You’re in a room, there is an apple on the table that you want to eat. There is a wasp in the room with you. Assuming you’re not deathly allergic or exceptionally scared of stinging insects, your response may be to simply eat the apple, keeping an eye on the wasp and waving it away if it comes near, or you may decide to swat the wasp with a rolled up newspaper, or trap it with a glass and postcard and humanely release it at the window. The apple, when you eat it, is very enjoyable, but this won’t be a day that you regard as particularly memorable. One wasp per apple is easy to deal with.
Another time, you’re in a room and there are 100 apples. More than you can possibly eat, and you have the luxury of choosing the very nicest looking, most ripe and juicy apple from the large collection in front of you.
There are, in this room, also 100 wasps. This probably isn’t OK. This probably isn’t something you can deal with by swatting them or ignoring them or humanely releasing them outdoors. In fact, this is a swarm of wasps. Indeed, the large number of apples present is causing the wasps to behave differently - more aggressively compared to the single wasp you encountered before.
None of the things you did when there was only one wasp and one apple are effective now. One wasp per apple is not easy to deal with. You will remember this day as the day that you encountered a swarm of wasps.
Of course, the obvious ratio that has changed is the one that includes you - there’s still only one of you, which is part of the problem, but not the whole of it. The phenomenon of 100 wasps and 100 apples in the same room simply isn’t quite the same phenomenon as 1 wasp and 1 apple.
This is an analogy. What I am really thinking about is the way we deal with threats and problems. I think it is expected that our lives contain good and bad things in them, and that in a normal situation, the bad things are sufficiently offset by the good.
I think that is true, but I also think there is sometimes an expectation that when there are more things in total, that the good things will continue to offset the bad, as long as the ratio stays constant. I don’t find that it does. At a certain point, the good things reach saturation where their increase does not convey any greater benefit, but the same may not necessarily be true of the bad things.
Without wishing to labour the analogy, one point I neglected to make is the possibility that, in the face of a swarm of 100 wasps, you might flee, and never even get one apple. Scaling up the outward situation, ecen in perfect proportion, leads to very different outcomes.
I think the flaw in your reasoning here is that you’re assuming that bad things always increase at the same rate that good things in one’s life may be increasing. This may be true to some extent (more money, more problems), but in general I think a good life is one in which there are more good things on the whole than bad. They are not intrinsically tied together. 100 wasps is a problem no matter how many apples you may have. 100 apples is a nice supply. That many apples may attract wasps, but the problem is not how many apples you have, it’s that you need to store your apples better or fix the hole in your screen.
I used to have a similar thought experiment: if you flip a coin 10,000 times, you might have runs where you flip heads 10 times in a row, but the average will eventually always balance out to 50/50. I wondered, does it work that way with good luck vs. bad luck in life? For example, winning millions of dollars in the lottery may be the luckiness equivalent of flipping heads 50 times in a row. Does that mean you’ll also have some extraordinary bad luck, say you’re more likely to die in a plane crash or contract a horrible disease? I eventually decided it was a false analogy. Some people have more good luck, some have more bad luck. And of course people make their lives better or worse through the actions they take.
You seem to be saying that if you only have one problem it may be easy to deal with, but if you have many problems the situation may be a lot more difficult to deal with, and the large number of problems may overshadow your happiness. That’s completely obvious, so maybe I’m misunderstanding something.
I made no such assumption about what will happen. This is actually about situations where that does happen, and how it simply isn’t enough to do more of the same things that worked perfectly fine as a different scale
It relates to a real world issue, but I wished to discuss it in the abstract. It’s actually about problems that are easy to simply ignore when there are a few of them, but I tolerably difficult at a larger volume, even when their dilution is the same ratio.
A concrete example would help. If you don’t want to discuss the actual issue, then perhaps you could give a different example from the wasps and apples.
OK, imagine a situation where people give you feedback throughout your week. Let’s say the ratio of positive to negative feedback is 99:1
So in a week where you receive 100 pieces of feedback, 99 of them are positive. 1 says ‘I hate you, you’re useless’. It’s pretty easy to simply ignore it, because 99 people said nice things; that one seems like a drop in the ocean. An isolated incident.
Time moves on and the situation changes to the point where you are receiving 10,000 pieces of feedback in a week. The ratio hasn’t changed, so 9,900 of them are glowingly positive and 100 people said they hate you. At this point, the statistical weight of the positive just doesn’t work any more, because holy shit, 100 people.100 different people went to the trouble of saying they hate you.
This is entirely about perception, but the effect can be very real. It’s still the same proportion as the ‘drop in the ocean’ above, but the ocean is now too big to count, The number 100 isn’t. ‘Just ignore it’ doesn’t work any more.
Natural selection doesn’t seem to favor the ability to put things in perspective and threat will always have a more immediate emotional response than bounty.
No, but it’s marginally better than 100 apples and 100 wasps.
I think you’re splitting hairs a bit. My point was that Mangetout seemed to be claiming that good things and bad things are intrinsically connected, such that the more good things you may acquire, you also acquire bad things at the same rate, and at some point the increase of the good things does not compensate for the equal increase of the bad. I was arguing the basic premise. Just because you manage to collect 100 apples does not mean that you’re also going to be stuck with 100 wasps.
In any case, I made that statement when I thought the discussion was a philosophical hypothetical, not some actual situation that Mangetout is dealing with. I hope things are OK, Mangetout.
Ok, I just saw this. A bit better hypothetical than apples and wasps, I think. In this case, yes, I get it, the sheer number of negative replies would be tough to take, even though the ratio was the same low percentage. I think all you can do in that situation is to laser-focus on the ratio and remember you can’t please everybody.
Thanks - yeah, things are OK, ish. My solution has been to withdraw and take a sabbatical from participation in the scenario where the problem is happening, which is nice in that I don’t have to deal with the wasps, but it does mean I am also temporarily depriving myself of apples too.
Yes there are two saturation points to abundance. We see it in the affluent who are desperate to identify with rarity - go into space or own a Bugatti. We are less familiar with the bottom. They have run out of things that will provide differentiation.
My youngest son has explored the extremes of human existence. He explained to me that individuals can reach a level of deprivation where a destructive life style makes sense to them.
Your horizon shrinks to a point directly in front of you. You have no future and your past is of no consequence. You have no assets and you are not employable. Any debts will never be repaid. Your only comfort is the company of like humans engaged in activities that are degrading and destructive. It’s a flat line existence. You have reached saturation. An IRS debt, police summons or even a broken leg will not significantly change your life style. Because debts will not be paid, your mobility is not great and jail might be a step up.
So what is your cut-off point - somewhere between 1 and 100 apparently.
5?
10?
25?
Isn’t this just optimism/pessimism … i’d be tempted to think “holy cow, 9900 likes !!”
If it was just likes, dislikes, thumbs up and down, sure, the ratio works at all scales (because you see the totals - the ratio)
It’s quite different when the negative things are more like personal attacks, because you feel the cumulative weight of the intent.
I know this is still a hypothetical, just maybe a little closer to what you’re experiencing than the original apples and wasps analogy. So I don’t really know if my advice is any good, but again, I think it’s good to focus on the very small ratio of negatives, despite the overall number. And, if you are actually getting in the neighborhood of 10,000 pieces of feedback, 100 of which are negative, at that scale I would think it’s less a personal attack than people reflecting their own personal biases.
I might see a product on Amazon that has very positive reviews, but even the best, most reliable product is going to have a small percentage of 1 star reviews. But when you read those 1 star reviews, you find that a lot of them say stuff like “it was damaged in shipping”. Or, “it’s not what I expected it was”. That’s not the fault of the product, moron.
It’s sort of not hypothetical in this example. I used to be able to just shrug off the statistically tiny proportion of hater comments and the occasional death threat via email. The overall volume has increased dramatically as my channel grew, I think the ratio of nice has actually increased. The proportion of negative is probably smaller, but the amount is dramatically greater, and it sort of jumps out. Ignoring it doesn’t work any more.
And the simple act of trying to engage with the greater proportion of good feedback results in accidental exposure to the bad. You can’t have one without the other.
I don’t know if simply the knowledge that this is a perceptual phenomenon will help to overcome it, or if I need to do something else.
I’m trying (at the moment) a week of sabbatical from commentary engagement. It’s definitely a relief to be away from the hate, but I am missing the positivity and kind inspiration of the majority of supportive feedback.