A finding of absence is not an absence of findings

On stagnation, self-esteem, social media, and selection bias, briefly

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"How have you been working on yourself?" is the new question that I hope to be able to answer favourably, when queried. I recall first realising my magnitude of stagnation, when catching up with a friend with whom I try to meet every half-yearly, and nothing had fundamentally changed in the past six months, save some new experiences from my interaction with the circumstances beyond my control. I recognise, however, that it may be possible that any change happens so gradually as to be indiscernible to me, but is more evident to the periodic external observer. In my celebration, however, I have indeed observed improvement in some aspects that have far-reaching and outsized positive impacts across my life, which wasn’t the case before, such as now enjoying the company of myself to even frequently seek it after forced social activities. So I have become better, but perhaps not in a way that I can demonstrate through a tangible skill, such as playing the violin.

Having had the privilege of recently briefly getting to know some new wonderful people, I begin to internalise the perspective of the necessary situation whereof you may be greater than the people whom you surpass, but always inadequate amongst those who are better than you— and the balance is in choosing the domain in which you are willing to struggle in, to hopefully be good enough at it to more efficiently create value for others, and thereby for ourselves, which is the operational definition of the meaning of life that we have previously identified. 

I wouldn't dare say "extensively", but I had on numerous occasions written thematically about self-esteem and value. Is self-esteem a function of your immediate external environment and its people, or solely internally derived? The conundrum I then encounter is that the one who is confident in her skills and abilities may have a high self-esteem validated by her superior performance to those in her immediate environment, but a desire for growth might see her seek a more challenging environment in which she then becomes inferior. What impact does this have on her self-esteem, self-image or self-value? To what extent are they truly independent of external validation? Are these terms functionally interchangeable? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter, and what can we do about it? 

Of everything in the realm of character development, I believe that it took everything happening for things to have happened this way, in that having changed anything means changing the outcome of who I am today in a way that I necessarily cannot predict, and unlocking a different set of adjacent possibilities. However, this also means that it would have been possible to have had been so much better than who I am now, if I had had taken the route of successive best adjacent possibilities. And yet, progress isn’t linear, but jumps between distinct stages.

Perhaps what I have been experiencing isn't so much stagnation as it is just development in other domains that I merely do not value as much, or incomplete exploration, akin to completing a mega side quest that is implicitly required before one can progress with the main storyline.

I first realised the role of social media as an indispensable tool in the maintenance of friendships and acquaintanceships, only quite late on in the Fall of 2019. 

In book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell popularises the concept of “the Strength of Weak Ties”, first introduced by Mark Granovetter in his classic 1973 paper of the same name. The wisdom of the crowd is, more often than not, just the wisdom of someone in the crowd as opposed to that of the collective, and the strength of weak ties makes the network greater than the sum of its parts.

I think that the “problems” most often cited about social media are less problems than natural characteristics, or even features by design.

We understand the implications of the echo chamber, but I suspect that most of us may view this just as an external phenomenon that affects other people and not us, because our knowledge of it somehow makes us immune to its influence. This perspective may stem from the natural human tendency of all of us to think that we are better than the average person.

Selection bias describes the bias introduced by the selection of individuals or data points for analysis in such a way that proper randomisation is not achieved, then erroneously assuming that the sample obtained is representative of the whole population. Similarly, our perception of the average person is skewed and limited to those with whom we interact or know of, thus resulting in our inaccurate conclusion of our measurement in any metric against the “average person”. Moreover, echo chambers perpetuate in a closed feedback loop where content that you interact with will algorithmically be presented to you more often, thus leading invariably to the more of the same type of content being presented to you, further skewing your perception of the average.

A finding of absence should not be confused with an absence of findings. Our perception of the general landscape is also affected by survivorship bias, which describes the logical error of focusing on the people or examples that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, because of their characteristic lack of visibility. Therefore, our not seeing those who have failed at the same task before us does not necessarily mean that there are no people who have failed, for those who did not succeed would no longer comprise the current visible data set under consideration. 

This also means that to accurately gauge the magnitude of difficulty or achievement of a particular task, we must first know the size of the original pool of people before attrition. Else, just as how an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters will invariably see one monkey produce the works of Shakespeare, so the successful outcome of one individual may not reflect her abilities as much as it may represent sheer luck of circumstance. This is not to undermine individual achievement, but to remind that sometimes the qualities that we attribute to personal success may not be the sole causal factors that can lead to the same consistently reproducible success in the future. Instead, it may just be that people with good handwriting write neat notes, and not people who write neat notes will develop good handwriting.