290 - Discipline

If there is one lesson everyone could stand to learn this New Year, it is that the opinions of random people on the internet, both those you see and those you don’t, matter “not at all”.

“The problem is choice”, some people will choose to learn, and some will choose to post-hoc justify their own emotionally backed beliefs, however delusional and toxic they may be in practice. It matters not at all if some random person believes that the sun is made of glowing string cheese or that some random celebrity is the second coming of their chosen religion, and it is in no way the job of anyone but the person in question to change those beliefs.

I’m reminded of an Emo Philips joke about self-destructive tendencies, shown in the attached video, but the reality is that humans evolved to be social creatures. Humans didn’t evolve to handle the kind of social interaction that is ever-present via social media, with random, sometimes anonymous, and frequently unaccountable individuals or even fake bot profiles attempting various forms of manipulation. One of the typical mechanisms of action that gets exploited, and is well-known to increase the virality of posts, is to inspire outrage. It was also famously shown that misinformation spreads roughly 6 times further and faster than sanitary and clinically accurate data, with later correction often spreading little, if at all, causing asymmetric impact even when intentions aren’t malicious.

It may be tempting to respond “for your own sanity” (or more accurately your emotional sense of indignation), but that would be a failure of discipline, perhaps best summarized by the quote: “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience". As Sun Tzu would say "Every battle is won before it is fought".

Random people on the internet aren’t your friends, your “network”, or your peers, and sometimes they aren’t even human. They hold no inherent authority or expertise on anything that they fail to demonstrate, or demonstrate more often in the negative than the positive case. You have no reason to allow their activities to harm you, wasting your time and cognition or exhausting your emotions.

If you encounter a troll, a bot, a spreader of disinformation, or some other form of bad actor, you can simply block them. If you do that, leaving behind those who choose to roll in their own filth, you’ll live a better life for it.