ME:: tl-dr-ing Coping with the flood of misinformation and the fact that we know less than we think we do (e.g. how do toilets work really?): rigourously maintained factual chronological timelines, critical ignoring, cognitive elaboration ; Erin Kissane:: Landslide; a ghost story
Discovered: Dec 27, 2025 17:32 (UTC) ME:: tl-dr-ing Coping with the flood of misinformation and the fact that we know less than we think we do (e.g. how do toilets work really?): rigourously maintained factual chronological timelines, critical ignoring, cognitive elaboration ; Erin Kissane:: Landslide; a ghost story
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- Read the whole thing: Erin Kissane:: Landslide; a ghost story
So: Even those of us who think we know things and believe that we’re “paying attention” know far less than we think we do. We are mostly skating on a brittle scrim of knowledge over an unperceived void, blithely trusting the resources around us to fill in for our spotty brains on a just-in-time basis.
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And let me say: Chronological timelines are about the least innovative and least sexy or funding-attracting thing imaginable, but like…go try to find them, for the things happening now! They’re hard to find and hard to make and hardest to maintain. Yet without an easily referenced record of when the many things happened, we’re extraordinarily vulnerable to doctored, adulterated, and just made up summaries of even extremely recent history. The subsequent mass misbeliefs can feel, to people who were closely tracking the realities being reinterpreted, like the results of mass hypnosis.
I think there are many other ways to densify information and make knowledge durable—and that people who work on the social internet should be thinking about how they can work toward that in their systems, in ways that also respect people’s desire to retain the orality or ephemerality of some communication. This is one of the things I’ll be digging down through in the coming year.
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Several of the papers I’ve been working through discuss the role of cognitive elaboration in the creation of durable knowledge. Cognitive elaboration is, very roughly, synthesizing new information with other knowledge or otherwise playing around with information as a way of knitting it into our minds in ways we can use. This is an obvious springboard for the kind of facile, thought-leader-scented solutions institutions adore (all articles are now quizzes!) but I think it’s also fruitful territory for more sophisticated thinking and experimentation.
Critical ignoring has come up several times in my explorations since my crimeing partner Liz Neeley first sent me a paper about it. I’m also very interested in trustworthy catch-up tools that perhaps use machine learning but are not chatbot summaries. A lot of my work this year has been briefings and explainers on top of timelines as a resource for people who need to just drop the rope—and then, when they’re ready, return and catch up without having to go out and wrestle the shrieking backlog themselves. I don’t think we’re all the way there yet, but we’re learning a lot.