What we’re seeing at scale feels less like people believing false things and more like fidelity collapse under entropy. Loss of context, message mutation, and collective distortion compounding faster than belief updating mechanisms can correct. In that sense, drift is the default trajectory of any dense social information network unless energy is continuously spent maintaining alignment with reality.
The uncomfortable implication is that better fact-checking alone won’t fix this. You’d need systems that actively preserve semantic fidelity across transmission, not just truth at the source, which biology seems to manage only intermittently and at real cost
bayesian_blue•16h ago
DaveZale•15h ago