Almost everything you see about AI, whether in the news, on social media, or in whatever else makes its way to you, is wrong.

But it isn’t just wrong. It’s a whole spectrum of wrong.

Most of it is wrong because the subject is complicated, and the person summarizing it for you doesn’t entirely understand it themselves. A large share is wrong on purpose, built to persuade you toward a conclusion they already own. The rest is wrong because wrong is entertaining (flat earth, birds aren’t real, etc).

The small slice that’s right is right narrowly. It has to be. Any topic of sufficient complexity can’t be broadly right. By definition, in fact.

Each of these has the same cause: distance. Every retelling moves the idea one step further from the people who understand it, and every step trades a little truth for a little reach. What arrives at you is whatever traveled best, not whatever was most accurate.

So the key to living online is to pay attention to everything, ignore 90% of it, and constantly assess the final 10% for intent.

in summary:

Jameson’s Law of Information Traversal Expanded Formula:

As information about a complex subject moves farther from its source, it tends to become easier to communicate and less accurate. What survives is increasingly selected for simplicity, persuasion, or entertainment rather than fidelity.

Jameson’s Law of Information Traversal

The farther a complex idea travels from its source, the more it optimizes for transmission over truth.

Jameson’s Law of Information Traversal Corollary:

The more consequential a claim is to you, the closer to the source you should go.