It seems so weirdly coincidental that you talked about death tolls of D-Day; I was just last week talking to my 14-year-old daughter about war (she'd asked some questions about the US Civil War), and it led to looking up the beach death tolls. I was really surprised to see how low they were! Not because a couple of thousand deaths is small, but because of the mythology built up around them, they make you FEEL like it must have been tens of thousands of soldiers. Sort of like the number of unarmed black people shot by police. No one ever quotes numbers, but the STORY that's told about it makes it feel like the number must be high. That's not the same as an information cascade, but it's a related way in which narratives can mislead us without any one of the individual stories within the narrative being incorrect.
Regarding information cascade, I agree with everything you said. It seems to me that, while the behaviors that drive the cascades are fairly built into human social behavior, our contemporary information ecosystem demands these kinds of information efficiencies far more than prior generations where one could conceivably read the world's significant news in a few hours, say, or even earlier, where one could conceivable read a pretty fair percentage of books in one's language. Do these problems continue to get worse? Does AI help us start to handle them more effectively, or does it merely mirror our already-overstressed (perhaps overwhelmed) mechanisms?
Listening to the podcast I mentioned above they were discussing Operation Compass (the total rout & capture by the British of an entire Italian army, in North Africa. Never heard of it before. The very same day I looked at a book-swap cabinet, in Quettehou. Right there, in English, a book about Operation Compass.
So I forwarded this to my elderly anti vax conspiracy theory mother, it seems she read the first two sentences, quoted them back to me and then wrote me a 1000 word essay on why vaccines are not safe. QED!
I'm imagining you patiently attempting to explain that you probably just have different ideas of what 'safe' means. Show her some data on aspirin or ibuprofen and see if she thinks we were lied to about that.
It seems so weirdly coincidental that you talked about death tolls of D-Day; I was just last week talking to my 14-year-old daughter about war (she'd asked some questions about the US Civil War), and it led to looking up the beach death tolls. I was really surprised to see how low they were! Not because a couple of thousand deaths is small, but because of the mythology built up around them, they make you FEEL like it must have been tens of thousands of soldiers. Sort of like the number of unarmed black people shot by police. No one ever quotes numbers, but the STORY that's told about it makes it feel like the number must be high. That's not the same as an information cascade, but it's a related way in which narratives can mislead us without any one of the individual stories within the narrative being incorrect.
Regarding information cascade, I agree with everything you said. It seems to me that, while the behaviors that drive the cascades are fairly built into human social behavior, our contemporary information ecosystem demands these kinds of information efficiencies far more than prior generations where one could conceivably read the world's significant news in a few hours, say, or even earlier, where one could conceivable read a pretty fair percentage of books in one's language. Do these problems continue to get worse? Does AI help us start to handle them more effectively, or does it merely mirror our already-overstressed (perhaps overwhelmed) mechanisms?
Get this for coincidental ...
Listening to the podcast I mentioned above they were discussing Operation Compass (the total rout & capture by the British of an entire Italian army, in North Africa. Never heard of it before. The very same day I looked at a book-swap cabinet, in Quettehou. Right there, in English, a book about Operation Compass.
So I forwarded this to my elderly anti vax conspiracy theory mother, it seems she read the first two sentences, quoted them back to me and then wrote me a 1000 word essay on why vaccines are not safe. QED!
I'm imagining you patiently attempting to explain that you probably just have different ideas of what 'safe' means. Show her some data on aspirin or ibuprofen and see if she thinks we were lied to about that.