More Deep Musings

I've been thinking about the difference between what's best for me and what's best for the various communities that I engage with.  As you can imagine I'm awfully interested in the former - so interested that I usually forget there's a latter.  I figure out what's best for me and then the hell with everybody else.  

Some of this inclination is okay, of course, as long as I don't get too carried away with it.  I do have a sense of being a part of something today whether that's a member of The Program, of my neighborhood, of my city, of my country, of the human race.  I calculate how my actions are going to affect others and modulate them accordingly.  I don't just do whatever I want.  I hate being told what to do so much that I never stopped doing anything that I didn't want to stop doing.  You want to get some sleep?  Tough shit - I want to blast some Judas Priest.  Deal with it.

A lot of this has been fired by the great CoVid-19 pandemic.  Am I overly afraid or am I truly concerned about others as much as I am about myself?

I've also been thinking about confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out information that validates what we already believe and ignore those things with which we disagree.  This sort of goes hand in hand with the backfire effect where individuals hang on to something that they believe ferociously, resisting all attempts to prove them wrong, hanging on despite the fact that they have been proven wrong.

And then there's optimism/pessimism bias where people overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes (especially if we're in a good humor) and to overestimate the likelihood of a negative outcome (especially if - you guessed it - we're upset or afraid).  There have been brilliant psychological experiments put together that prove these theories, too.  The docs aren't making this stuff up out of thin air.  We like to win but we hate to lose even more.  One study I enjoyed contrasted how conservatively people behave given the possibility that they might lose $100 with how aggressively they act to try to win the same amount even though the odds were exactly the same in both cases.  

Have you ever noticed how the news you are fed on electronic platforms either stokes your sense of well-being or fires your sense of outrage?  I have to remember that social media is being developed and tweaked by brilliant scientists who have advanced degrees in behavioral psychology.  They're smarter than me, they can tap into unlimited amounts of information about me, and they work 80 hours a week.  If I think I'm not being swayed and manipulated by these people I'm Ozzy Osborne.  And the thing that makes all this tweaking and manipulating so insidious is that social media companies have instantaneous access to huge amounts of information every day.  Each time you click on something it's recorded and this information is used to make the next page you look at even more inviting, right down to the size and color of the letters.

Why all this, anyhow?  Because I'm prone to outrage when things are going my way, when they're stable and somewhat predictable.  When things are uncertain and changing day by day I find myself driven to consume more and more, to get the latest and greatest, even when things don't change nearly as much as I think they are.  I'm hungry for facts so I absorb data that hasn't been vetted or proven.  Bullshit data, in other words.

Sometimes fast is good and sometimes fast is just . . . fast.