Comment by rckoepke

5 years ago

Indeed, that seems to be from at least as early as 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887405

It's funny, ever since the most recent thread about low background steel the other day it seems to be popping up with some frequency. I was aware of it before, so I'm not sure this is just a case of Baader-Meinhof (when you learn of something and then "start" to hear about it all the time, but really you're just now paying attention to it)

Edit: actually, I think I saw this tweet: https://twitter.com/rantlab/status/1284849214653034497, and remember thinking "I bet this person just read the hn thread about low backround steel". It doesn't seem to have come up on hn other than that since the low background steel post.

  • It's a really fun feeling when you notice that someone posted something because they read the same thing you read and it sparked a similar association.

    There are probably already manipulation techniques in play where an actor 'plants' (or 'incept' if you will) a future post by posting a lot of things that will lead people to organically 'find' the subject they want to promote.

    • > It's a really fun feeling when you notice that someone posted something because they read the same thing you read and it sparked a similar association.

      Someone please tell us the German word for that. There must be one. (Or maybe a French phrase.) ;-)

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  • In my case I definitely only included it as an example due to the recent submission on HN, so not Baader-Meinhof in this case. I'm still surprised that @rantlab and myself came up with the exact same analogy independently though.

    Clearly it wasn't as creative of an analogy as I originally thought. For myself, just a very small leap of logic after reading 'jobigoud's comment. Very surprised to see other people making it as well, and a good re-calibration for me!

    • I also came up with the same analogy after reading both posts. Wasn't just lurking and when I later had a moment to post my brilliant analogy it was already posted. So if many of us thought of this independently, does that make it a better or worse analogy?

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  • There are so many discourse fads, especially on HN, like the time there was a lot of logical fallacy taxonomy. The echo chamber effect is very real. Even the use of echo chamber is and echo chamber. I guess its unavoidable that memes are a very real method we use for group cognition. I also noticed the background steel thing came up a lot recently.

It'd be interesting to compare plagiarism detector scores of average outputs of various generations of GPT.