Matt+Jensen

I believe that good decision-making is the key to the success of humanity on earth. This is unfortunate because I also believe that a lot of people are simply terrible at making decisions. You can scoff and say that I am a hypocrite. You can say that I think people suck at decision-making because they don’t make the same decisions as I do. And you can say that I only like my decisions because they are mine. But I never said that all my decisions are perfect, and I’m not saying that other people end up making only bad decisions, I’m saying that people don’t know how to make those decisions. People are too brainwashed by things that they hear and things that supposedly-superior people do. Now I hate to be “that guy” but I am going to bring a math concept into this. In math you have something called ‘order of operations”. This is the law for which things to do first in terms of adding, dividing, etc. Often times I feel that the order of operations for some individuals’ decision making is skewed. Everyone needs to be made aware of what is important and what isn’t, the day that everyone can agree on what is important and what isn’t, is the day that society will progress as it should. If everyone analyzed their situation and made logical decisions while still applying moral and ethical values then our world would be as close to perfect as it can be. The biggest problem with this is that there are so many obstacles embedded into human nature that prevent people from using the “order of operations”, so to speak, and making informed, rational decisions that aren’t driven by some primeval instinct. Is it a coincidence that no matter what happens in the world, politicians can spin it to show why it confirms their opinions? A cynical explanation is that politicians twist the truth to get what they want. But a more subtle explanation is that our brains tend to search for and interpret information in ways that support our pre-existing opinions. This is a huge problem and one that digs at the very core of my being. Getting people to change their minds about something that they already believe is one of the hardest things to do, socially, on the planet. This is because the more a person is exposed to a certain ideal, and the more it is described in an inflated and seemingly sensible manner, the more they have no reason not to believe it. Basically what this means is that although I would like for everyone to be stellar decision makers, it is extremely difficult for a person who is already a poor decision maker to become a good one. Maybe all that I have described is impossible. But it is still what I believe. Perhaps, in the moderate future, humanity will have converged and there won’t be such a gap between the logically challenged and society’s more high quality discerners.