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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?
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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They were prior to the discovery of black swans in 1697.
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.
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.
'black swan' is a term of art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
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
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.
In case that wasn't a joke and for those who didn't click the wikipedia link:
Free Martian Whores!
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.
I dunno what you're talking about... seems to me, every time I've turned on a regular cable news station, doesn't matter which one, it seems the format you described is already one they've adopted. So people *must* like watching crap like that, or why would they all be pushing it, instead of actual news?
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
... 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
If you think that people who understand statistics are immunized against magical thinking I have a bridge to sell you.
A suitable knowledge of mathematics allows you to calculate correct answers to problems that intuition provides lousy answers to; but that doesn't make intution shut up, unfortunately.
If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
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.
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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That's exactly the point. Such a big deal was made about Columbine that it will be in everybody's mind forever (I'll bet you can still recall the names of the two shooters, but that's another problem in itself). It masks the fact that 3x as many children died in car accidents on the same day.
Had all these accidents been caused by one and the same person, I'm sure it also would have made big news.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes, it would. But people are now terrified that their children are going to be gunned down in school - because "improbable is now the normal", when they really should stop using their cell phones while driving. That's a lot more likely to harm their children.
If you think that people who understand statistics are immunized against magical thinking I have a bridge to sell you.
A suitable knowledge of mathematics allows you to calculate correct answers to problems that intuition provides lousy answers to; but that doesn't make intution shut up, unfortunately.
If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
Actually, intuition is pretty darn important, even in math, at least theoretical math. Stephen Hawkins relies on intuition. So did Einstein. So do numerous others. Intuition isn't always correct, but without it, analytical thought can't really develop.
Besides, even mat itself isn't as concrete as we want to make it. Math tells us that the square root of a number is a value that, when multiplied by itself, gives the number. No magic involved there. However, much of physics relies on imaginary numbers (the square root of negative one). Imaginary number or magical thinking, you tell me.
I doubt it. If a school bus crashes and kills 39 children then it will be very big news for a week or two, then it will be forgotten. Do you remember what happened in Yuba City?
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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/
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