South Palm Beach, FL — You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t be concerned about something that never happened. This is a chance to consider why you’re reading this right now, even if you’re reading this for yucks.
The fact of the matter is that we don’t know what is going on at the time of this writing. But, perhaps we will, and if you are reading this in the future and we know more, it’s still time to consider why you allow stuff like this in your head.
You want to believe it, even if the more rational part of your brain tries to put on the cognitive idiot brakes.
Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes individuals to seek out, favor, interpret, and retain information that confirms their previous ideas. For instance, if a person is provided with a large amount of information on a specific topic, confirmation bias may cause them to retain only the pieces of information that confirm their preexisting beliefs.
Confirmation bias influences people’s judgment and decision-making in many areas of their lives and often is an automatic, visceral reaction to ambiguity.
So, if you haven’t figured it out, it’s about confirmation bias, which might be the single most existential threat we face on Earth. At least one significant contributing factor to our demise.
And lastly, we figure that some will think a rant like this contributes to the problem. Criticism noted. But intent plays a significant role here, as does fiction, both of which we seem to have downplayed or dismissed in the past few years. So instead, we’ve compartmentalized and categorized them to make them easier to deal with: fiction is a Netflix episode of your favorite series, and intention is some weird, unknowing personal experience, like how people describe their experience with religion.
So before you look for a story that reinforces what you already believe to be true, take a moment and examine your intentions. What you might be reading might be fiction.
