Read on Twitter
This is one example of a phenomenon that I think is ultimately a kind of scaling failure. That is, I don& #39;t think we& #39;re quite prepared for how many people there are who don& #39;t know something we find obvious. https://twitter.com/robertjbennett/status/1310946991350992901">https://twitter.com/robertjbe...
I& #39;ve made the observation before that I could write essentially identical posts about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle once a month, and they& #39;d do great traffic basically every time, because there& #39;s always a new batch of people who haven& #39;t heard it before.
The down side of this is that it& #39;s kind of exhausting to have to do the Uncertainty Principle (or Schrodinger& #39;s cat, or Many-Worlds, or whatever) AGAIN. But that& #39;s because we& #39;re just not really equipped to deal with the scale of modern telecommunications.
As bad as this dynamic is in a physics context, it& #39;s worse in higher-stakes political areas. Thus, political wonks getting annoyed that somebody has JUST found out about the Senate, or activists irritated that somebody has JUST learned about systemic racism, etc.
In a lot of cases, this ends up going in a direction that I find pretty toxic, particularly on Twitter. But as much as the scale of Twitter breaks our brains, to lowest order, nobody uses Twitter...
In the end, the issue is really that as humans we have a pretty good intuitive sense of dynamics of groups up to maybe hundreds of people, but we& #39;re operating in societies a million times bigger than that, so the supply of people who don& #39;t know whatever is inexhaustible.
I have been informed that I will lose my Twitter privileges if I do not link to this xkcd comic to end this thread #ThoseAreTheRules: https://xkcd.com/1053/ ">https://xkcd.com/1053/&quo...
