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Any sufficiently useful measure will eventually become distorted because people pay attention to it

Wet bias is the phenomenon whereby some weather forecasters report an overestimated and exaggerated probability of precipitation to increase the usefulness and actionability of their forecast. The Weather Channel has been empirically shown, and has also admitted, to having a wet bias in the case of low probability of precipitation (for instance, a 5% probability may be reported as a 20% probability) but not at high probabilities of precipitation (so a 60% probability will be reported as a 60% probability). Some local television stations have been shown as having significantly greater wet bias, often reporting a 100% probability of precipitation in cases where it rains only 70% of the time.
If people pay attention to something, the very fact that we pay attention to it becomes a new element in the composition of the thing and, as such, needs to be taken into account.
This dynamic plays out all over our lives, but often gets hidden. I wonder how it fits into the current filter debate in Bitcoin? I can't find it now, but I saw someone on X post about the likelihood that the heat of the Knots vs Core flamewars being warm enough to attract many spammers who might have otherwise ignored the many opportunities to spam on Bitcoin...
this territory is moderated
Interesting. I've never heard of this bias. It doesn't "feel" like what's going on with Core/Knots. I think the bias when it comes to weather stations is probably due to people not understanding probability very well, and the weather stations taking action to "massage" the numbers in a way that better conforms to how their viewers interpret numbers.
Something about how attention affects action sounds more like the Streisand Effect, but that's not quite right either.
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