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The Dangers Of Positivity Bias

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@chekohler
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Hey Jessceptics

I'm not one of those with any real talent in a specific field of interest in any particular field. I sort of float between fields of interest all the time, and for the last few years, my technology journey leads me into business, which in turn lead me into finance, which then leads me into psychology. The more I learn, the more I see how the concepts intertwine and overlap.

Because, humans!

We came up with this shit; it's bound to reflect our flawed decision making as we build lives and societies on what we know today. What we know today may not always be true.

The world is constantly being written and rewritten as people tie new ideas together and break apart old concepts. This may be invisible to most of us as we live our daily lives, but many of what we hold on to today won't see out this next decade, never mind a lifetime.

The negative nelly

If you've been following my train of thought for some time, you know in a cynic, overly critical permabear. If you're the type that likes to categorise people, but to me, I see it as a lack of critical thinking and me asking questions. How you want to frame that is up to you, but things in this world don't always make sense to me, and I'm not going to accept the explanations given to me.

We're always told to keep positive, stay positive, look on the bright side of things. There's always this drive for positive everything as if its limits know no bounds and that being positive, seeking positivity, or positive reinforcement is always the winner.

Emotional decision making

We are emotional creatures, and very few of us can distance ourselves from emotion when making decisions.

I'll give you an example. If you had a child and they're struggling at school, and you take the child to be evaluated. One evaluator says the child has a learning disability; the other evaluator says the child is super gifted.

Which one would 99% of parents side with? The gifted outcome, because you're emotionally attached, you want to believe in the positive outcome.

So you exercise the positive outcome, move the child to a school for gifted kids only to find out they're not gifted and they fall behind. Damaging the child self-confidence further, taking away their support structures they were used to in the previous school, removing them from social development made with friends all because you emotionally attached to the positive outcome.

For all, you know you've just ruined that child for the rest of their lives.

Practising decisions

I see the same decision making processes applied to investing; you see something go up, regardless of if it's a fraud or not, people will chase up positivity like their lives depended on it.

I am not saying we should all be miserable sacks of shit like myself, but not all positivity is positive, and we have to learn to discern which is which.

We see companies, governments, parents, and many in positions of authority or power making decisions for "the greater good" with positive intentions in mind, only to obfuscate the negative consequences of those actions.

We don't want to feel pain; we don't want to learn the lessons of sacrifice or take the hard route even if the outcome is somewhat better in the long run. Once you understand peoples motivations and where they allocate their time and resources, it's often prudent for those that can think critically to take a position against that frame of thinking.

In the business world, this comes in the shape of disruptive startups; in the investment world, it comes in short-sellers. These contrarians look at the world and have no interest in the positivity, but instead look through it to see what negative aspects are brought about by this enthusiasm we humans feel is so valuable.

NGU positivity

We're already into this bull market and number go up positivity is starting to grip the masses pulling more and more people into the space. I am already seeing people who have no business speculating in crypto asking questions that I believe are way beyond their understanding at this stage.

It took me years to get my head around crypto and I am not saying I'm the smarted, and that others can't leapfrog me, but I can see these money-making opportunities are reaching people with a narrative that's only half the story.

This positivity ends up sucking in greater and greater fools and eventually, the fools run out, for now, we still have a while to go! IT's easy to be bullish right now, which is why I have already turned bearish.

Have your say

What do you good people of HIVE think?

So have at it, my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, "I am a Jessie."

Let's connect

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