Telling each other about random samples of our daily lives (experiment)
Hello, my friends!
This is my first post and I am happy to join your noble community! I will be happy if I can somehow improve you, myself or this world.
I’m in urge to share with you an idea whitch can improve humanity’s ability to make sensible decisions in big groups. I’m sure it would have been better written if I had first carefully studied the principles of the forum and looked for statements similar or canceling my idea, but I’m afraid to get bogged down in procrastination and time is valuable. So I’ll post the idea first, and then I’ll figure out how it all works and delete / correct the post if it seems appropriate. So I ask you to have a little patience with this, as well as with my English.
Briefly the essence of the idea:
For the sake of effective collaboration, we should post information about our ordinary life on social media. To do this, I propose to use the analogue of experience sampling method.
Now expanded:
1. What problem prevents the mutual understanding between humans:
The media and the current way of doing social networks are widening the gap between people. Looking at posts on Instagram, the average user gets the impression that other people are much more different from him than they really are. And the whole point is that a concentrated essence of exceptions from everyday life falls into the field of view of the observer: both traditional media and active users first of all put on public display the outstanding aspects of life, and we have no other connection with the rest of humanity. As a result, atomization occurs.
2. What I suggest to solve this problem:
I believe that if we fill the network with things that are common to us, others will be able to feel how little we differ from them, to be imbued with trust.
I found out for myself that I didn’t even know my closest friends very well when I accidentally asked them to describe their typical day. This experience was nothing compared to what I saw in their Instagram posts! As a result, I realized that they do not live their lives as one continuous entertainment, and that they are just as lonely and confused people as I am. And I began to empathize with them more and it brought us closer.
Thus, for mutual understanding and strengthening of ties, it would be great if we kept others informed about the real state of affairs in our lives. However, we can’t stream our lives 24⁄7 and no one will be able to watch it, so the most realistic way to achieve this is to use random distribution—in the long run this spans the whole day, but takes the viewer and the publisher a digestible amount of time .
3. What exactly should be the first steps:
In the near future, as an experiment, I will start using this method in my social network accounts. The principle is this:
Random Reminder App gives a reminder twice a day at a random time from 08:00 to 22:00.
I take a photo of what I was doing at the monent notification arrived, add a description and optionally my thoughts on the topic.
I add a disclaimer about what is’s all about and the corresponding hashtag and publish it on the network.
4. Concerns:
The people with whom I shared this idea suggested that such content, even if it fulfills its purpose, will not be of interest to people: no one wants to see in their feed how bored you are sitting at the computer. I cannot (and see no point in trying to) confirm or refute these fears, let the experiment decide everything.
Conclusion:
I hope my idea will help people get rid of the “broken phone” and begin to perceive themselves as a group of like-minded people—humanity that can make decisions on its own (without intermediaries in the form of politicians and the media) correctly (because there are really smart people among us) and quickly (because we have the Internet and this wonderful forum).
That’s all, thank you for your attention. As the experiment progresses, I will supplement this publication. And I’d love to hear your opinion, whatever it may be!
Peace for everyone)
P.S. The original topic title “Humanity’s (in)ability to make sensble decisions in big groups”© - is a quote. I saw this expression on Twitter, it belongs to the pen of Jacob Eliosoff (@JaEsf) and I couldn’t say better.[1]
This seemingly already exists with BeReal.
”Its main feature is a daily notification that encourages users to share a photo of themselves and their immediate surroundings given a randomly selected two-minute window every day. Critics noted its emphasis on authenticity, which some felt crossed the line into mundanity.”
″As of July 2022 the app had over 20 million global installs estimated”
That is almost exactly what i was thinking about, thank you!
Hi Roman, I really like your post, the idea of experimenting with telling each other about random samples of our daily lives. Something that is more likely to bring people together than the slickly curated Instagram posts. It’s a very worthwhile thing to try and achieve, and you seem to be succeeding in it—so well done there!
However, the title of your post doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual content. I read your post expecting to find something about cognitive biases, for example, and groupthink, based on that title. Could you maybe consider giving your post a title which better reflects the content? Then you will be more likely to reach the readers you want to have a conversation with about it.
All the best!
Thanks for the helpful advice! Can I use your outside perspective again to say if the new topic is better?
Yes, much better.
Couple of questions :
You frame this as an idea to improve humanity’s ability to make sensible decisions in big groups. But how does posting photos contribute to decision making in a group situation? Feels like a leap between the problem statement and the proposed solution.
The mechanism you proposed would require an app capable of dealing with sharing and storing photos and data in a secure way. Did you have a specific solution in mind? Otherwise building such an app from scratch seems like a big technical effort.
1. First question
I’ve already mentioned “mutual understanding between humans”, and this is what I see as an intermediate step between stated problem and the proposed solution, but I may have underestimated inferential distances, so I’ll try to be more clear. I’m going to break down my answer into two parts: in the first part I’ll go into more detail about how the solution I proposed would help increase mutual understanding, and in the second I’ll explain how it all relates to decision making.
1.1. Mutural understanding
Due to the specifics of curiosity, the media field around me is filled with extremes. Therefore, when I try to imagine the society around me and my place in it, the availability heuristic throws up examples of abnormality for me, because of which my idea of “others” is formed with a distortion.
I believe that this effect affects everyone. I assume that if we fill social networks with more representative content, then this will normalize a person’s idea of the rest of society and their place in it. And photos are a good way to form a figurative, emotional perception, unlike the dry statistics.
1.2. Decision making
I have an idea about how to improve humanity’s ability to make sensible decisions in big groups (and I will definitely describe it in a separate post). But discussions will take a long time until a common opinion is formed, and this task may take precious years to complete. At the same time, I consider it very likely that the implementation of the final decision will in any case involve the need to increase mutual understanding among individuals in the first stage. Thus, despite the still open questions of the subsequent stages, it is worth starting the first step now.
So, perhaps, I really made a mistake with such a statement, and it should be rephrased like this: “I’m in urge to share with you an idea of the first step in the way to improve humanity’s ability to make sensible decisions in big groups”.
2. Second question
Yes, there seems to be a solution already and it’s Bereal (thanks DavidNash). But this great app is not yet available where I live, so I just use my Instagram and Facebook accounts paired with the Randomly RemindMe app for Android.
Thanks for the detailed response along with nice images!