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Me too, but I had always figured it as survivorship bias. That is, there are many such things that I newly hear of, but most of them don't get repeated mentions right way. The few of them that do catch my attention, and it seems like it happens a lot. But it actually happens only for a few of the many, many new things I hear about all the time. Similar to my friend who thought that every time he looked at a dead street lamp, it would turn on. :)

Another possible factor is that I find I pay more attention to things I've recently learned about more closely when I come across them, but ignore them when I either know them very well or don't know them at all. I don't know if this is true for anyone else.




It's, of course the second explanation.

The first would include the Kardasians for example. But just because they get mentioned a lot, you don't feel anything strange about hearing about them a lot.

Whereas the very essense of the phenomenon is that encoutering something multiple times seems strange to you.




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