From the comments at Behind Blue Eyes:
Radders: You’ve heard of the phenomenon by which when, say, one group of apes discovers how to use a tool in a novel way, populations of apes quite distant and disconnected also start to use tools in this way; it’s got a name I can’t recall. Anyhow, the Interweb’s a bit like that – it’s articulating the thought that matters, not how many people read it. The effect an internet post has is not directly correlated with the number of readers. Keep posting.
Have other people heard of this phenomenon?* Is there actually a name for it? Whether it can plausibly exist or not is a separate topic (just because it can't be proven that something does or doesn't exist doesn't mean there isn't a word for it).
* Or, do other people think they've heard of this idea, even if they haven't.
Monday, 22 August 2011
A cheering thought
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23 comments:
Yep. It's the 'hundredth monkey effect'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
No actual evidence for it but people are always going on about it like there is.
Maybe not quite the exact same phenomenon, but some science involved
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-minority-scientists-ideas.html
ah, 100th Monkey, thought that rang a bell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4xu49jFN8
M, maybe there is no evidence for it, it's just that I've spent the last few years repeating myself on the same few dozen topics and sometimes I see or hear somebody completely different make the same point who has neither read anything I've ever said or written (and even if they have, they have completely forgotten about it). Which is not to deny that I adapt ideas from other people, of course.
TH, "The Tipping Point" is different, that is a geometric thing and easily observable in practice, whether the point is ten per cent or some other figure probably depends on circumstances.
"morphic resonance" - Rupert Sheldrake (if memory serves).
They mentioned the idea on the latest series of Torchwood and called it "morphic resonance". I have no idea whether they made up the name, but it sounds posh.
D, that's even better. For sure, it's probably hokum, but so are lots of things.
OP, I refer you to D's comment.
Thinking on, I got my first fifteen minutes of fame by rehashing this idea and have never looked back since. For some reason, people refer to my adaptation more often than his original idea :-)
Most likely when you see someone making the same point even though there's no appparent connection between you and them, it's just that you're both writing about an "idea whose time has come".
In a sense, the dots behind the idea have been gradually appearing for a while and eventually enough of them are visible that people begin to see how to join them up independently of each other. So it appears that telepathy is taking place.
Well, that's my take on it anyway. Last time it happened to me was with the quntum immortality/suicide idea which came to me in the early 1990s. I kept it to myself as I didn't think it would be healthy for everyone to think that way. But to no avail. It was just an idea whose time had come, so there were soon articles about it all over the place.
Chaos?
Thanks for the link :-)
Zeitgiest.
zygote
It's the synchronicity fairies, as any fule no.
Yes, I've heard of it.
I think it confirms the wisdom of crowds / knowledge is dispersed in society / knowledge is always changing stuff from the 'Austrians'.
If you think about it it is not so surpising. In any population there are people moving about, their social networks are extensive and overlap. The speed of transmission of knowledge is extremely fast, I would go so far as to say practically instantaneous. This does something else. It also proves why central planning always fails.
Relatedly there was a lot of angst during the Cold war as to how the Global scientific community confounded the security people on both sides of the Iron Curtain by continually exchanging ideas by means no-one could work out.
Well, well. Proof - of a sort.
My standard analogy for describing the credit crunch / banking failure, that I've posted in not a few places, is that in 1997 one super-junkie, G Brown, got control of the narcotic monopoly. In his case the drug was money and he then set about making us all junkies like him by destroying all the checks and balances, mightily rewarding his pushers (the banks) and setting up an enforcement agency to make sure this all went swimmingly (the FSA). In other words, globally, we became credit junkies.
See this:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100101832/most-of-the-things-we-have-done-since-the-credit-crunch-has-made-things-worse/
I have heard of it - sounds rubbish to me.
One idea is that if John Smith in London
trains his dog to do x then it is easier for dogs everywhere to learn it.
Eh? Went over my head, this one.
Didn't look at other posts but check out Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Resonance. He was posting and publishing about this a decade or more ago as I recall, with case studies. An interesting concept.
I've always understood that Carl Jung believed that knowledge could be passed unconsciously, but I just looked up Collective Unconscious and it doesn't seem to be quite what I understood it to be. Perhaps I misunderstood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious
funny how we spend little time agreeing on observed facts(like climate change, bankster robbers) and lots of time agreeing on metaphysics aye? very religious.
"Morphic Resonance"
Isn't this the same sort of phenomena that lead to the dispute between Newton & Leibniz. Who discovered calculus?
Now both are regarded has having discovered their theories coincidentally at the same time.
Ape group one and Ape group two may be in geographically distinct locations but they may be exposed to similar enviornmental stresses. The result is that they respond to those stresses in similar ways - being apes. Bingo 'Morphic resonance'.
Apes and gazelle probably wouldn't display the same behavior responses.
Anon, how very dare you. Newton was English and therefore must have invented or discovered nearly everything and the other foreign fellow you mention took the biscuit. Fiar point about apes though.
"took the biscuit."
Ho ho ho!
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