Rising levels of bullshit in the world can be explained by social media turning crowds into distributed Big Data stores.
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Brandolini *almost* figured it out with his law: "it takes 10x more effort to refute bullshit than to create it."
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He missed 2 things. 1: Bullshit presents a sorting problem (separating true and false) not a refutation problem (demonstrating falsehood)
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And 2: BS has an additional positive property of being easy to repeat (memetic strength). This allows it to replicate on social networks
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This is replication both in the sense of genes and database storage technology.
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This means "Bullshit as Big Data on the social graph" is not just a metaphor. It literally satisfies defy "cheaper to store than decide"
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We just don't see it because we assume an action we call "sharing" cannot also be functionally "replicate and store" in a network.
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So recent results on how we are susceptible to BS (which actually is quite a bit BSy itself) aren't that dismal
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We are just evolving civilizational memory to the Big Data stage. As said (ok, bs'ed), "history is just all the data we have so far"
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This is overall a good thing. BS is not as good as truth, but it is better than a) lies and b) having no data at all about a subject.
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