Once In A Lifetime, All The Time

Back in 2020, I wrote this (edited from a Twitter thread – RIP Twitter):

Our world is often full of seemingly impossible events, but they occur more frequently than we realize. To put it into perspective: one-in-a-million events happen to around 7,800 people every single day; this means that somewhere in the world, such an event occurs every 11 seconds. Likewise, one-in-a-billion events – the sort of occurrences we might think are so rare they’re practically impossible – happen to about 8 people every day, or one every 3 hours. As our global population grows, these incredibly improbable things will continue to happen more often, simply because there are more people around for them to happen to.
The challenge is that human brains aren’t wired to intuitively grasp these kinds of probabilities. We’re not naturally equipped to understand exponential growth, let alone the compounding effect of probabilities that grow exponentially. Most of the time, this inability to grasp vast numbers and unlikely events doesn’t impact us directly. But when it does matter, it really matters.
Take the lottery, for instance—most of us can accept that winning is a long shot, and it rarely influences our lives beyond the occasional ticket purchase. But this failure of intuition becomes much more critical when it concerns the emergence and spread of novel diseases in our interconnected world. The same is true for understanding the growing prevalence of mass shootings or recognizing early signs of economic instability. These are situations where the probabilities might seem negligible in isolation but have a significant impact when scaled up to a population of billions.
Yes, it’s true that the figures I mentioned earlier are simplified; not everyone faces the same likelihood of experiencing a significant random event, and not every phenomenon scales neatly with population growth. However, the core point stands: as the human population increases, so too does the frequency of rare, impactful events. Understanding this shift is crucial, especially as our societies become more complex and interdependent. Ignoring these probabilities, or failing to understand their implications, can leave us blindsided by events that, statistically speaking, were bound to happen sooner or later.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about this in the past week and I realized that it’s incomplete. It’s not wrong, but it ignores selection pressure; it ignores memetics. It’s rare that specific ideas pop up, but when they do, there are two possibilities: the idea can be spread or it can die. This spreading doesn’t happen evenly and it doesn’t happen without modification, which is the concept at the heart of memetics: evolution of ideas spreading through a society.

Selection pressure comes into play just like it does with biological evolution, where ideas that resonate strongly with a group are spread more widely and rapidly. With social media and the way we select who to follow, we’re applying further selection pressure; ideas get spread back and forth rapidly between “social islands”, resonating even more strongly. Angry ideas in particular spread rapidly within groups, amplifying themselves as they go along (c.f. CGP Grey’s video “This Video Will Make You Angry”).

What I’ve been describing here, and what I think is more accurately called “the germ theory of information”, is memetics; the evolution of culture. So what does this have to do with what I wrote in 2020? Novel diseases.

With an increasing population, novel diseases become more common, and the same is true for novel “thought germs”. They tear through our populations like butter because we’re hard-wired to be receptive to them, and become increasingly receptive as they evolve.

I’ve been trying to understand how we got here (gestures vaguely) and this is the only framing that has made sense to me. We’re dealing with a few particularly virulent strains of disease, and we’re seeing the exponential growth rate of those novel strains in realtime.

Unfortunately, just because this is the framing that makes sense to me … Doesn’t mean it gives me comfort. It just means we’re going to keep living through more “once in a lifetime” events, at an increasing rate. Buckle the fuck in.