Ontology:Q5440

1. When two people have information, everybody has it

Characteristics in draft

Properties

item type

F2

label (en)

When two people have information, everybody has it

alias (en)

When information is available to a few people, it's available to everyone

When two people know something, everybody knows it

printing press fallacy

QID references

printing press

approximate historical date

color swatch references

Existentialist-Structuralist tradition

Lacanianism

[S2] Information cannot reach a "collective unconscious" without communication

instance of

Difference-Existentialist model?

physically-incorrect statement

physically-incorrect statement which would be correct if framed differently

prototype notes

dreadfully common in every single discussion of "culture" and "prejudice". in fact, it's vastly more common to find people who believe this than people who don't. but, it's demonstrably untrue in the physical world. ...

Usage notes

This is one of many cases of a very subtle type of error which is easily missed or identified incorrectly when people do not distinguish exactly what kind of error it is. The "printing press fallacy" is not a statement against the possibility of information which has gotten to two people ever getting to millions of people; however unlikely, there is always some probability of little-known information or claims spreading. Instead, the "printing press fallacy" is the fallacy that every single possible communication of information to someone acts as a printing press. This is the fallacy that when one highly-specific queer theorist's paper is published in an inaccessible private journal every reactionary will spontaneously know the contents of the paper without having to hear of it or obtain it. This is the fallacy that one person tweeting about a bad experience at work will spontaneously cause every human being on earth to internalize the dangers of workplace misogyny and also somehow create from whole cloth and internalize solutions. This is the fallacy that information spreads by telepathy or some unknown method many times more efficient than telepathy, rather than always having to experience logistics because every piece of information must actually be communicated between individuals.

Somewhat ironically, Lacanianism has a brilliant statement against this fallacy. In having to examine the physical applicability of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious to the real world, Lacanians came up with a model that people only accept ideas after the process of communication between human beings through signifiers alienated from the individual who said them. There are many further fine details within this model that make it dubious, but overall, the statement that human beings communicate through exchanging signifiers is true. If human beings exchange information through signifiers which can be misinterpreted along the way, it should be clear that there are obstacles that stand in the way of information instantaneously making it all the way from a few individuals to everyone, and these obstacles can be non-trivial, or even completely prohibitive.

Keep this in mind: if you can find anyone on earth who has not heard of some particular thing, from the story of Dragon Ball to Frantz Fanon's postcolonial theories, then you know that information does not spread instantaneously, and you know that at any given time there will be many, many more people who have not heard of something.