Morgan Housel

I have no statistic or even strong thing to back this up with.

My gut tells me that the younger generation in particular.

is gonna be the one that looks at social media and looks at AI and recognizes the bullshit that can come out of it.

It's the older generation, it's the boomers today on social media who believe everything that they see.

And I think that tends to be where a lot of the polarization comes from, not to blame everything on the older generation, but I think if you were to look at statistically who is the most gullible on social media of believing every post in their feed, it's the older generation.

And it would not surprise me if the younger generation is much more attuned to how quickly you can be led astray into some bullshit rabbit hole that is not reflective of how the broader world works.

I don't know if that's true or not, but if you were to ask me to articulate why we're going to get around the social media bubbles, it would be that the generations who have been doing this the longest are going to be the best at recognizing how dangerous it can be.

I think we have to remind ourselves two things about social media.

One is that it's been designed by the smartest people of our generation to deliver you in your feed, not the best information, not the right information, basically what's going to give you the most FOMO, the most anxiety, what's going to pull out the starkest reaction in you.

And the smartest people of our generation have gone to work at Facebook and Google and whatever, and TikTok, to make an algorithm that's going to give you that.

It's going to give you the thing in your feed that's going to make you go, whoa, what?

That's so out.

And two is that even when it's not that, even when it is just people's thoughts, people go on social media to perform, right?

They go on – like they are trying to give you – and I'm trying to do this on social media as well.

I don't want to give you any random thought in my head.

I'm going to specifically give you what I think is going to be interesting and whatnot.

So if we view social media as a proxy for the real world, and I think everyone kind of intuitively does, even if they – when you say it out loud, you're like, no, of course it's not the real world.

But it's easy to assume that when I open up Twitter or Facebook or Instagram –

I'm like, I'm just seeing a window into the world.

And you're like, no, these are people performing for you and the smartest minds in the world ordering that performance for what's going to give you the most anxiety.