I really love how this is could be seen as a demonstration that HN (or any other similar interest community, or probably the internet in general) functions like a hive mind, a collective consciousness. I've read that post by Carmack and I wondered exactly that "wonder what Pascal's Mugging is, interesting".

Sometimes you go around and wonder various things, but don't look them up or do them in the moment, and then sometime later your subconscious mind serves you up with an answer, perhaps when you are more relaxed you just think up of the answer, or it happens to come up in a certain context, the subconscious lights it up there. It might be a word that you see randomly in a newspaper, or you think of a person that was related when you met them etc.

And here the subconscious did the same wonderous thing, except it wasn't even strictly my personal subconsciousness, it was the group subconscious that found the information and presented it.

I have noticed this pattern before: Someone mentions a topic deep inside a thread on HN and next thing you know that topic is on the front page.

It could also be confirmation bias, though. The Baader-Meinhof thing.

Looking forward to seeing the Baader-Mainhof phenomenon on the front page later today or tomorrow.

I only had to wait for the next comment.

But how useful is it? Pascal's Mugging was submitted to HN and discussed 8 years ago. If the collective consciousness keeps needing reminders of what it once knew, this is probably still inferior to a single intelligent person who reads a lot and remembers it all.

The population using HN takes in new members continuously, and the fraction who read everything posted eight years ago is very small.

As a somewhat intelligent person, I still also do need reminders often. The trick is to forget mostly the unneeded stuff and maximally retain the useful stuff, and accurately discern between the two. The goal is not to remember everything.

Also it would be strange to expect this group consciousness to never need reminders when it continuously has new people added to it, who are unfamiliar with old things.

I think consciousness is more about active living rehashing of information and reupdating it, reupdating the worldview to adjust to constantly changing environment - not so much about building one single model that would somehow know everything. Such models tend to be stale or abstract and philosophical to the point of uselessness.

It’s new to me :)