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The Natural Selection of Bad Vibes
Why public discourse should be negative even when things are going well
They cite an “ optimism gap ”: for decades, people have tended to say that things are going wellfor them personally, even as they become increasingly pessimistic about their nation and the world. Look at the green line: if problems are 20% more likely to yield benefits, and each person has 50 topics to choose from (middle of the chart), the proportion of positive conversations—in a world where 90% of the news is good—is only 40%. This final point makes the prediction that as people have more topics to choose from, the negativity of public discourse will increase—even if the rate of positive news stays at a constant (high value).
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