Keep Writing! Selection Bias Tricks You to Only See Outliers

Congratulations! You have started writing online. But when you look at other people publishing on social media, all you can see is people with ten-folds your engagement.

Don’t worry! Your brain and social media are misleading you. Selection bias is at play. Let me tell you more about it!

Other people seem to have better engagement

I was scrolling through other people’s ship30for30 essays yesterday evening, and I was worried. At the time, no one had commented on my essays. At the same time, other people were getting a lot of feedback.

All I could see was other people’s success

What I can see happening in social media is not representative of what is happening.

Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of data for analysis so that it lacks proper randomisation.

Machines don’t know how to do randomisation (they use some tricks), let alone our brains. We pick and choose the information following bias in our minds.

• Bias in the Mind: My brain chose to see more success stories and bookmark their essays to read them later.
• Bias in the Machine: The algorithm chose atomic essays to show me.

Selection bias only shows us a part of the larger picture. We don’t see people like us who, despite the perceived low engagement, show up every day trying to understand how to write better essays consistently.

There is no point comparing our progress to others

We are on our journey, and there is no objective way to say how we are doing compared to others. All we can do is take one more step ahead.

This post was created with Typeshare