New scientific paper shows the Mandela Effect is real

neural networks, artificial or otherwise, are (among other things) compressors. they take a complicated world and they compress it into a less complicated internal representation.

compression is lossy.

it’s conceivable that people with a shared culture would form similar lossy internal representations based upon the larger cultural context (training data, if you will) that formed those memories.

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You should always question your grip on reality. You never know.

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Once those searches are done, it wouldn’t be very difficult to determine who is open to suggestion or manipulation, right? :thinking: Maybe I’ve read too much about the use of cute cat content on social media to lure people down the rabbit hole of extremism. :woman_shrugging:t4: I’ve definitely read too much about service providers to believe they haven’t figured out exactly what they have to gain. :moneybag: :face_with_spiral_eyes: :zombie:

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Star Trek Ok GIF

But to the original point, the spreading of various kinds of misinformation is designed to muddy the waters and put out misinformation to radicalize people who might be susceptible to such radicalization. Just look at the recent shenanigans with CRT, which was purposefully used to create a moral panic that did not need to exist. The goal was to make public schools such a chaotic mess that the tide turns against public schools and they can all be closed down.

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Yep. Looks like a fake.

I’d buy that. The album cover upthread is puzzling, though.

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Which reality should I be focused on gripping at the moment? So many to choose from, so little time.

The slipperiest one.

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Didn’t Sinbad write a research paper on the Mandela Effect back in the 90s?

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MANDELA EFFECT TEST: What year did those “birds aren’t real” memes first appear?

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What is the motivation for a lot of what pol and the chans do?

Maybe I am being overly suspicious, but having experienced having someone get me to doubt my own experiences (conversion therapy) I tend to be wary of anything that looks like it. Some of the Mandela effect stuff looks like the fallibility of memory, but other things seem to be more malicious in nature. I have had arguments with people who are insistent that transgender didn’t exist before 2010, and refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary (like physical books that were printed in the early 1990s).

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I think it’s absolutely the case that some people have weaponized this kind of general human fallibility for their own political gains. They do that with all sorts of human traits (like weaponizing our sense of community and solidarity).

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My memory has never been that good, so I’m always willing to assume that my memory of anything is changeable, and I’ve actually encountered times when my brain has conflated two memories together seamlessly.
That’s always led me to assume that if someone says they have a good memory, and never get false memories, that in reality they definitely get false memories but have never realised.

It also makes me wonder how many times I’ve been successfully gas-lit.

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I remember that pattern being different :thinking:

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Good One Lol GIF by Justin

He gets it! :grin:

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Since there is a play arrow just overlapping the logo what did the video show?

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I think it’s a little provincial to map your personal experience on to the world like that. This is a huge cultural phenomenon, and you think an appreciable part of it was caused by the specifically odd “mislabeled pirated tape” thing that happened to you? Leaving aside that the contents of the tape would not be misspelled, so it’s even more specifically you remember the box the tape came in. I’d wager almost nobody else in the grand scale of things had this happen to them.

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Well, that is one of the things research like the study this article is about might help answer. The indication seems to be that there not need to be any “gain” required. People genuinely misremember the logos. Even when they’ve very recently been asked to study the correct image and are then asked to draw it from memory, people frequently make the same mistakes.

Why? Who knows (aka more research required) but it does appear that they do frequently make the same mistakes so there is something that makes these mistakes “stick”.

And that is really all that is needed to explain why people insist on saying that they remember a different logo or image - as we have several examples right here in this thread. They almost certainly genuinely do remember seeing a different image.

Sadly, given the well-known ability of our minds to serve up stuff which we are sure is accurate but is actually a cobbled together hash of various superimposed fragments of memory, there is no way of being sure that those memories are accurate. There is no way of being sure any memory is accurate absent clear external evidence - and even that can be doubted.

As you would expect from a modern corporation in these social media days they have made a few jokes about it such as tweeting a cornucopia version of their logo on twitter with a jokey text and changing the logo on the website on April 1st to one with a horn.

But they are hardly going to weigh on whether the logo ever really had a cornucopia with a definite answer because a) even if they did people wouldn’t believe them and b) why would you try to end the thing that keeps your brand circulating merrily all over the internet and social media?

I wouldn’t say that’s driving trollies.

There’s a reddit thread claiming to have answers to question from the artist via his son. According to that the son claims that his dad said that he drew it with the flute/horn because that was the logo, why else would I do it?

He also apparently says when asked why the company wouldn’t include that logo in their brand history - oh well that must just be a mistake by some new employee who doesn’t know the history.

So the problem is that there is no evidence that the artist isn’t just misremembering the logo like everyone else who claims to remember a cornucopia logo.

All he’s relying on - assuming those answers are from the artist - are speculations about decades old memories.

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None of this is malicious or intentional. People just collectively misremember stuff and don’t bother looking it up unless there’s reason to suspect our memories are wrong. That’s the power of culture. It’s not clear how these misconceptions get started and that’s part of what research like this aims to figure out, but it’s generally a logical shift from the real thing. Like, we often see cornucopias full of produce, so it’s reasonable our brains would map that image to the Fruit Of The Loom logo. Berenstein is a more common spelling of the name, so it’s natural we’d map it to the Bears. So it goes.

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As good an explanation as any! It’s interesting that this mistake dates back at least half a century.

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