328 - Cascade of Consequences

Humanity rarely hears about cutting edge research in certain domains (particularly in AI) because of what may most accurately be described as "The Human CentiPad Problem", where the sequential filtering of all information via strong Cognitive Biases and vested interests causes a cascade of consequences.

For example, in the earliest stages news outlets have two primary sources, open-ended topical search and paid "press releases" (effectively advertisements).

The topical search is reliant on the tools of search, meaning that SEO and related forms of manipulation, both technical and social, heavily bias the results. This comes even before any cognitive biases from the news outlet itself are applied to the interpretation and communication of the content.

"Press Releases" offer the Pay-to-win solution to the problem, where a company throws money at the problem of ensuring that people hear about it. This obviously favors those with money to burn, and favors those who burn more that much more heavily.

In subsequent stages of the same sequence, you find Survivorship Bias and heavy Narrative-based confirming and reinforcing cognitive biases. A frequent oxymoron is for someone to ask, "So why haven't I heard about this before?" when first hearing about anything new. Yes, there is always a first time. You were a naive virgin, and now you're not.

Survivorship Bias is the subject of no shortage of jokes, as while it remains unrecognized the people falling for it leave all else within the domain of "Unknown Unknowns", the things that they are completely oblivious to. Narrative-based cognitive biases, such as Confirmation Bias, further encourage this, as they offer a far simpler vision of the world and all within it.

Each stage of this sequence inflicts several distinct and severe forms of harm against information:

  1. All information is simplified and repackaged to fit some cohesive narrative. This is repeated at each step, and often through misaligned or conflicting narratives.

  2. Some critical information and topics are systematically filtered out, making all subsequent steps blind to them. This causes increasing Survivorship Bias at each stage, as well as subsequent Narrative drift, fallacies, and cognitive dissonance from the resulting disagreement between narrative layers.

  3. The majority of people rest at the final stage of this process, and most feedback on the process is governed by the majority, making those with the poorest quality of information, and least complete information, the “signal” upon which further optimization of the process is carried out.

Sadly, that makes the HumancentiPad reference uncomfortably accurate. “(SEO or paid) Garbage in, Garbage into stage 2, Garbage into stage 3….Garbage out”