army1987 comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: gjm 15 September 2014 12:24PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2014 08:31:41PM 2 points [-]

The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.”

This is a very good heuristic but it does have a few exceptions, e.g. astronomical, meteorological, and similar events. Lots of people assume that if the news are talking about the supermoon then it must be an exceedingly unusual event.