Shocking Psychology Lessons To Understand People Better - Gurwinder Bhogal

You've become the intellectual Nikocado Avocado. You are-

(laughs)

... obese, obese with interesting ideas. So we're gonna go through as many-

Yeah.

... as we can get through today. My first one-

Yeah.

... one of my favorites, idiocy saturation. Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair.

Yeah. So by Twitter dumbassery, what I mean is if you just go onto Twitter un- unfiltered and you're not sort of, you don't have a curated feed, and you just look at the posts, it makes you wanna blow your brains out just because there's just so much garbage. It's just a avalanche of garbage. Um, and it kind of like, when I first went onto Twitter, I got a really low opinion of humanity because I was fooled into believing that this was reflective of what humans actually think. Um, but it actually took me a bit of time to realize that the stuff that you see on social media is overwhelmingly cons- it consists of stuff that people have posted hastily without thought. Because the people who really think about what they're posting, they take a lot longer to post. And so naturally, it's gonna be filled with stuff like, um, "Oh, I'm tired, lol." You know, "I'm gonna go to bed, lol," and stuff like, just meaningless nonsense like that is gonna be the stuff that makes the majority of social media posts. And I think this is why it's so important to curate your feed, um, because I always say that, um, a social media feed is the worst possible source of information you can have, but a well-curated social media feed is amongst the very best sources of information you can have. It makes such a difference. It- it's the difference between hell and heaven. And, um, a large part of that really consists of filtering out people who don't think before they post, people who just give in to their worst impulses and just follow their whims rather than actually following their logic and their rationality.

What was that insight you had around how famous people will tweet some half-baked idea whilst they're sat on the toilet that will then be studied by the entire world for the next three weeks?

(laughs) Yeah, I mean, um, I mean, this was kind of like a guess, but I think that this is true. I suspect it's true. I think w- we kind of, what's happened is that people, uh, have a tendency to over interpret information online. So they'll read into information a lot more than was intended. And I mean, I call this the politicization of babble, basically. I think that's what it, what it actually is, is a lot of people don't lo- because they don't think before they post, they're just making a comment about something that just off the top of their head, it's just something that's come very sort of, you know, quickly to their mind, and it's something that they just vomit out. They don't really think about it. And then what happens is you get people on the other side of the world who will see that, and they will assume that this is a hill that the person's willing to die on, something that they've spent their entire life thinking about. And they will scrutinize it and dissect it and evaluate it and write essays on it. And I've seen this happen a lot, you know, with... I mean, nowadays you get whole articles, whole news articles written about one tweet. You know, some, if some famous person like Elon Musk, if he just, just, you know, farts out a tweet, uh, then you'll get like a BBC journalist who will basically just lock onto that tweet and then they'll just write a whole piece about it, and they'll, they'll just completely scrutinize it as though they could sort of give a psychological profile based on this one tweet, you know?