Safety in numbers

For social creatures, there is safety in numbers.

Even for social creatures with don’t have to look over their shoulders all the time to keep an eye on their predators.
Humans find safety in numbers when it comes to decision making: it matters to us what other people think and if the majority thinks something, we feel it is good for us to follow that example.

I guess that is deeply ingrained in our social nature and serves our safety well.

Still, I feel there is more to it than meets the eye, worth a blog post.
It is something I find interesting, zooming ‘in’ a little and zooming ‘out’ a little too on the process of gathering information in social context to feed your decision making processes with.

Zooming ‘ out’

I start zooming ‘out’ with an internet example of taking into account what others think.

General booking websites for accommodations are usually equipped with ratings and reviews, to accommodate for the customers desire to ‘ know what others think’ on this matter.

If you were to see a B&B with appealing pictures on an appealing location with a rating of 4 out of 10, with comments like:” The breakfast tastes like cardboard” and “ the staff is grumpy”....  first thing you look at is probably:”How many people contributed to this rating?”.
If it was 1 person, you may think ‘ incident’ and decide to book.
If it was based  on  124, you’d most likely take the low rating a bit more serious. There is safety in numbers, apparently there is a pattern, this ‘ grumpy breakfast thing’ was not an incident.

You are still free to book it anyway and simply “ see how it goes.”
However, don’t be too surprised if the breakfast does taste like cardboard and is served by grumpy staff.
Of course, you can be lucky and have a marvellous breakfast served by the new cheerful smiling member of staff.

But most people, when given the choice and the available data on previous experiences, will chose to book a nice B&B with more appealing ratings and reviews.

Case closed.....
O no..... not yet, not completely.

For the reviews and rating to be even more valuable in your decision making process, it would help if you knew a little bit more about the people who voted and commented. How ‘ alike’ are they in preferences, what they sought to experience, compared to you?

Picture seeing a not-too expensive hotel with a rating 9 out of 10 (based on 106 entries) , appreciating it in various degrees of being -just in the right spot to have a good time-.
Your finger may already hover above the ‘book now’ button.

But what if your idea for the right spot to have a good time is a calm hotel, home base to sleep well to be walking in nature all day and these 106 content customers liked it for the all-night-every-night disco in the basement and the 24/7 buzzing terraces of bars just next door, conveniently close to the train station to get there?
Still that eager to book?

So.... you’d be on the lookout to identify ‘ your kind of people’, with whom you’ve got a lot in common, to make your decisions more meaningful and likely to lead to nice experiences.

On booking sites... that is not so easy to determine.
However, how convenient..... there is a social network of people you personally know and like, in various degrees.

Let’s have a closer look at this social network.

How many people do you (personally) know, how many individuals are there in your social network?
How many of them would you consider influential on your (everyday) life decisions, in some degree (actively or passively)?

It can be more, it can be less, but for the sake of this blog post let’s set the number on 100. But feel free to work this mental exercise out with your own real numbers.

A hundred, that is a fair bunch you would say, enough to give gravity to valuing what they say and think, especially if they all seem to lean into liking similar choices, finding these matters contributing to their quality of life.

But just as a mental exercise......

• What if, due to the same cultural programming, most of these 100 are not at all aware of better options.
• What if, most of these  100 are getting it all ‘ wrong’ assuming that these common options are a real contribution to the quality of (your) life and your wellbeing (in the long run).
• What if there are better options; better as in... not only satisfying and gratifying now ( pleasure), but also having more appealing harmonious long term effects in important areas of life ( peace, harmony, joy in all your affairs).....

The first question you’d probably ask to protect your network of reliable sources is :” Says who.....?”
This one vague very alternative acquaintance?

Well...

• What about 100.000 people you don’t personally know, with the same cultural background as you, still alive.
• What about 700.000 people you don’t personally know, with another cultural background, still alive.
• What about an infinite amount of people (think millions) , who made their experience available to you, even if they are not alive on this planet, like you, right now.

You may have calculated, that based on your own database, containing 99 entries of rating something as a excellent idea to have a good time (10 out of 10), with only 1 vote indicating the contrary, that you have a 99% score of excellence for this choice, making it a no-brainer to chose it too.

But what if, on a larger scale, in a larger database, (the database of all human experiences), these 99 entries become a small minority... (much less than 0,1%)

What if, in this very same database, your whole cultural alike programmed population alive right now (even if it is 80 million or so), voting ‘ pro’ something, is a small minority in the billions of entries..... (maybe 1% if you count all people alive today),

What if.... even if you took the whole western world as a benchmark it wouldn’t get anywhere near a majority of the people now alive (about 18% of the people live in Europe, North America/Canada or Oceania)

Majority is a very relative term, seen in this light.

And what if you could fine tune, filter in that database on other characteristics than ‘ calling something a good thing to have a good time’?

What if you were then to see that a vast majority of the culturally alike living human beings is not happy with their life (rating it 6 out of 10, on a good day), suffering from many long term and often life threatening behaviour related diseases. Would you still consider this group to be your best shot  to base your (important) life choices on?

What if now, suddenly, in this bigger database, this one vague acquaintance of yours is part of a group of people who actually enjoy life every single day, are happy with who they are and what they do, are fit, healthy, creative and resourceful, experiencing having enough of everything that is important and sharing their resources harmoniously with others?

Even in that vast database, it may only be a small group: 2% .....maybe?
Just a tiny little small group of only 146,5 million souls:  happy, healthy, harmoniously living people, if we count the current world population.

What if this group is unanimous that behaviour X and choices Y are actually decreasing long term wellbeing and health.... the behaviour considered to be “a good idea to have a good time” by your 99 and your 80 million, has in their experience ( not opinion, not theoretical speculations, but really lived and tested experiences!) .... much better (healthier, harmonious) alternatives and they can name them too!?

Well.... how significant is this?
Hardly!?

You are reasonably happy now (6 out of 10, which is average in your social network, not bad at all), reasonably healthy too (7 out of 10) and value those little pleasures of life ( alcohol, smoking, mass produced cheap food, looking at screens for hours in a day (television, computer, smart phones) are just that... the little pleasures to keep an equilibrium to stay at 6-7 rates on happy and healthy.

OK let’s make the matter a little bit ‘ close to home’ and see if significance increases, in this thought experiment.

zooming'in' 

Let’s zoom in.....on this scenario:

Unfortunately, you find yourself developing a rare disease. Healthy rates drops to 4 out of 10 and are decreasing..... happy rates follow in its slipstream rapidly.

You consult your doctor, who has no real clue on what it is , let alone what can be done to heal.
But, fortunately, he has a wide circle of 150 doctor-friends and he’s willing to consult them on your case.

Unfortunately, your circle combined with his, contains nobody who has ever dealt with this.

Are you happy with him slicing you to pieces, to examine various body parts?
Are you happy with him, or one of his doctor friends to experiment on you with sticking various generic drugs into your system to see what ‘ sticks’, what might help?

Or would you be interested in getting in touch with the only three doctors alive in this world who have treated somebody with your rare disease successfully?

150 medical experts with no relevant experience, nor proven success in this domain, or 3 who have.....?

There is a possibility that these three doctors are:

• An Indian doctor in a shanty town.
• A 90 year old medicine woman in an isolated tribe in Africa.
• A young practitioner in alternative medicine, now 21, having helped his father to overcome this disease using his natural healing ability at the age of 11.

If you get past  a range of ‘ OMG trust’-issues on ‘ this kind of people’ ....you might think practically: ”We can’t contact them, because we don’t know them and they can’t be found on the internet!”

Seeing what this blog is about.... you may gather that I see other ways of tapping into the experience of these three doctors.

There might be safety in such a small number as 3, or an even smaller number......ONE.
And being part of and being guided by the advices of ‘2% ‘ can make a great deal of difference to the quality of ( your) life.