Twitter Thread On Helpful Concepts Is Way Too Fascinating

Eric Lund

Feb 17, 2022 10:00 AM EST

We're people. And that means that even though we like to think we have completely perfect judgement all the time, we absolutely don't. It only takes one last-ditch trip to a toy store on Christmas Eve to make you realize that people are brimming with lazy, stupid choices that we don't even make in our own best interest. But our bad decisions aren't just limited to us fighting over the last Lego set with the angriest mom you've ever seen, it comes down to media literacy and how our biases structure our entire basis of reality. Throw in a few bad actors who actively want people to be misinformed, and you've got yourself a wonderful, bubbling pot of anger gumbo.

As people who just a few hundred years ago really figured out the benefits of regular bathing, we're being asked to run a ton of modern programs on ancient hardware. Some of our biases would have been really helpful in a tribal society where we didn't know if we were being actively talked by wolves, but since that's not the case anymore, or right now at least, our emotions force us into all these thinking traps that don't make a whole lot of sense. One way to help ourselves out of this mess is by understanding the concepts at work in our own minds and lives, which brings us to this helpful twitter thread by @G_S_Bhogal.