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cybernetics

Social Media: Entropic Confusion

When rolling two six-sided dice, the number seven is most likely not because it is special, but because probability clusters toward the middle. Out of 36 possible combinations, six add to seven, more than any other sum. This is entropy in miniature: the system naturally drifts toward its centre, not by design or meaning, but because more pathways lead there. The central attractor isn’t a thing in itself—it is simply the point with the greatest number of possible routes. What we mistake for significance is often just the weight of probability pulling outcomes into balance.

In communication systems the same logic plays out at scale: what spreads most readily is not the most truthful but the most reproducible, and so noise, outrage, and distortion dominate. This drift is entropic, an outcome of logic itself, and so it feels beyond our control. Yet it is not impermeable. By understanding the attractor and how multiplicity shapes outcomes, it becomes possible to design interventions that redirect flows and amplify coherence instead of dissonance. This has been the core of my study: to identify and develop actual tools that allow people to navigate and negotiate these systems rather than be swept by them. I have insights of genuine use here—but I am not part of the central distribution of scholastic, institutional or technological self-propagation, those analytical tools and interdictive methods are probabilistically biased to remain misunderstood, unheard, as outliers. Entropy, it seems, works both ways here: stupidity percolates, insights suffocate.

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