Slouching Towards Oblivion

In marketing, one of the major obstacles you have to overcome is getting your product in front of a potential customer. And that's a big problem because everybody and his fuckin' uncle is completing for that customer's attention.

You have figure out how to cut through the clutter.

Used to be, you needed some decent amounts of spending money to buy billboard space, or air time on radio and TV, or newspaper ads and The Yellow Pages, or whatever.

Now, what you need is time and an iPhone and some outrageous subject matter - which is how you cut thru the clutter on the intertoobz - just put up the most outrageous bullshit your fevered little brain can conjure.

(ed note)

The kind of rank speculation this piece is addressing is not "hypothesis". It's pure fantasy conceived by attention junkies who know they can get some likes and follows by posting imaginary "findings" based on meaningless random details (apophenia).

What Is Apophenia?

Apophenia refers to the human tendency to see patterns and meaning in random information. The term was coined in 1958 by German neurologist Klaus Conrad, who was studying the “unmotivated seeing of connections” in patients with schizophrenia. Statisticians refer to apophenia as patternicity or a “type I error.”

4 Types of Apophenia
Apophenia is a general term that refers to seeing meaningful patterns in randomness. Here are the subcategories of apophenia:

1. Pareidolia. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia that occurs specifically with visual stimuli. People with this tendency most often see human faces in inanimate objects. Some examples of pareidolia include seeing a face in a slice of toast or seeing the shape of a bunny in a random mass of clouds.
2. Gambler’s fallacy. People who regularly gamble often fall prey to the gambler’s fallacy. They may perceive patterns or meaning in random numbers, often interpreting the pattern as an indication of an oncoming win. Learn more about gambler’s fallacy in our guide here.
3. Clustering illusion. A clustering illusion occurs when looking at large amounts of data—humans tend to see patterns or trends in data even when it is entirely random.
4. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon in which a person will test a hypothesis under the assumption that it’s true. This form of apophenia can lead to overemphasizing data that confirms a hypothesis and explaining away information that disproves it.