Recently someone pointed out to me that there was no good canonical post that explained the use of common knowledge in society. Since I wanted to be able to link to such a post, I decided to try to write it.
The epistemic status of this post is that I hoped to provide an explanation for a standard, mainstream idea, in a concrete way that could be broadly understood rather than in a mathematical/logical fashion, and so the definitions should all be correct, though the examples in the latter half are more speculative and likely contain some inaccuracies.
Let's start with a puzzle. What do these three things have in common?
"This creates a pressure for all people to always notify their friends whenever there’s been a dangerous event near them, even if the odds of them being involved were miniscule. This is a clear waste of time and attention,
and the feature was removedthe feature continues to be a piece of security theatre in our lives."that's not how it was solved to equilibrium in my social environment. most people ignore those. from time to time someone use it and i think it's weird and wonder why.
"In my life, even if 90% of the people around have the idea, when I’... (read more)