I'm valuable, you're valuable, the world is weird

This is a self-reminder article, at least while things are temporarily a little bit difficult (emotionally)

Self-worth is something I occasionally have struggles with, humans have a negativity bias despite things radically improving, as in comparision to history

Our brains our wired to think of the worst possible outcome, however unlikely

Subjectivity, confidence and false value

Large swaths of groups can be convinced into something untrue

"Collectively believed lies" are a slightly difficult concept accept, people en-mass have believed things that haven't been true hisorically – and continue to do so today

For example – Antivaxxers exist (in large groups) despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the fact that vaccines work (source 2, source 3, source 4 and source 5)

"Flat earthers" exist (I am not arguing against them)

In large corporations, the people in power, the people who have gotten rich, have repeatedly been people that have had no evidence of ever having contributed to helping society at large

case and point

• Elizabeth Holmes defrauded a massive number of patients and healthcare workers with fraudulent medicine - She was the on the cover of time magazine

• Adam Neumann continues to be a billionaire despite having financially destroyed WeWork by any definition imaginable

• Frank Abagnale despite having had a film made about him (catch me if you can), a talk at google - has been repeatedly lying about everything he has done (his talk is still up on youtube, uncritiqued)

alot of this comes down to our social constructs of belief, things are as valuable as we collectively agree to their value to be (money, housing, etc) – this is just a perception game

Dunning Kruger shows an inverse correlation of confidence between people that have read about something in the passing vs people that have actually studied the topic in detail

It's subjective – even when it's objective

When someone says something is wrong – often it's just the person in front of them telling them they are wrong

and this often can be with large swaths of crowds, Galelio was met with huge challenges within the church – when he presented the view that the earth, was in-fact, not the center of the universe, and that the earth revolves around the sun

This is very hard a concept to internalize for many people, often when there is something wrong or bad, there's often just someone else saying that - or a group of people, but doesn't make them right

Groups may have a hard time self reflecting

Numerous cults and groups exist, where collective lies will be believed and operated upon (like Scientology), entire markets of people and large swaths of people will collectively push for an idea without self reflecting on the consequences of the idea (ergo - the 2007 financial crisis, caused by banks collectively engaging in predatory lending)

The numbers can be gamed

Phew, with the right numbers you can make it seem like Nicholas Cage causes shark attacks

Tyler vigin has an entire website of spurious correlations if you want to check it out

• Nasa once lost a 327 million dollar spacecraft due to a disaster between metric vs inch conversions

• Volkswagan lied, and manipulated it's results to show that it's emissions were 40x times lower than their actual on-street emissions (this doesn't happen without a huge number of people knowing the lies)

A majority of startups fail, the coolest are massively successful

We live in a huge survivorship bias when it comes to the things we see that surround us

A majority of startups fail the ones that succeed - are massively, massively successful

Awesome things exist, things can succeed

Again, I don't want to give the impression that things are all wrong, it's just that our belief on things can be pretty…mistaken, and to really know if things are true we are dependent on experts or to do quite a bit of research

• We eradicated smallpox collectively, as a society
• Extreme poverty has historically decreased - massively
• Last month had the largest protests - ever - in US history, most people who bother to act think the person in power is a clown
• American homicide rates have massively decreased since the 1990s
• Child mortality rates have plummeted since the 1800s

What am I trying to say?

We live in a world, with data itself having high characteristics of VUCA

Having numbers is one thing, knowing what to do with them is extremely hard

This is a subjective thing to say, but people typically do not self-reflect, and often convince themselves of their conditions being the best - I tend to think of this as a sort of survival mechanism

Gianmarco Soresi has a hilarious standup special with trying to convince someone about the fact of what they're doing to be potentially displacing jobs – only to hear them say, they don't feel bad because the numbers are in a spreadsheet

This is not to say "everything is wrong", it's a very long winded way of saying, things are extremely complex - take a step back and really carefully think about the things you're sure of

We as people need other people, "collective value" is hard to fathom, but without people in the collective - other people can't be happy, can't be valued, won't have someone to spend time with – you are valuable to the ones around you, that you can be sure of.

At the end of the day, the goal is to get people out of believing in lies, to make scientologists see that the group itself is causing harm, for people that are hurting themselves and other people that - hey, maybe take a step back and self-reflect on what you're doing!

I really love Armin Ronacher's take on this

I think not wishing others well is a coping mechanism of sorts. For sure it was for me. As you become more successful in life, it becomes easier to be supportive, because you have established yourself in one way or another and you feel more secure about yourself.

You're probably not going to get out of a situation well by arguing against someone that you're right - discussing the situation, taking care of emotions and managing the situation to everyone's emotions is probably a better way to succeed

But keeping the uncertainity and difficulty of the complex world we live in, and how we collectively determine human value (and it's fallibility) is probably important to keep in mind before, being really harsh on ourselves