Sunday Reflections: The Tricky Process of Making INFORMED Decisions

in #hive-12615225 days ago

What influences our decisions? What factors go into making some kind of significant life choice? What information do we choose to gather? And are those factors internally referenced, or externally referenced?

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I find myself pondering this, mostly in light of the impending Presidential election here in the US. How do people arrive at their choices? And is it by ostensible logic or something completely different? Rumors? Intuition? Messages from God? Gut feel? Psychic powers?

From an early age, I was taught the importance not only of getting lots of information before making any important decisions, but on getting information about the sources of your information. If your sources are biased or incomplete or outright incorrect, then so will be your decision making.

My father subscribed to both the "left leaning" and "right leaning" newspapers when I was young, and determinded his own "leanings" through a pretty long process of looking at all sides.

If there is one thing I am grateful to my parents for, it would be the ability to think for myself, independently of "popular" opinion. I remember my dad often giving me "what for" if I came up with something I wanted and it was because "that's what someone else has/says."

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But it's still really tricky to make an informed decision because we live in a world where so much information is deliberately manipulated so as to coerce the information seeker to be manipulated into making choices that aren't necessarily wise, or in their best interest.

Whip people into a frenzy of emotion and outrage and they become easy targets for making stupid choices in the heat of the moment.

That was something else my dad taught as a lifelesson: If you feel suddenly pumped into an impulsive rage over something, it is time to step back and examine why you feel that way, rather than simply "act out," based on what you're feeling in the moment. Moreover, try to approach important issues from the perspective of being a blank slate, rather than with your mind already made up.

No wonder I never really heard/saw my parents fight; instead they just had intense but courteous and respectful "discussions."

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Of course, you have to be willing to consider reality through an authentic lens of what truly matters to you... not just get swept up in mob mentality.

We give a lot of lip service to wanting to be informed, and to wanting to make wise choices... but sometimes it feels like our very biology is working against us!

Look no further than the divorce rate!

About 50% of marriages end in divorce. But even though there are psychological algorithms that can predict the success/failure rate of two people wanting to get married with more than a 90% accuracy, people broadly reject the science and go with their heart/gut feel, instead.

The human ego says "I know better" than empirical wisdom. We all want to be the exception that proves a rule.

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If you think about it, most people would reject the idea of a body of evidence picking a "happy life partnership" for them, even if they were offered a 95% guarantee of that.

It's not romantic!
It feels like WE are not in charge!

I remember having a long conversation with someone who's very close to being a "professional debater" — as well as a skilled psychologist — and she pointed out that most people place "BEING right" above a "right OUTCOME" in a discussion.

Which is really a bit toxic and self-destructive, when you stop and think about it.

I have often been accused of being both "slow" and "annoying" because I don't just pick a viewpoint/team and then stick to it, ride or die.

But what is the right outcome, even if that outcome is not the right one for me?

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It often holds true that even selfless acts are undertaken in service of making the actor "look good," in some fashion.

Truly informed decisions are very challenging to arrive at... and I'll be the first to admit that many of mine are not as informed as I would like them to be.

But at least we can all do our best, right?

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2024-10-27 16:36 PDT

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It's getting harder and harder to know what really is true. We have AI and photo-shopping and silicone masks and reality is becoming blurred.

It takes a lot of double checking and backtracking to confirm that something actually is what it claims to be... and it's frustratingly time consuming.

If your sources are biased or incomplete or outright incorrect, then so will be your decision making.

This is so important. Politically motivated demonization of many reliable sources has a great many people blindly trusting sources that are obviously, and rabidly so, politically biased. These people believe the most astonishing things! They accept fairy tale characters as real, absurdly simple explanations as plausible, and surreal illustrations as real, as if their information had come straight to them from some sort of god. I am speechless before them. What can you say?

I, like your father, try to read right and left information but, sadly, both sides now seem false to me, and I've had to go far out from mainstream publications to come to any understanding of the world today.

Thank you for stating these thoughts.

It is both strange and alarming what people will believe.

I remember talking to this game designer/tech genius I know and he was pointing out how something like Q-Anon basically had the feel of "A LARP gone awry." He got into a long technical explanation of the way game player misinterpretation could take on a life of its own and massively deviate from the game's design, completely under its own steam.

Since I talked to him (pre-Covid) others have picked up the same idea and now refer to it as "Conspiracy Fictioning."

A lot of stuff sounds false to me, perhaps because it has to be magnified through the lens of extremism in order to actually bubble to the surface of the information stream.

I can see this at work, this LARP gone awry. Or perhaps managed to appear to have gone awry (the ridiculous belief that 50% of Americans are women hating homophobic racists, otherwise know as conservatives), when really, it was in the plan all along for the other half of us to believe that. We could deviate, though sometimes I think we might all have been accounted for in the game designers' plans.

The appearance of the pictures is good and quite beautiful in terms of natural scenery, it looks quite good so that the plants also look quite fertile.

I'm glad you enjoyed the photos... all from my own time in nature...

Have a nice day ❤️🍻

Unfortunately, public choice theory explains why people preferr feelings over research and study in elections. It's easy to feel something and just do what your political tribe says. It's hard to grapple with complex ideas. Your vote is mathematically insignificant even in a swing state, and completely a performative ritual in a state we already know goes one way or the other. Why spend the effort? You get the psychic reward of feeling like you did your part either way, too.

Some of us just aren't built that way, but how many are? Based on social media and historic trends, we're outnumbered.

Perhaps that is what I find to be the single most frustrating part of "the system;" this sensation what if you are thinking, you're outnumbered and irrelevant.

Which invariably leads me down the dark path towards Idiocracy.

And so... counterintuitive/counterproductive as it might be, many thinking individuals basically end up minding their own business, while the lunatics are running the asylum.