Ironically, doing research is the best way to be right. What people want is to feel right without having to think very hard. Feelings don’t really require energy in the same way that thinking does.
Feelings are SUPER important to humans because they’re a huge efficiency boost. We take everything we’ve ever learned in our lives and crunch it down into a feeling for how the world works. Then we make the vast majority of our decisions by using that “gut feeling”. Can you imagine how ridiculously inefficient it would be to have to analyze every new scenario you come across?
The big problem today is that people lean in too hard on that idea and assume that because their feelings are right most of the time, feelings must be equivalent to truth.
The problem arises from the fact that the internet in particular incentivizes attracting attention above all other things and there’s no incentive for being correct, nuanced or well-researched. Combine that with the fact that people like to be right about things and doubly so when everyone else is wrong about it and you create a world where conspiracy, woo and other bullshit is actually an industry. I feel like that’s part that always gets lost in these discussions: people are making money from this.
Ironically, doing research is the best way to be right. What people want is to feel right without having to think very hard. Feelings don’t really require energy in the same way that thinking does.
Feelings are SUPER important to humans because they’re a huge efficiency boost. We take everything we’ve ever learned in our lives and crunch it down into a feeling for how the world works. Then we make the vast majority of our decisions by using that “gut feeling”. Can you imagine how ridiculously inefficient it would be to have to analyze every new scenario you come across?
The big problem today is that people lean in too hard on that idea and assume that because their feelings are right most of the time, feelings must be equivalent to truth.
The problem arises from the fact that the internet in particular incentivizes attracting attention above all other things and there’s no incentive for being correct, nuanced or well-researched. Combine that with the fact that people like to be right about things and doubly so when everyone else is wrong about it and you create a world where conspiracy, woo and other bullshit is actually an industry. I feel like that’s part that always gets lost in these discussions: people are making money from this.