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Comment by swampthing | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to develop a metric of how long it takes for a new fact to propagate through a population, and then see what other attributes that correlates with. You'd need to adjust it for falsehoods propagating, of course, to account for populations that tend to believe whatever you tell them.

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> You'd need to adjust it for falsehoods propagating, of course, to account for populations that tend to believe whatever you tell them.

I think you'd need to adjust for a lot of (too many) other things, as well.

For example, there are new facts that spread quickly and easily because it's painless to change your mind. They don't make you feel retrospective guilt, debunk your religious beliefs, threaten your livelihood, or force you to change your lifestyle. One example would be that BPA is harmful for humans to ingest -- a relatively recent concern that is fairly widely accepted now.

Compare that with the fact that fossil fuels cause climate change, and you don't just get well-funded corporate disinformation efforts. You also have individual workers who just don't want to feel like they've been destroying the planet for 30 years and should find a new industry to work in.

Santa Fe Institute actually does make models of exactly this sort of thing. They probably have a visualization using NetLogo to demonstrate it, too.

And how much of it is just old people dying versus people legitimately changing their minds

The structure of scientific revolutions in action!

it sounds like you would appreciate the opportunity to speak to an FB dev

Ha, good point!

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