Selecting information: When our logic can no longer bear it

So emotional, our society has become.

The massive flow of information and communication we have today makes most of us assume that our society must have become a more logical and fact-based society. Well, turns out they are not.

The overwhelming amount of information the cyber dimension of our life makes most of use confuse. The plethora of information and opinions vastly distributed in the network, also increase the need for ability to choose which one is valid and relevant. This sounds logical in its entirety, isn’t it?

Yet, to look at a vast array of information that comes into our brain, and the selecting them based on what is contextually valid and relevant, is not an easy thing to do. This is one type of executive intelligence necessary for today.

I have seen this mostly in the business setting, where today the web can offer almost anything. Different software businesses are utilizing increase the ability to give a larger and complex data for analysis. All of this is done in faster and faster way then before. In many cases, they are pushing into our door even though we are not expecting or looking for them.

In a way, we can say that information is invading our life sphere. With the continuously increasing demand for transparency, it is just making this invasion of information getting even more colossal.

In the past, seeking for more information is the most important part. Today, filtering and selecting information to be processed is what really matters.

But this is a skill only few possess, ironically.

Therefore, what we often see today is people start selecting information based on what they like. The supposedly normal logical filtering has become too overwhelming and overloaded, for most people. This is where the emotional preferences is taking over. Instead of choosing what is logically relevant, people start choosing what is emotionally resonant to them.

There is nothing wrong with this, really. What we do can work better when we love what we do. But when the emotional preference we are using deceives us, then we will probably select the unsuitable information. This emotional bias can be more difficult to deal with, in comparison with logical loophole.

Apparently, this skill to manage emotional biases has become a more important executive intelligence, possibly more than just being intellectually or logically sound.