the logic behind societal vibes

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“I’ve learned that you simply can’t control those bad vibes.”

Kenny G

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“Just as thoughts are not facts, feelings are not facts either. Emotions are information, but when that information is powerful, intense and loud, as emotions can be, then we are more vulnerable to believing in them as a true reflection of what is going on. I feel it therefore it must be a fact. Emotional reasoning is a thought bias that leads us to use what we feel as evidence for something to be true, even when there might be plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.”

Julie Smith

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I almost called this ‘feelings versus reality,’ but let’s stick with vibes for now. Vibes is simply an extension of “feelings over facts” or even perception is reality. To be clear, sometimes what you feel about something is a reflection of reality, but for the most part your feeling is simply a reflection of some part of reality you have chosen to focus on. And from there reality goes into a death spiral because often what we choose to focus on is, well, wrong.

Which leads me to the misuse of data.

Whew. Nothing feeds vibes more than a misused piece of “data.” Some scrap of faux logic feeds an entire vibe meal. Lets use the “60% of people live paycheck to paycheck” to discuss this. The reality is maybe 18% of people actually live paycheck to paycheck – as in that’s all the money they have. That said. Apparently 60% of people ‘feel’ like they are having to live paycheck to paycheck. That’s the logic gap. And it is within the gap where ubiquitous data thrives. You would think we , as a society, would have learned this in discussing climate change. For years, if not decades, climate change has been proven, and agreed upon, by over 95% of experts and climatologists. Yet that less-than-5% pried open a gap which confused the hell out of people. That climate change faux debate was simply the precursor to everything in today’s world. It where the charlatans learned how to use data to their own purposes. What I mean by that is “use the exception to suggest the rule.” Along the way they combined this learning with “he who shouts the loudest and most confidently wins.” The exceptions of data were wielded like heavy dull axes on a society dulled by an overwhelming amount of data. Vibes often get fed by misused data.

Which leads me to dulled versus stupid.

I just said “a society dulled” but this isn’t to suggest most people are dull/stupid. Generally speaking, people are not stupid. Generally speaking people face some challenges with regard to truly learning despite what they feel like they observe. Human beings, apart from being fragile mentally fragile in certain instances, critically thinking fragile in certain instances, as well as selectively data starved in certain instances, has consistently shown a limited capacity for transfer learning. What I mean by that is we mainly extract superficial patterns and have a tendency to not be able to deal with a hierarchal structure of data where a meta structure of thinking is often constructed from a myriad of smaller mesa components. We struggle with open ended inference and have a poor history of integrating prior knowledge. We certainly cannot inherently distinguish between causation and correlation and we tend to assume a predominantly stable world while struggling to deal with a confluence of systems that are continuously changing with varying rules, varying outcomes, and varying successful processes. So, as we consider progress and priorities and likely future paths of not only our society but of our own thinking we must constantly be exploring better ways of assessing our own intelligence an ability to assess reality True progress means we do need to become better prioritizing not only the data but the paths that we pursue.

Which leads me to logical illogical vibes.

One of my pet peeves is the saying “perception is reality” because, well, reality is reality. If your perception is not reality, it just means you are living in a non-reality world and I would suggest you are in for a rude awakening one day (maybe not tomorrow, but one day). Vibes based on flawed data is exactly the same. Selective data plucked from qualified research and data simply gives you some dubious logic to an illogical universe. It is within this illogical universe in which things like vaccines can be bad, soft power (diplomacy and foreign aid) is wasted monies, tariffs can generate enough revenue to fund necessary societal needs and immigrants are actually bad for the economy (they are not), more likely to commit crimes (they are not), and voting (they can’t). That isn’t to say that I could find a selective data point to make any of those statements seem logical. Its just, well, it would be selective data misused and, therefore, creating a vibe not reflective of reality. All that said. This is the illogical logic world we live in. Ponder.