Same Same

Headlines with a negative twist boost the consumption of online news, demonstrates study

Mar 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-03-headlines-negative-boost-consumption-online.html

This isn't about misinformation or memetic propagation; it's about multiple discovery, which I would rather call simultaneous discovery -- Calculus and the telephone come to mind. 

Incidentally, the publication of the research is a story all by itself. Only when Feuerriegel and his team submitted an initial version of the paper to Nature Human Behaviour did they become aware that a research group led by Jay Van Bavel from New York University had also submitted a paper -- in the same week, on the same topic, based on the same dataset from Upworthy.com, and with almost identical results.

via Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich: Claire E. Robertson et al, Negativity drives online news consumption, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4

Image credit: AI Art - The Concept of Dimensionality Reduction in Machine Learning - 2023

Post Script:

This whole description is poorly sourced but well written: The concept of multiple discovery (also known as simultaneous invention) is the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors. The concept of multiple discovery opposes a traditional view—the "heroic theory" of invention and discovery. Multiple discovery is analogous to convergent evolution in biological evolution.

Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.

-Merton, Robert K. (December 1963). "Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science". European Journal of Sociology. 4 (2): 237–282. doi:10.1017/S0003975600000801. JSTOR 23998345. S2CID 145650007. Reprinted in: Robert K. Merton (15 September 1996). On Social Structure and Science. University of Chicago Press. pp. 305–. ISBN 978-0-226-52070-4.

Art vs Science

How an Entirely New, Autistic Way of Thinking Powers Silicon Valley
Temple Grandin, Richard Panek, 05.23.13

Vincent van Gogh’s later paintings had all sorts of swirling, churning patterns in the sky — clouds and stars that he painted as if they were whirlpools of air and light. And, it turns out, that’s what they were! In 2006, physicists compared van Gogh’s patterns of turbulence with the mathematical formula for turbulence in liquids. The paintings date to the 1880s. The mathematical formula dates to the 1930s. Yet van Gogh’s turbulence in the sky provided an almost identical match for turbulence in liquid.

Even the seemingly random splashes of paint that Jackson Pollock dripped onto his canvases show that he had an intuitive sense of patterns in nature. In the 1990s, an Australian physicist, Richard Taylor, found that the paintings followed the mathematics of fractal geometry — a series of identical patterns at different scales, like nesting Russian dolls. The paintings date from the 1940s and 1950s. Fractal geometry dates from the 1970s. That same physicist discovered that he could even tell the difference between a genuine Pollock and a forgery by examining the work for fractal patterns.