Hello Lovely!
Today we are going to be exploring why it is SO important that we learn how to recognize and question our cognitive bias’ in this world where we are exposed to SO much information.
When we are able to see our bias’ clearly, when we are able to challenge and question where we may not be seeing reality in a fair and balanced way and when we are able to question who we naturally want to take information from and who we naturally reject - we’re going to be setting ourselves up for a MUCH better life experience.
We are going to be setting ourselves up to be able to ACTUALLY figure out who we can and can’t trust, what information is true, what is helpful, what is harmful and what’s just there to stimulate and enrage.
Now, if you’ve not done so already, please do read:
Part One
Part Two
Before reading this post.
Now on with today!
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So What Does All Of This Bias Awareness Have To Do With Discernment And The Internet?
If we want to become powerful, true creators, we must first learn that we HAVE cognitive bias - which I hope this article series has already supported you in doing! Remember - this is not a ‘bad’ thing, nor is it something to ‘fix’ in ourselves. It’s really just something to be aware of so that we can play with it, play within it and expand within it to create a better life for ourselves and those around us.
Then we must learn to moderate those bias’ so as to ensure that we are moving closer and closer in our awareness to actual TRUTH and what serves to help us CREATE what we want to create.
The reason we want this skill is because we are living in a time and space where some of us who are on the upper limit are exposed to more information in a single day, than any human from any past civilization would have been exposed to in an entire LIFETIME (Source). And this number is increasing every year.
Even if this number is inflated and exaggerated, this is still way, way too much information for most of us to be able to process, fact-check, understand, discern what is and isn’t true and to then integrate into our awareness or discard.
The pace at which we are being made aware of what’s happening across the world and in our own back-yards, what people are thinking and feeling about every topic under the sun, what people are thinking and feeling about US and our lives, what we should care about, who we should care about, what is happening to the environment, what the future may look like - it’s all SO MUCH and for many of us the intake levels we’re experiencing have been normalized - but this doesn’t mean that they are HEALTHY nor does it mean that we are actually coping well.
We also have to understand that a lot of what we see in a day on social and regular media, a lot of what flashes across our screens as text. Video and sound, isn’t there with the intention of actually informing us. A LOT of it is there with the intention to excite, anger, stimulate or distract - as a way of making sure the maximal number of ‘eyeballs’ are on the piece of media.
You see right now, information is power. Information is income. Information is how people determine where they stand in the pecking order of social dynamics. Information isn’t just information - it’s a vehicle for clout, access, wealth and privilege in our current culture - and thus many who share share not from a place of genuinely wanting to inform or to provide something of true value - but rather from a place of understanding that the more sensational, one sided, emotionally stimulating and extreme something is, the more it’s likely to be viewed, shared and talked about, and the more that will then drive attention to the entity that created that media - and that attention is often the basis for what is truly wanted - money, approval, social status and so on.
If we are to understand that so much of what we take in in a day is specifically designed to play right into our cognitive bias’, is designed to reassure us that our current worldview is true - and in fact that our current worldview may not even be as extreme as it SHOULD BE - is designed to trigger us EMOTIONALLY so that we engage and shut down our reasoning and logic skills, is taken out of context or manipulated in some way to elicit the largest REACTION from us - this can help us to start taking a step back, understanding our own bias, questioning what we’re seeing and filtering what we’re seeing through a whole new lens so that we aren’t getting caught in echo chambers that reinforce our worldview and make us feel safe - but that actually drive us further and further down a path away from truth.
Our bias’ make it easy for us to sort through the information we’re being presented with - our bias’ jump in as soon as we hear or see anything to inform us as to whether or not what’s coming in is true, useful or helpful - and this happens at such a rapid rate that most of the time we don’t even realize why we’re accepting something at face value or rejecting something outright. We don’t even question the source of the information or take our time to fact-check what we’re reading - we just ‘feel’ that it’s either right or wrong, trustworthy or not - based on how well it fits into our already formed view of life.
The massive problem with this is that we now live in a time where we can essentially find a corner of the world that caters all information to match whatever bias we hold. We can now filter out any information that would cause us to have to question our takes, that would challenge what we believe to be true and false and that would ask us to broaden our perspective or even challenge our perspective. We are living in a time where we can be actively living in ways that oppose reality and not even be aware of the consequences we are facing because we have SO MUCH mental information and emotional manipulation at our disposal that we don’t HAVE to really look at or feel what’s ACTUALLY happening to us.
We live in a world now where we are able to take in so much information that shapes a worldview that is TOTALLY disconnected from our actual lived experience - yet we can’t identify and see that because again we are becoming increasingly ‘online’ in the sense that more and more of our time is spent engaging with media vs. engaging with actual reality. We are living in a time where the lines between actual reality and what is essentially virtual reality are getting more and more blurred - to the point that we can be convinced of things being TOTALLY TRUE that have absolutely NO BASIS in real reality, we can be handed page after page of ‘evidence’ that what we are seeing is real - and yet have no actual way of verifying if what we’re being presented has ANY real-world foundation or if it’s all cherry-picked and fabricated narratives woven together like a storybook.
We are living in a world where our bias’ are being used against us in a MASSIVE way - and this is leading people to experience real world negative consequences.
This is leading people to hate other groups of people and to feel justified in doing so. Leading people to doing things with their health that are deeply problematic, this is leading people to becoming increasingly polarized and incapable of interacting with those who hold different views, it’s leading to a world where there is ever increasing paranoia about institutions and leadership - but that paranoia is driving people into conspiracy and sensationalized narratives instead of into the actual reality of corruption and what could be done about it. It’s driving us to a state of perpetual overwhelm and then perpetual ‘shut down’ in terms of being open to questioning our worldview or in terms of actually vetting the information we’re taking in. It’s leading us to believe we ‘know what’s really going on’ when we have literally NO experience with any of the so-called ‘facts’ we have supporting our belief systems.
We are swimming in a soup of ideas that we can pick and choose from, that we can use to continually drive our narrative about how the world works, that we can use to deny anything that contradicts our world view and that ‘explains’ why we are experiencing what we’re experiencing in a way that makes sense to us - without any of it actually needing to be TRUE or REAL.
As I stated above, in many ways we are living in a virtual reality where facts only need to prove themselves to us intellectually to be seen as true and where anything that goes against what we already believe can be believed as false as we collect ‘evidence’ of other people’s thoughts and opinions rather than being able to weigh what we’re thinking and believing against actual reality.
It’s a BIG problem.
And the reality is, it’s not going to change any time soon.
This is how the world works right now - and the only defense we have against it, the only thing we have to help ourselves combat the never ending 24 hour news cycle, the only way we can start to pick apart what’s actually helpful and what’s harmful is to do our inner work on our own bias so that we can get BETTER at discerning truth from lie, helpful from harmful, sensational from factual and useful from unuseful.
Our only true defense is our ability to ground into reality as much as we can, our ability to slow down and question, our ability to learn to respond rather than react and our ability to question our own thought process enough that we can gain some semblance of clarity in this whole mess.
We Can’t Get RID Of Our Bias
Remember - this is not about ‘getting rid of’ our capacity to imagine what is not already here. This isn’t about being as ‘logical’ as possible - as again a HUGE part of our awareness comes through our emotions, feelings and other felt sensations that perhaps don’t make sense to our logic and our cognitive bias towards what is logical and explainable.
This is about learning to embrace our emotions, embrace our feelings, learning how to really use our critical thinking skills as WELL as our actual lived and felt experience in order to determine reality for ourselves, and in order to determine who we should trust and who we shouldn’t.
This is about learning how to take what works from someone and leave what doesn’t instead of looking for a single source to be perfect or totally wrong.
This is about learning how to admit where we were wrong or mistaken, how to course correct and how to adjust our view to match new information instead of continuing to double-down on what we want to believe or what feels safe and familiar to us in this moment.
This is about learning to use ALL of our faculties to understand reality better, and it’s about learning to love ourselves enough to feel safe enough to change when we are presented with the reality that what we thought was true wasn’t, or what we thought was false wasn’t.
It’s about being able to learn as we go, instead of depending upon deeply held beliefs to be the foundation for everything we will ever do or believe for the rest of our lives.
It’s about learning how to see our own bias, how they are working or not working, and knowing when and how to change them.
This is key.
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How do you feel about the above? Do you recognize this tendency towards bias in yourself when you’re taking in information? How does it feel to consider that we may need to be more open to information that we have a knee-jerk reaction to reject, and to question information we have a knee jerk reaction to accept?
I would love your thoughts!
<3
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