago this kind of stuff would give you a wild advantage over all the monkey-see-monkey-do types around you. How to choose a good spear, how to predict the seasons, when to shift camp, what plants can kill you, etc. Science is the ultimate form of narrative learning; stories are picked not because they sound right/are interesting/are sexy/worked once, but by relentlessly grinding them up against reality.
And this capacity for narrative learning is, of course, why we find the improbable events on You Tube - or the Bible - so very compelling: we have evolved to love and collect the improbable, just because it just might save us one day. I know that next time I crash a truck, I'm going through the window, and landing on my feet. It works.
A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim. -- George Santayana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Infinite_Improbability_Drive
Hold on, you're saying that porn movies aren't entirely realistic I'm shocked.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3373637&cid=42572023
Only the non-normal makes it to the headlines. Also Bruce Schneier once said: if it's in the News, then don't worry. Meaning, if a danger is worth a headline it is something rare, not to worry about.
I have a hard time believing that most people buy lottery tickets for entertainment or as a form of charitable giving. This forces me to conclude that they're awfully bad at calculating their odds of actually winning.
Of course the actual probability doesn't change. But people's perception of it does.