How We're Fooling Ourselves

It's probably not just me, but everyone must have that one uncle who knows everything. 

He knows that his long-haired neighbour is a drug dealer. He knows more about your life than God. He even knows what shampoo Narendra Modi uses. Thankfully, he doesn't know how to read English.

Where does he get all this valuable information?

Apparently, it's from other such uncles who know everything.

Their source:  WhatsApp, ShareChat, news channels, and Narendra Modi's conditioner.

The Business of News Channels

What's the main purpose of a news channel?

One might say, "To broadcast news". Almost there:  just needing a few more words.

To broadcast news that people want to listen to.

There's a big difference between news that people want to listen to and those that people need to listen to.

A Valentines for the Future

Allow me to take you back to February 14th of 2019. On that eventful day, there were two such news articles.  One, on the now infamous 40 deaths of CRPF personnels in Pulwama, on the front page. The other, on the little known development of ChatGPT by a company called OpenAI, tucked back somewhere in the back pages.

The death of the personnels were a shock to the citizens of India, since the imaginings of death horrify us. On the other hand, the ongoing development of ChatGPT did not concern us, since, well, we didn't understand it.

As a result, people wanted to listen to the stories on the Pulwama attacks. And the news channels focused their coverage on that. Meanwhile, no one cared about the news on ChatGPT, and it got tucked back into the background.

Years later, all anyone can talk about is how ChatGPT and AI is replacing their jobs. When we look back, we realise we needed to understand the development of this radical technology.

Even though this exponential rise of AI technology was inevitable, being aware of the development might've given us time to be prepared. 

We overestimate the effects of trivial issues and underestimate the impact of probable revolutions. That's basically how we're fooling ourselves.

Back to the Uncle

Remember the phony uncle I mentioned in the beginning? He knows the names of all the soldiers who died, the personal stories of every sensational rape victim and the exact role that God played in the recent train derailment. Impressive, right?

Well, while he was muddling in everyone else's life, an algorithm came by and took his job. Now he's at his home, tucked back onto his comfy sofa.

To Stop being the Fool

I'm not implying that we shouldn't care about deadly accidents, soldiers dying or girls getting raped. What we should actually be doing is focus on the details that matter. In all these cases, instead of focusing on how it happened, we should start caring more about why it happened.

Why are these war-mongering idiots sacrificing precious lives for trivial gains? Why exactly are these women getting raped? Why do such accidents keep happening? What can we do to prevent these stuffs from happening?

We should be filtering the essential bits from the non-essential bits. 

How do we do that? For starters, we could try to understand what we do not understand.

Just remember this: people try to make things seem complicated so that we'd ignore them and concentrate on the easy-to-understand stuff. They do so hoping that we do not delve deeper beyond the meticulously constructed surface details. That's our cue that they're trying to fool us.

A Final Few Words

On one hand, there are people advocating for cow worship, debating on gender identities and scanning for celebrity divorce stories. On the other hand, there are starving children, unemployed youths and a dying planet.

Every minute we spend on trivial issues, an unnoticed starving child dies, an unemployed youth falls into drug abuse and a manmade calamity sweeps a village. That's the cost of our foolishness. 

In this world with unlimited information, attention is the most limited resource. Showing attention to issues that matter is the most important favour we can do to ourselves and the world.