The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

This is a complete troll, but a very pleasing and cleverly written one. If you search "Baader-Meinhof", you get the militant group, this article (from 2006), another article referencing the same definition without citation (from 2013), and an Urban Dictionary entry with this definition.

But the question is, by simply naming the phenomenon, even as a joke, has he created it in earnest? If you see this referenced again, then it's the behavioral psychology equivalent of the sentence "This sentence, by xianshou on Hacker News, has only been typed once in the history of creation." - a statement that remains false until it is made.

Weird. I've only heard about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon recently, but I'm an expert on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Well here's a weird example. Last night I watched the movie Three Days of the Condor, which has a character named Joubert. And here we have a post on the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon by a poster named joubert. Welp.

I've been thinking about this phenomenon since I was a young teenager, a couple decades ago... (Not knowing that it had a name, if that name was even coined back then.)

My thoughts on this go two-fold: 1) When we see the same concept multiple times, it often has to do with things being trendy, and media looking to other media for coverage. Other than breaking news, most publications publish iterative rather than totally original content. Even when a thing is not super trending, you can often find that multiple occurrences of the same concept have their root in the same origin. Now that we publish on the web and that most writers aren't greedy with crediting their stories' ancestors with backlinks, you can often tell that this has been the case.

2) Survivor bias. We are exposed to dozens of new concepts every day, many of which will linger on in our minds for a few days or weeks, depending on their salience. When we see a second occurrence, our brain creates a link/links with the previous one, and suddenly the original idea gains in salience in our mind along with the new one. But what about the other 15 unique ideas that I was exposed to yesterday, the day before, and all other days before that? They go on to be forgotten. When one original concept re-appears from a different channel, we're delighted, but really, this is all our brains do for a living, connecting things from disparate origins for what they have in common. Nowadays I'm more upset at not being able to link more information to my existing mental super-structure than I'm excited at connecting things in the schema. :P

Not to be confused with the Baader-Meinhof Gang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

Humans are just very good at seeing patterns in random events, while ignoring the events where they don't see a pattern.

Think about all the times it did not occur...

I was only talking to someone about this the other day, and I couldn't remember the name of it!

That's so weird, I just heard about that the other day!