Anger + Passion ≠ Importance // Variant Perception #15

Narrative distortion has become integrated with our modern world. Social media combined with traditional media’s money incentives optimizes the news flow for what’s most volatile, not for what’s most important. This week’s flavor came up from the combination of a trans online influencer, a great article by Mike Solana, and my family trip to Sedona.

Mike published on his recent newsletter “Pirates Wire” a quote that struck me:

“the intensity of this culture war backlash is revelatory of something actually important: there is a critical incompatibility between any kind of stabile mainstream culture, and social media at scale.”

I’ve written about this before. The internet is a particle accelerator for the most inflammatory ideas and opinions. What’s most enraging, frustrating, thrilling, or shocking is what’s most shared and spread in our viral media culture.

This goes all the way up the pole to people who don’t get their news from Reddit and Twitter eventually filtering its way up to cable news.

And it’s true. These topics are incredibly captivating.

This last week I was in Sedona with my family celebrating my Dad’s 75th birthday. We began talking about the current cultural zeitgeist of gender ideology, and, quickly, the energy of the conversation rose to become more passionate, with a tone of frustration.

It was a circular loop of emotional agreement, and, to be honest, it felt kind of good. But not good like a tough workout, seeing a beautiful vista after finishing a difficult hike, or hitting that perfect line on a ski slope. It felt good like a Chick-fil-a 12-count nugget, large fry, Coca-Cola, and a milkshake good…

This conversation didn’t bring us closer as a family. And, it sure didn’t help us solve any problems facing our society. We didn’t talk about what values we look to espouse and cultivate, or how serious of an issue gender ideology is based on facts, data, or any real relative context. Instead we just chased an emotional high that came from talking about something inflammatory.

All us humans share a tendency to become captivated by ideas that evoke the strongest emotional response versus what ideas have the most sound logic and reasoning.

We see this over and over when hot-button topics get coopted not by the most rational, logical, data-driven, down-the-middle group of people but by the loudest, most emotional, volatile, and bombastic instigators.

And, this quote from Mike struck me. I can admit I’m affected by this. In fact, it’s a well-studied cognitive bias called the affect heuristic that people tend to overweight the most emotionally volatile opinions versus the most data-driven.

The affect heuristic cognitive bias states that humans tend to overweight the importance of topics that they feel the most emotions around. Their judgement and decision-making becomes influenced more by what thoughts, topics, or opinions create the largest spike in positive or negative feelings.

Safe to say my family conversation became captured by the affect heuristic. We cared more about how the topic made us feel rather than the evidence-based, rational assessment of the importance.

The issue of gender, individual expression, and the role this plays in society is an incredibly polarizing one with strong feelings and emotions on both sides.

We’ve seen the last few weeks this lightning rod online drama around Bud Light and trans social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

If you look at conservative media, you’ll see Kid Rock emptying a clip into a case of Bud Light and boycotts celebrating a 20% drop in Bud Light sales.

If you look at liberal media you’ll see this event characterized as a hate movement that threatens, oppresses, and commits violence on a group of people.

It shows how incredibly emotional of a topic this is where it’s so easy to lose the thread of reality.

If you read conservative media you might think Anheuser-Busch stock has cratered. Yet, the stock is up for the year and has suffered almost no recent volatility from the recent boycotts.

We also might be led to believe by what’s most shared on social media that there’s a tidal wave of gender ideology making its way into the school system with drag events on every street corner.

I can easily go find dozens of videos from the libsoftiktok Twitter account that show teachers who openly share how they teach their students about gender fluidity and how they openly desire to influence their students.

However, when I went to look for data and research to support that gender ideology was broadly taught in schools I could not find anything conclusive.

There’s roughly three million public school teachers and 50 million students in America right now.

With no official curriculum that references gender fluidity I could find and millions of teachers and tens of millions of students what’s the actual occurrence of these teachers in these schools?

Where I’m landing on this is it’s likely a small group of teachers who have a personal desire to impose their ideology versus a broad campaign to teach gender fluidity concepts to students.

Just taking a napkin-math approach and applying the same percent of trans people out of the population (0.5%) to teachers we can assume there’s roughly 15,000 teachers who identify or are trans.

I would actually be shocked if there were that many teachers who both identified as trans and also had a desire to impose their ideology onto their students knowing that the vast majority of people hold a binary reality around gender.

So, to wrap this up I want to bring back the quote from Solana:

“there is a critical incompatibility between any kind of stabile mainstream culture, and social media at scale.”

Depending on your own social media/media echo chamber you may believe that there’s a tidal wave of either hate and oppression or imposition and coercion surrounding gender ideology. When instead, what’s most likely is that this topic holds the correct amount of emotional charge perfect for creating a media wildfire.

We all have a role to play in how we influence our own culture. How we react to inflammatory news, opinions, and online media. And, if we all desire to have a stabile mainstream culture fixing the incentives of media needs to be at the top of our list of priorities.

-Jared