On Availability Cascades

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

 
The most important idea and paper I’ve encountered in the last 20 years is “availability cascades”. The paper is here: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=public_law_and_legal_theory ; the authors are Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein.

 
What’s an “availability cascade”? It’s a combination of:

-“Availability” — short for “availability heuristic or availability bias, a pervasive mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which its occurrence can be brought to mind”.

-“Cascade” — short for “social cascades through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse”.

 Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: pmarca.substack.com