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by eviks 310 days ago
Why is it hard to ignore an attempt to assess reality that is not grounded in reality?
1 comments

That's an extremely dense question :) (Not pejorative, but conceptual dense).

I had some fun trying to answer it, ignoring fixating on whether or not the premise is true, for argument's sake.

My answer is:

I would think "attempting to assess reality that is not grounded in reality" is hard to ignore due to a combination of "it's what is available," being easy to understand, and seeming useful (decoupled from whether it's really so). As a result, it's hard to ignore because it's what is mostly available to us for consumption and is easy to make "consumable."

I think there is a LARGE overlap in this topic with my pet peeve and hatred of mock tests in development. They are not completely useless, but their obvious flaws and vulnerabilities seem to me to be in the same area: "Not grounded in reality."

Said another way: Because it's what's easy to make, and thus there is a lot of it, creating a positive feedback loop of mere-exposure effect. Then it becomes hard to ignore because it's what's shoved in our face.