In the words of the legendary Terry Pratchett, in the Discworld novel The Truth:

“A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has had a chance to get its boots on.”

Or from one of my favorite bands, The Protomen in their song, “The Hounds”:

“When I say he was a monster

When I set fire to his name

It does not matter where you hear it from

Whether truth or lies, it gets said all the same

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…

Whatever’s on the table plays!”

Volume bias

I’ve been on a kick recently about a propensity for us to misunderstand or misrepresent people who aren’t in our tribe. And how BS gets amplified.

In “How to casually radicalize a citizen,” we talked about how people with less-than-awesome intent can easily (and do) create a stream of the worst of the opposition. You can see this and then get a bit radicalized yourself, as we see.

But this is happening passively, too. I call it VOLUME BIAS.

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