**Edit: Thank you to a kind reader who pointed out that I said “binomial” at the start of the video when I meant to say “bimodal.”
Today I want to talk about people caring about us positively and negatively, distributions, and an insight I had about this.
Imagine a scale from - to +. People hate somebody, people love somebody, and neutral is in the middle. Usually we think that this is a normal distribution of how people react to us. Let’s say we start at neutral, some people like us a little bit, some people like us a little bit less. But as they get to know us better, we move the distribution. We either become more loved or we become more hated. But we think that the basic is a normal distribution. The question with a normal distribution is: Where is the center? Disliked, neutral or liked? And how wide is it?
I came to understand something different. Recently, I came to understand that when we move, we don’t move in either direction. We move in both directions. And we get what we call a bimodal distribution. As we make more waves in the world, it’s not just that we move one way or another. We move both ways. We get a distribution that has two peaks. Basically, we split in two directions. We have some people who love us more and we have some people who love us less. And the question, of course, is how big is each distribution?
I think it’s important to understand that if we want to move toward the upside, we must accept that we will also move to the downside. I think that people who want to be liked more must understand that it doesn’t mean the distribution will move to the positive side. It means that some people will move to the positive but there will be other people who move in the other direction. How high and how tall is each distribution? How many people does each contain?
Personally, I think I have come to be in this type of situation. As I started making some waves, more people liked me, but I also have more people who don’t. Now the catch is that people who don’t like me are much noisier. So I don’t recommend looking at Twitter for this information. It doesn’t give you the right information and it’s hard to figure out how many people fall in that distribution.
Remember as you make more waves, just realize it comes with a cost. So, I certainly feel that I have people in the more positive distribution, but I’m very well aware that I have people in the more negative distribution as well. This is where, I think, normal distributions do not yet completely describe the situation. It’s much better to think about the situation as a bimodal distribution. Liking and caring about people in this polarized environment is a bimodal distribution. I’m not sure if it’s sad or good. In my case, I feel it’s sad. But I’m not sure if, in general, it’s sad or good.
Remember: bimodal distribution is where one group of people are much more noisy than the other group. And therefore, the noisy people can make the distribution feel distorted.
Here’s to a better understanding of our impact (but not getting this understanding from Twitter/X, etc.).
