seems like the phrase "common knowledge cascade" showed up in ~2020 from an account @SimonDeDeo, since deactivated kinda surprised it wasn't older than that! anybody recall what he said at the time? @kevinsimler @vgr @nosilverv @ben_mathes @ben_r_hoffman @aneeshm @acidshill
Tracing the origin of the phrase "common knowledge cascade"
9 tweets · April 2024 · 30 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
seems likely it evolved from the older & more common concept of "preference cascade" (/information cascade)
(I figured out who to tag based on searching for "common knowledge" cascade ...in many cases if the whole phrase was in quotes it didn't show up due to subtle variations)
aha, praise be to screenshots! (screenshotting again just in case)
I wonder if anybody saved the whole thread. oh wait, now I can google a fragment from it. aha! help us @DellAnnaLuca! you're our only hope
ah drat, this excerpt doesn't have much more than the original... but it's a clue. we're looking at common knowledge collapse (an alternate term!) in the wake of George Floyd luca-dellanna.com/thoughts-of-th…
aha, searching "common knowledge collapse" I get some stuff that didn't show up with "cascade", including this TechCrunch article about 2020's dystopian vibes which quotes another tweet from the thread. but that tweet isn't quoted anywhere else google knows of
still almost no results for "common knowledge collapse" though. the others are irrelevant or merely quote TC or Simon & nothing more and then there's this 1997 paper which uses the phrase but syntactically different; what's "collapsing" here is the meaning of the phrase "ck"
anyway that's enough sleuthing on my part today here's a manic 6am thread from last summer boggling at the nature of common knowledge: