You Feed the Algorithm

Have you ever noticed that your Google news feed seems to reflect results related to many of your recent searches? Or that your Facebook feed seems to show posts from the people you engage with the most?

This happens because of the algorithms used by social media sites and search engines. Perhaps you may not remember what you searched for last week, but Google does. Long after you forgot about your friend’s Instagram post, Instagram remembered that you liked it.

Most people are familiar with the results of algorithms, even if not familiar with how, exactly, they work.

The algorithms track your actions, not your intentions. What matters in shaping the content you get shown is what link you click; not why you clicked it.

This means that if you decide to go off researching opinions and viewpoints that are contrary to yours, if you want to get a more comprehensive understanding of alternative viewpoints, suddenly you’ll see more of those views.

We can make a good argument that this is a good thing, in that it takes us out of our echo chambers and exposes us to new ways of thinking about things. But that’s another topic for another time.

The point is that you feed the algorithm. It’s watching what you click on and what you engage with, so it can give you more of that. It assumes that if you click on something you want more of it.

Even if your intention was to do “opposition research.”

The Algorithm of Your Mind

Your mind also has an algorithm, and it works in the same way. Whatever thoughts you think regularly, or whatever you repeatedly speak aloud, feed the algorithm of your mind.

The more you say or think something, the more that thought will arise, and the more you will believe it to be true.

Again, intent is not relevant here. The algorithm of your mind doesn’t care if you’re verbally abusing yourself as a method of motivation; all it hears is the words you’re saying.

Every algorithm has a programmer behind it. The algorithm of our minds was programmed early on by the people who had dominance over us: parents, teachers, caregivers.

The words they said to us became the words we learned to say to ourselves, and we continued a cycle of feeding those inputs into the mind algorithm.

But we need not be stuck in this cycle forever.

You Can Reprogram Your Algorithm

Once we understand how the algorithm works, we can take charge of reprogramming it by feeding it empowering thoughts and words to form new beliefs.

Online and in your mind, you feed the algorithm. What are you feeding it with?