I happened to be watching the Oscars last night, and I was pretty shocked to see the mistake with the Best Picture award.  Thinking back on it, this is a bit surprising to me: many things are happening that should be more “shocking” (all the craziness in Washington) but don’t seem to affect me the same way.

I think this comes down to selection bias: the internet has made it so much easier to find extreme examples that the impact of them is dulled.  In contrast, seeing something for yourself — such as watching the Oscars mistake live — has a realness to it that is much more impactful.  Maybe another way of putting it is that it has become much easier to cherry-pick examples now.

I thought of some other examples of this: I don’t feel very persuaded when someone says to me “there was a paper that shows X”, because there’s probably also a paper that shows the opposite of X.  Similarly, quoting an “expert” on something doesn’t mean that much to me anymore either.  Particularly when their qualification is simply “[subject] expert”, but even quotes from generally-respected people don’t have that much impact, since I’m sure someone else famous said the opposite.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking.  There’s the meme that “a terrorist attack is more frightening than X even though X kills more people”, and if true is fairly opposite to what I’m saying here.  And I don’t really know how to solve the selection bias problem — words seem to hold less value in new internet regime where anyone can say anything they want, and it’s not clear what to replace words with.  Or maybe this whole thing is just me being a bit jaded.  Either way, it will be interesting to see how society ends up adapting.