In my conversations with people (both online and face-to-face conversations) about the post-election media environment, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my position as a dispassionate optimist. Is this because the world itself is contradicting that position, or is it because I'm being met with more resistance from those around me? That's what I'm still trying to sort out.
Many of the conversations come back to the premise that America is somehow more hostile than it used to be (not just that our leaders are objectionable and/or dangerous, but that the increasing danger resides in our populous). There are also conversations about what particular politicians are doing, will do, or can do, but I want to set those aside for a moment and focus on premises relating to the American population and the extent and intensity of its hostility toward one another. Previously, I've argued that the impression that we're a nation divided is largely an illusion, that the true conflict is mainly at the fringes, but that was before the election. So, I'd like to revisit that argument in light of discussions of public opinion, fake news, and a general sense of threat.
Essentially, my argument was that the strong disagreement we see in our culture is relegated to small groups of individuals on either end of an ideological spectrum that manifests themselves in highly visible ways. Although it can appear as though our entire culture is in a state of unrest (and is getting worse in this respect), this may be an illusion. To paraphrase myself:
This illusion occurs when we mistake uncommon, extreme online behaviors for exemplars. We implicitly or explicitly link hundreds or thousands of people actually stating a belief online (or, in this case, acting hostile toward other Americans online) with the behaviors and beliefs of a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the belief, has stated or acted in such ways that makes it clear that they believe in some of the same things as the group that actually states the belief online. In the U.S. right now, the large groups to which we most often extrapolate are "liberals/Democrats" and "conservatives/Republicans." Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the belief (or actually being openly hostile) online and members of the large group who are not stating the belief (and are not actually being openly hostile online) are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common. This is justified on the grounds that what the small group and the large group have in common is thought to represent a shared, coherent ideological framework (see "Arguing with the Fringes" for further details).
In retrospect, I shouldn't have used the word "fringe" to describe these small groups. The word feels dismissive and judgmental, which is not what I intended. Really, I just want to make a statement about the size of the groups that are in strong disagreement with (and are hostile toward) other Americans. Still, the term "fringe fighting" has a certain ring to it, and I can't think of a suitable alternative word for these groups at the moment, so for the purposes of this post, I'll stick with "fringe."
Arguments/evidence for the Fringe Fighting hypothesis
Though there is more talk about social unrest than there was when I wrote "Arguing with the Fringes," this talk fits a "moral panic" narrative in which people become extremely alarmed over novel behavior that is rapidly becoming popular (often involving media use) and extrapolate to a future world in which the novel behavior radically changes our world for the worse. There are, of course, concerns about rapidly spreading novel behaviors that turn out to be justified, and the dismissal of such concerns as hysterical can have dire consequences. But there are also dire consequences to succumbing to overblown fears, namely rapid declines in interpersonal and institutional trust that are essential to functioning societies, in addition to the "boy who cried 'wolf'" problem (if one's concerns are found by others to be overblown, one loses credibility, forfeiting the ability to call others' attention to future threats). Given the similarities between the talk of social unrest and previous instances of moral panics, it at least seems worthwhile to consider the possibility that concern about Americans' hostility toward one another is a moral panic.
It is also important to ask, "What are we using as indicators of how 320 Million or so Americans think of feel?" How Americans voted and what they say on the internet seem to be commonly used indicators. The majority of Americans did not vote in the last election, so it would be difficult to use 2016 voting behavior to assume anything about how "America" feels about anything. For those who did vote, whom they voted for is a pretty weak signal of any particular belief, as these candidates, in effect, bundle together various disparate beliefs, and some votes are not intended as endorsements of anything the candidate stated or believed but instead are merely "protest votes."
What people say on the internet is also a weak signal of overall public opinion. For one thing, comparatively few people post about politics and social issues (roughly one-third of social media users, according to Pew). And many of those are posting information that is visible only to those in their immediate social circles (e.g., posting on Facebook). Such information is highly salient to individuals consciously or unconsciously forming beliefs about what other Americans believe, but it is hardly representative of Americans as a whole.
We may also question assumptions about the impact the hostility we're able to see is having. The extreme voices may have been largely filtered out because most of their friends unfollowed or hid them. The only people who don't filter out the extreme voices are the ones who already would have believed whatever the poster is trying to convince them of. What good is sharing a news story if very few people follow you, and those few people already knew about the news you're sharing? As a side note, it would be nice to have some information about actual audience and the practice of unfollowing to go along with the information about sharing and 'liking' information online.
Better evidence about what America, as a whole, believes can be found in the General Social Survey, which attempts to look at what ALL Americans believe rather than the few that contribute content to the internet. Data from the survey suggests that American public opinion on a variety of social issues is relatively stable over the past few decades; an abrupt shift in that, though not impossible, would seem unlikely.
Finally, there is evidence that the growth of political animosity in the U.S. is a trend that pre-dates social media, so perhaps social media is just making visible what was already there. It should be noted that animosity (and attitude) is not the same thing as hostility (a behavior).
Arguments/evidence against the Fringe Fighting hypothesis
There is some evidence of growing distrust of the media. If you're not getting your information from the media (or whatever you define "mainstream media" as), where are you getting it from? You could either get it directly from alternative news sources or get it via social media, which carries stories from those alternative news sources. Many existing measures of exposure to news have yet to catch up with the way we consume news. It is entirely possible, given the growing distrust in mass/mainstream media and the lack of good indicators about where Americans get their information, that Americans have quickly shifted toward consuming news stories that frame current events chielfy in terms of conflict between groups of Americans.
What does this have to do with hostility? Well, those intra-American-conflict news stories could play to whatever various groups are inclined to believe about various other groups, play to one's fears (climate change on the Left; undesirable social change on the Right; an unfair, "rigged" economy and government on both the Left and Right), decrease trust and empathy, increase fear and cynicism, and sew dissent. Very few people may be initially fighting with one another, but if those people can disseminate information so as to convince disinterested others that the people on the Other Side of the fight are a growing threat to everyone, they can effectively "enlist" those disinterested others in the fight. What starts as a fringe fight could quickly grow into something larger.
So What?
For a moment, let's assume that there is a problem, that a significant number of people in America disagree with one another to a significant degree. Is this necessarily bad? Disagreement isn't bad in and of itself; arguably, it's desirable so as to avoid the pitfalls of "groupthink." But strong disagreement could lead to incivility (which, some would say, is antithetical to empathy and compromise, and compromise seems like a prerequisite to having a functioning democracy and economy) and censorship (which is antithetical to democracy and the progress of science and education). Incivility could lead to violent attacks (though I've heard at least one scholar argue that arguments can be uncivil and not be bad in these senses). In so far as we see evidence of strong disagreement growing and/or leading to incivility, censorship, and violent attacks, then yes, it's bad.
Assuming we have a problem, what do we do about it? It's possible that the traditional channels by which we sought to address social unrest would no longer work within a decentralized, non-hierarchical information system like today's (or tomorrow's) internet. This is the "everyone finds their own facts" problem (a topic for an upcoming blog entry). Even if you engage in a dispassionate analysis of evidence and find support for the fringe fighting hypothesis, or evidence that people are consuming more and more biased information and wandering further from any objective truth, what are you going to do with that information? You might teach it in a class, but if people don't want to hear it, then people might just start distrusting teachers more. You might publish in an academic journal, but what good is that when the journal loses it's sense of authority and credibility? If you publish in that academic journal and your research is covered by The New York Times, what good is that if fewer and fewer people trust The New York Times?
I'm left with a desire (quixotic as it may be) to try to step outside the problem. I know that many are fond of casting Intra-American conflict (online and offline) as a part of global phenomenon, but here again, I think we're making a facile analogy, choosing to see the similarities and ignoring the many differences. Surely, not every country is experiencing precisely the same kind of online conflict problem that Americans are experiencing. I was reminded of this point while attending this year's Association of Internet Researchers annual conference in Berlin, where I was fortunate enough to present on a panel with researchers from Israel, Denmark, and the U.K. I was left with the notion that not all online discussion forums are the same with regard to conflict, that intra-group conflict is not inevitable in the digital era.
We might also step outside of the internet for a moment. Anecdotally, I've observed a few folks taking a break from social media and news media because the emotional pitch of online discourse became so shrill as to be unbearable. I'm reminded of an idea put forth in Joshua Rothman's book review in the New Yorker (as well as the book he was reviewing, I assume) that our face-to-face interactions with individuals and our feelings about the political groups to which those individuals belong are often in conflict. Short version: we love (or at least tolerate) our neighbors but we hate the political groups to which they belong. The basic idea is that it is harder to hate a person in person. It will be important to see how our face-to-face interactions at work, school, family, and in public places progresses along side our perceptions of behavior online.
So, where to go from here? For starters, it seems worthwhile to examine the framing of news about current events: do we really see an uptick in exposure to intra-American conflict framing, or are our filter bubbles fooling us into think this? It's also important to understand more about the contexts in which online hostility occurs (a goal of my current research project examining hostile behavior on Reddit) and when and where this is associated with offline hostility.
Showing posts with label biases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biases. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Egg-manning: Arguing with the fringes
I've been thinking more about writer Dan Brooks's post about the death of the Straw Man and the rise of the Egg Man. I'm not in love with Brooks's name for this "egg-manning" phenomenon (for one thing, googling it currently yields pictures of Peyton Manning being egged, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but is indicative of the requirement of lexical singularity in the age of Google). So far, I've only been able to find one other use of it online (by blogger Tim Hall). But as I read more opinion pieces on both mainstream news websites like the New York Times and encounter news via social media (on Facebook and Twitter, where the person sharing the opinion piece is, in effect, endorsing the argument), I keep returning to this concept.
While straw-manning involves making up an imaginary person who holds a view opposed to your own just so that you can refute it, egg-manning involves finding a real person advancing a real view on social media just so that you can refute it. Finding an actual person essentially justifies the necessity of making your argument. There really are people who must be argued against!
Straw-manning involved assuming that someone out there disagrees with your argument. Egg-manning does not assume this, but instead makes another, typically unstated, assumption. The assumption that egg-manners make is that the person making the argument opposed to their own is part of a large, influential group of people, and that the expression of the argument is part of a larger trend. Rarely is any particular opinion held by only one person; you can search for a hashtag or a term or through various interconnected bits of the blogosphere or social news networks and usually find hundreds or maybe thousands of examples of the argument which you wish to argue against.
The next step in the assumption is the implicit or explicit linking of these hundreds or thousands of people actually stating the argument online with a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the argument, has stated or acted in such ways that makes it clear that they believe in some of the same things as the group that actually states the argument online. Most often in the U.S., these large mainstream groups are liberals/Democrats or conservatives/Republicans. Sometimes, they're smaller and/or more amorphous groups, like racists, sexists, Tea-Partiers, Social Justice Warriors, fraternity brothers, hipsters, or many other groups that are partially defined by their stated beliefs and actions. The largest, most amorphous group to be argued against in the U.S. right now is The Establishment. Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the argument online and the large group not stating the argument are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common, which, to the egg-manner, represents a coherent ideological framework.
Even if that group of people isn't large right now, it could become large in the future if its ideas are not argued against. Often times, an example from history is provided to show how quickly ideas can spread if they are not forcefully countered with another argument, a time when silence sealed the fate of a people. In the past, small, vocal groups of people got large less-vocal groups to go along with them. This is intended to make it clear that arguing against a dangerous idea is not so much an act of participating in civil discourse (and thus not subject to the informal rules of civil discourse), but a kind of duty, and that to fail to argue against it would constitute negligence of one's duty.
Sometimes, the egg-manners are correct, as many people who assume things tend to be every now and then: a dangerous view that once was fringe becomes mainstream. It can happen quickly with viral spread of ideas through social media. But other times, the egg-manners are incorrect. The view never becomes one held by more than an un-influential, fringe group online. Of course, if you are able to indefinitely postpone the point at which you believe the fringe idea will become mainstream, you can never be proven wrong, but if we were to require that the aforementioned assumptions be tested (which requires setting a finite time frame in which the fringe idea would become mainstream), I think that many assumptions like this would turn out not to be true.
Then there is the possibility of a backfiring effect: that by arguing against the fringe idea, egg-manners give legitimacy to it, thus bringing about its popularity. Not only are egg-manners raising the profile of ideas with which they argue; they are also providing more examples of opposite arguments for the egg-manners on the other side of argument to use in their egg-manning. There's likely an emotional component to the way in which egg-manning fuels that which it seeks to fight: anger from one side fuels anger from the other.
It's unclear whether egg-manners consider their arguments to be "arguments" in the traditional sense - attempts to convince another person of the truth and/or to provide support for a like-minded person who feels alone - or whether they consider them to be acts of self-expression. If it is the former, the egg-manner should care about the impact of the argument. But if it is the latter, being wrong and ineffective may not matter. It's a rhetorical maneuver that continues to interest me. If only it had a better name.
While straw-manning involves making up an imaginary person who holds a view opposed to your own just so that you can refute it, egg-manning involves finding a real person advancing a real view on social media just so that you can refute it. Finding an actual person essentially justifies the necessity of making your argument. There really are people who must be argued against!
Straw-manning involved assuming that someone out there disagrees with your argument. Egg-manning does not assume this, but instead makes another, typically unstated, assumption. The assumption that egg-manners make is that the person making the argument opposed to their own is part of a large, influential group of people, and that the expression of the argument is part of a larger trend. Rarely is any particular opinion held by only one person; you can search for a hashtag or a term or through various interconnected bits of the blogosphere or social news networks and usually find hundreds or maybe thousands of examples of the argument which you wish to argue against.
The next step in the assumption is the implicit or explicit linking of these hundreds or thousands of people actually stating the argument online with a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the argument, has stated or acted in such ways that makes it clear that they believe in some of the same things as the group that actually states the argument online. Most often in the U.S., these large mainstream groups are liberals/Democrats or conservatives/Republicans. Sometimes, they're smaller and/or more amorphous groups, like racists, sexists, Tea-Partiers, Social Justice Warriors, fraternity brothers, hipsters, or many other groups that are partially defined by their stated beliefs and actions. The largest, most amorphous group to be argued against in the U.S. right now is The Establishment. Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the argument online and the large group not stating the argument are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common, which, to the egg-manner, represents a coherent ideological framework.
Even if that group of people isn't large right now, it could become large in the future if its ideas are not argued against. Often times, an example from history is provided to show how quickly ideas can spread if they are not forcefully countered with another argument, a time when silence sealed the fate of a people. In the past, small, vocal groups of people got large less-vocal groups to go along with them. This is intended to make it clear that arguing against a dangerous idea is not so much an act of participating in civil discourse (and thus not subject to the informal rules of civil discourse), but a kind of duty, and that to fail to argue against it would constitute negligence of one's duty.
Sometimes, the egg-manners are correct, as many people who assume things tend to be every now and then: a dangerous view that once was fringe becomes mainstream. It can happen quickly with viral spread of ideas through social media. But other times, the egg-manners are incorrect. The view never becomes one held by more than an un-influential, fringe group online. Of course, if you are able to indefinitely postpone the point at which you believe the fringe idea will become mainstream, you can never be proven wrong, but if we were to require that the aforementioned assumptions be tested (which requires setting a finite time frame in which the fringe idea would become mainstream), I think that many assumptions like this would turn out not to be true.
Then there is the possibility of a backfiring effect: that by arguing against the fringe idea, egg-manners give legitimacy to it, thus bringing about its popularity. Not only are egg-manners raising the profile of ideas with which they argue; they are also providing more examples of opposite arguments for the egg-manners on the other side of argument to use in their egg-manning. There's likely an emotional component to the way in which egg-manning fuels that which it seeks to fight: anger from one side fuels anger from the other.
It's unclear whether egg-manners consider their arguments to be "arguments" in the traditional sense - attempts to convince another person of the truth and/or to provide support for a like-minded person who feels alone - or whether they consider them to be acts of self-expression. If it is the former, the egg-manner should care about the impact of the argument. But if it is the latter, being wrong and ineffective may not matter. It's a rhetorical maneuver that continues to interest me. If only it had a better name.
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The Truth, Online
Reading Jill Lepore's review of Michael Patrick Lynch's new book, The Internet of Us, reminded me to write something on the topic of truth. I haven't read Lynch's book yet, but even the sub-title ("Knowing more and understanding less in the age of big data") gave me that all-too-familiar twinge of jealousy, of feeling as though someone had written about an idea that had been gestating in my mind for years before I had the chance to write about it myself, of being scooped. So, during this brief lacuna between the time at which I learned of this book's existence and the time at which I actually read it, let me tell you what I think it should be about, given that title. That is: how is it possible that the Internet helps us to know more and to understand less? Or, to take Lepore's tack, what is the relationship between the Internet/Big Data and the truth/reality?
At this stage, I have only a semi-organized collection of ideas on the topic. I'll base each idea around a question.
To what extent has truth (or reality) become subjective in the age of the Internet/Big Data?
I think we vastly overestimate the extent to which the Internet has fragmented our sense of truth and/or reality. And by "we," I mean most people who think about the Internet, not just scholars or experts. My sense is that it is a commonly held belief that the Internet allows people access to many versions of the truth, and also that groups of people subscribe to the versions that fit their worldviews. This assumption is at the core of the "filter bubble" argument and undergirds the assertion that the Internet is driving fragmentation of polarization of societies.
I contend that most people agree on the truth or reality of most things, but that we tend not to notice the things we agree on and instead focus on the things on which we do not agree. Imagine that we designed a quiz about 100 randomly selected facets of reality. We don't cherrypick controversial topics. It could be something as pedestrian as: "what color is they sky?" ; "if I drop an object, will it fall to the ground, fly into the sky, or hover in the air" ; "2 + 2 = ?" I'd imagine that people would provide very similar answers to almost all of these questions, regardless of how much time they spend on the Internet. Even when we do not explicitly state that we agree on something, we act as though we believe a certain thing that other people believe as well. We all behave as if we agree on the solidity of the ground on which we walk, the color of the lines on the roadways and what they mean, and thousands of other aspects of reality in everyday life.
The idea that reality or truth is becoming entirely subjective, fragmented, or polarized is likely the result of us becoming highly focused on the aspects on which we do not agree. That focus, in turn, is likely the result of us learning about the things on which we do not agree (that is, of us being exposed to people who perceive a handful of aspects of reality in a very different way than we perceive them) and of truth/reality relating to these handful of aspects genuinely becoming more fragmented. Certainly, it is alarming to think about what society would look like if we literally could not agree on anything, either explicitly or implicitly; so, there is understandable alarm about the trend toward subjectivity, regardless of how small and overestimated the trend may be.
So, I'm not saying that that truth/reality isn't becoming more fragmented; I'm only saying that part of it is becoming that way, and that we tend to ignore the parts that are not.
It's also worth considering the way in which the Internet has unified people in terms of what they believe truth/reality to be. If we look at societies around the globe, many don't agree on aspects of world history, how things work, etc. Some of those people gained access to the Internet and then began to believe in a reality that many others around the globe believe in: that certain things happened in the past, that certain things work in certain ways. Reality and truth were never unified to begin with. The Internet has likely fragmented some aspects of reality and the truth for some, but it has also likely unified other aspects for others.
Maybe I'm just being pedantic or nit-picky, but I think any conversation about the effects of the Internet on our ability to perceive a shared truth/reality should start with an explicit acknowledgment that when people say that society's notion of truth/reality is fragmented, they actually mean that a small (but important) corner of our notion of truth/reality is fragmented. Aside from considering the net effects of the Internet on reality (has it fragmented more than it unified?), we might also consider this question:
What types of things do we agree on?
Are there any defining characteristics of the aspects of truth/reality on which we don't agree? When I try to think of these things (things like abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, racism, economic philosophy, immigration policy, climate change, evolution, the existence of god), the word "controversial" comes to mind, but identifying this category of things on which we don't agree as "controversial" is tautological: they're controversial because we don't agree on them; the controversy exists because we can't agree.
So how about this rule of thumb: we tend to agree on simple facts more than we agree on complex ones. When I think of the heated political discourse in the United States at this time, I think about passionate disagreements about economic policy (what policy will result in the greatest benefit for all?), immigration (ditto), gun rights (do the benefits of allowing more people to carry guns [e.g., preventing tyrannical government subjugation, preventing other people with guns from killing more people] outweigh the drawbacks (e.g., increased likelihood of accidents; increased suicide rates], and abortion (at what point in the gestational process does human life begin?). These are not simple issues, though many talk about them as if the answers to the questions associated with each issue were self-evident.
I can think of a few reasons why truth/reality around these issues is fragmenting. One is, essentially, the filter bubble problem: the Internet gives us greater access to other people, arguments, facts, and data that can all be used by the motivated individual as evidence that they are on the right side of the truth. In my research methods class, I talk about how the Internet has supplied us with vast amounts of data and anecdotes, and that both are commonly misused to support erroneous claims. One of these days, I'll get around to putting that class lecture online, but the basic gist of it is that unless you approach evidence with skepticism, with the willingness to reach a conclusion that contradicts the one you set out to find, you're doing it wrong. Dan Brooks has a terrific blog post about how Twitter increases our access to "straw men." So, not only does the Internet provide us with access to seemingly objective evidence that we are right; it also provides an infinite supply of straw men with which to argue.
In these aforementioned cases in which we disagree about complex issues, we tend not to disagree about whether or not something actually happened, whether an anecdote is actually true or whether data is or is not fabricated. Most disagreements stem from the omission of relevant true information or the inclusion of irrelevant true information. We don't really attack arguments for these sins; we tend not to even notice them, and instead talk past each other, grasping at more and more anecdotes and data (of which there will be an endless supply) that support our views.
If it is the complex issues on which we cannot agree, then perhaps the trend toward disagreement is a function of the increasing complexity and interdependency of modern societies. Take the economy. Many voters will vote for an elected official based on whether or not they believe that the policies implemented by that official will produce a robust economy. But when you stop and think about how complex the current global economy is, it is baffling how anyone could be certain that his or her policies would result in particular outcomes. Similarly, it is difficult to know what the long-term outcomes of bank regulations might be, or military interventionalism (or lack thereof). Outcomes related to each issue involve the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of billions of people, and while the situations we currently face and those we face in the future resemble situations we've faced in the past (or situations that economists, psychologists, or other "ists" could simulate), they differ in many others that are difficult to predict (that's simply the nature of outcomes that involve billions of people over long periods of time). And yet we act with such certainty when we debate such topics! Why is that? This leads to my last question:
Why can't we arrive at a shared truth about these few-but-important topics?
First, there is the problem of falsifiability. Claims relating to these topics typically involve an outcome that can be deferred endlessly. For example, one might believe that capitalism will result in an inevitable worker revolution. If the revolution hasn't occurred yet, that is not evidence that it will never occur; only evidence that it hasn't occurred yet. There's also the problem of isolating variables. Perhaps you believe that something will come to pass at a certain time and then it doesn't, and you ascribe the fact that it doesn't to a particular cause, but unless you've made some effort to isolate the variable, you can't rule out the possibility that the cause you identified actually had nothing to do with the outcome.
There are falsifiable ways of pursuing answers to questions relating to these topics. And despite all the hand-wringing about the fragmentation of truth/reality on these topics, there are also plenty of folks interested in the honest pursuit of these answers; answers that, despite the growing complexity of the object of study (i.e., human behavior on a mass scale), are getting a bit easier to find with the growing amounts of observations to which we have access via the Internet.
The other problem is the lack of incentive to arrive at the truth. Often times, we get immediate payoff for supporting a claim that isn't true, in the form of positive affect (e.g., righteous anger, in contrast to the feeling of existential doubt that often comes with admitting you're wrong) and staying on good terms with those around you (admitting you're wrong is often inseparable from admitting that your friends, or family, or the vast majority of your race or gender or nationality are wrong). So, there are powerful incentives (affective and social) to arrive at certain conclusions regardless of whether or not these are in line with truth/reality. In contrast, the incentives to be right about such things seem diffuse. We would benefit as a society and a species if we all right about everything, right?
I suppose some would argue that total agreement would be bad, that some diversity of opinions would be better. But we don't tolerate diversity of opinion on whether or not the law of gravity exists, or whether 2+2 = 4. Why would we tolerate it in the context of economic policy? Is it just because of how complex economies are, and that to think you have the right answer is folly? (I suppose that's a whole other blog entry right there, isn't it). But certainly, even if you believe that, you'd agree that some ideas about economies are closer to or further from the truth and reality of economies. So, perhaps what I'm saying is that if we lived in a society where "less right" ideas were jettisoned in favor of "more right" ideas, we would all benefit greatly, but that the benefits would only come if a large number of us acted on a shared notion of the truth and that the benefit would be spread out among many (hence, "diffuse").
But what if there were an immediate incentive to be right about these complex issues, something to counter the immediate affective and social payoffs of being stubborn and "truth agnostic?" I love the idea of prediction markets, which essentially attach a monetary incentive to predictions about, well, anything. You could make a claim about economic policy, immigration policy, terrorism policy, etc., and if you were wrong, you would lose money.
Imagine you're a sports fan who loves a particular team. You have a strong emotional and social incentive to bet on your team. But if your team keeps losing and you keep betting on your favorite team, you're going to keep losing money. If you had to participate in a betting market, you'd learn pretty quickly how to arrive at more accurate predictions. You would learn how to divide your "passionate fan" self from your betting self. And if you compare the aggregate predictions of passionate fans to the aggregate predictions of bettors, I'd imagine that the latter would be far more accurate. I would assume it would work more or less the same way with other kinds of predictions. People would still feel strongly about issues and still be surrounded by people who gave them a strong incentive to believe incomplete truths or distorted realities. But they would have an incentive to cultivate alternate selves who made claims more in tune with a shared reality.
Of course, not all issues lend themselves to being turned into bets (how would one bet on whether or not life begins after the first trimester?), but it still seems like, at least, a step in the right direction, and gives me hope for how we can understand the truth and our relationship to it in the Internet age, perhaps even better than we did before.
At this stage, I have only a semi-organized collection of ideas on the topic. I'll base each idea around a question.
To what extent has truth (or reality) become subjective in the age of the Internet/Big Data?
I think we vastly overestimate the extent to which the Internet has fragmented our sense of truth and/or reality. And by "we," I mean most people who think about the Internet, not just scholars or experts. My sense is that it is a commonly held belief that the Internet allows people access to many versions of the truth, and also that groups of people subscribe to the versions that fit their worldviews. This assumption is at the core of the "filter bubble" argument and undergirds the assertion that the Internet is driving fragmentation of polarization of societies.
I contend that most people agree on the truth or reality of most things, but that we tend not to notice the things we agree on and instead focus on the things on which we do not agree. Imagine that we designed a quiz about 100 randomly selected facets of reality. We don't cherrypick controversial topics. It could be something as pedestrian as: "what color is they sky?" ; "if I drop an object, will it fall to the ground, fly into the sky, or hover in the air" ; "2 + 2 = ?" I'd imagine that people would provide very similar answers to almost all of these questions, regardless of how much time they spend on the Internet. Even when we do not explicitly state that we agree on something, we act as though we believe a certain thing that other people believe as well. We all behave as if we agree on the solidity of the ground on which we walk, the color of the lines on the roadways and what they mean, and thousands of other aspects of reality in everyday life.
The idea that reality or truth is becoming entirely subjective, fragmented, or polarized is likely the result of us becoming highly focused on the aspects on which we do not agree. That focus, in turn, is likely the result of us learning about the things on which we do not agree (that is, of us being exposed to people who perceive a handful of aspects of reality in a very different way than we perceive them) and of truth/reality relating to these handful of aspects genuinely becoming more fragmented. Certainly, it is alarming to think about what society would look like if we literally could not agree on anything, either explicitly or implicitly; so, there is understandable alarm about the trend toward subjectivity, regardless of how small and overestimated the trend may be.
So, I'm not saying that that truth/reality isn't becoming more fragmented; I'm only saying that part of it is becoming that way, and that we tend to ignore the parts that are not.
It's also worth considering the way in which the Internet has unified people in terms of what they believe truth/reality to be. If we look at societies around the globe, many don't agree on aspects of world history, how things work, etc. Some of those people gained access to the Internet and then began to believe in a reality that many others around the globe believe in: that certain things happened in the past, that certain things work in certain ways. Reality and truth were never unified to begin with. The Internet has likely fragmented some aspects of reality and the truth for some, but it has also likely unified other aspects for others.
Maybe I'm just being pedantic or nit-picky, but I think any conversation about the effects of the Internet on our ability to perceive a shared truth/reality should start with an explicit acknowledgment that when people say that society's notion of truth/reality is fragmented, they actually mean that a small (but important) corner of our notion of truth/reality is fragmented. Aside from considering the net effects of the Internet on reality (has it fragmented more than it unified?), we might also consider this question:
What types of things do we agree on?
Are there any defining characteristics of the aspects of truth/reality on which we don't agree? When I try to think of these things (things like abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, racism, economic philosophy, immigration policy, climate change, evolution, the existence of god), the word "controversial" comes to mind, but identifying this category of things on which we don't agree as "controversial" is tautological: they're controversial because we don't agree on them; the controversy exists because we can't agree.
So how about this rule of thumb: we tend to agree on simple facts more than we agree on complex ones. When I think of the heated political discourse in the United States at this time, I think about passionate disagreements about economic policy (what policy will result in the greatest benefit for all?), immigration (ditto), gun rights (do the benefits of allowing more people to carry guns [e.g., preventing tyrannical government subjugation, preventing other people with guns from killing more people] outweigh the drawbacks (e.g., increased likelihood of accidents; increased suicide rates], and abortion (at what point in the gestational process does human life begin?). These are not simple issues, though many talk about them as if the answers to the questions associated with each issue were self-evident.
I can think of a few reasons why truth/reality around these issues is fragmenting. One is, essentially, the filter bubble problem: the Internet gives us greater access to other people, arguments, facts, and data that can all be used by the motivated individual as evidence that they are on the right side of the truth. In my research methods class, I talk about how the Internet has supplied us with vast amounts of data and anecdotes, and that both are commonly misused to support erroneous claims. One of these days, I'll get around to putting that class lecture online, but the basic gist of it is that unless you approach evidence with skepticism, with the willingness to reach a conclusion that contradicts the one you set out to find, you're doing it wrong. Dan Brooks has a terrific blog post about how Twitter increases our access to "straw men." So, not only does the Internet provide us with access to seemingly objective evidence that we are right; it also provides an infinite supply of straw men with which to argue.
In these aforementioned cases in which we disagree about complex issues, we tend not to disagree about whether or not something actually happened, whether an anecdote is actually true or whether data is or is not fabricated. Most disagreements stem from the omission of relevant true information or the inclusion of irrelevant true information. We don't really attack arguments for these sins; we tend not to even notice them, and instead talk past each other, grasping at more and more anecdotes and data (of which there will be an endless supply) that support our views.
If it is the complex issues on which we cannot agree, then perhaps the trend toward disagreement is a function of the increasing complexity and interdependency of modern societies. Take the economy. Many voters will vote for an elected official based on whether or not they believe that the policies implemented by that official will produce a robust economy. But when you stop and think about how complex the current global economy is, it is baffling how anyone could be certain that his or her policies would result in particular outcomes. Similarly, it is difficult to know what the long-term outcomes of bank regulations might be, or military interventionalism (or lack thereof). Outcomes related to each issue involve the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of billions of people, and while the situations we currently face and those we face in the future resemble situations we've faced in the past (or situations that economists, psychologists, or other "ists" could simulate), they differ in many others that are difficult to predict (that's simply the nature of outcomes that involve billions of people over long periods of time). And yet we act with such certainty when we debate such topics! Why is that? This leads to my last question:
Why can't we arrive at a shared truth about these few-but-important topics?
First, there is the problem of falsifiability. Claims relating to these topics typically involve an outcome that can be deferred endlessly. For example, one might believe that capitalism will result in an inevitable worker revolution. If the revolution hasn't occurred yet, that is not evidence that it will never occur; only evidence that it hasn't occurred yet. There's also the problem of isolating variables. Perhaps you believe that something will come to pass at a certain time and then it doesn't, and you ascribe the fact that it doesn't to a particular cause, but unless you've made some effort to isolate the variable, you can't rule out the possibility that the cause you identified actually had nothing to do with the outcome.
There are falsifiable ways of pursuing answers to questions relating to these topics. And despite all the hand-wringing about the fragmentation of truth/reality on these topics, there are also plenty of folks interested in the honest pursuit of these answers; answers that, despite the growing complexity of the object of study (i.e., human behavior on a mass scale), are getting a bit easier to find with the growing amounts of observations to which we have access via the Internet.
The other problem is the lack of incentive to arrive at the truth. Often times, we get immediate payoff for supporting a claim that isn't true, in the form of positive affect (e.g., righteous anger, in contrast to the feeling of existential doubt that often comes with admitting you're wrong) and staying on good terms with those around you (admitting you're wrong is often inseparable from admitting that your friends, or family, or the vast majority of your race or gender or nationality are wrong). So, there are powerful incentives (affective and social) to arrive at certain conclusions regardless of whether or not these are in line with truth/reality. In contrast, the incentives to be right about such things seem diffuse. We would benefit as a society and a species if we all right about everything, right?
I suppose some would argue that total agreement would be bad, that some diversity of opinions would be better. But we don't tolerate diversity of opinion on whether or not the law of gravity exists, or whether 2+2 = 4. Why would we tolerate it in the context of economic policy? Is it just because of how complex economies are, and that to think you have the right answer is folly? (I suppose that's a whole other blog entry right there, isn't it). But certainly, even if you believe that, you'd agree that some ideas about economies are closer to or further from the truth and reality of economies. So, perhaps what I'm saying is that if we lived in a society where "less right" ideas were jettisoned in favor of "more right" ideas, we would all benefit greatly, but that the benefits would only come if a large number of us acted on a shared notion of the truth and that the benefit would be spread out among many (hence, "diffuse").
But what if there were an immediate incentive to be right about these complex issues, something to counter the immediate affective and social payoffs of being stubborn and "truth agnostic?" I love the idea of prediction markets, which essentially attach a monetary incentive to predictions about, well, anything. You could make a claim about economic policy, immigration policy, terrorism policy, etc., and if you were wrong, you would lose money.
Imagine you're a sports fan who loves a particular team. You have a strong emotional and social incentive to bet on your team. But if your team keeps losing and you keep betting on your favorite team, you're going to keep losing money. If you had to participate in a betting market, you'd learn pretty quickly how to arrive at more accurate predictions. You would learn how to divide your "passionate fan" self from your betting self. And if you compare the aggregate predictions of passionate fans to the aggregate predictions of bettors, I'd imagine that the latter would be far more accurate. I would assume it would work more or less the same way with other kinds of predictions. People would still feel strongly about issues and still be surrounded by people who gave them a strong incentive to believe incomplete truths or distorted realities. But they would have an incentive to cultivate alternate selves who made claims more in tune with a shared reality.
Of course, not all issues lend themselves to being turned into bets (how would one bet on whether or not life begins after the first trimester?), but it still seems like, at least, a step in the right direction, and gives me hope for how we can understand the truth and our relationship to it in the Internet age, perhaps even better than we did before.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
What You Search For Is All There Is
The types and scope of information to which we had access was largely dictated by physical proximity, our social circles, books, newspapers, TV shows, movies. These sources gave us an incomplete picture of reality. There's nothing wrong with this per se, as long as the individual knows the extent to which and the way in which their information is incomplete. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman cites numerous experiments in which people are asked to make decisions based on information which they are told has a particular likelihood (e.g., 50%) of being true. But the more common flaw in decision making seems not to be the extent to which people trust a source, but the extent to which they assume that the sources are supplying them with complete relevant information.
Media users often employ some kind of skepticism toward the information with which they are presented. For example, viewers often discount what they see on Reality TV: they assume that the behavior of people on such shows is authentic in some sense but not in others.
But what about searching for information? You start off with a question about an upcoming decision. Sometimes, you find a relatively concrete, straightforward answer. Other times, you're searching for something harder to answer: whether or not to have children after 40, say, or whether or not to vaccinate your children, or whether or not to travel to the Middle East, or whether o not that lump on your shoulder is a tumor (in my case, thankfully, it was not).
Again, it's important to say that we never had perfect information to help us make these decisions. As a culture, we probably weren't hip to this at first, but in the recent past, and certainly once the internet came along, skepticism (or rather, cynicism) about mainstream media went, well, mainstream. It is true that our personal social networks, newspapers, or books were incomplete and biased sources of information. I think that the information we acquire through online search is incomplete and biased in different ways, but I wonder if the very act of searching increases our erroneous belief that we're getting complete, or near complete, information. The act of searching, of picking your own source, is likely to make you think that you're acting independently.
But search really magnifies certain biases in ways that mainstream media did not. Search results are, of course, not all that there is. They are based on what others click on (and a "click" is as much an indication of immediate curiosity as it is of the veracity of the information) and based on what we've clicked on in the past. So, confirmation bias probably influences search results. But the act of searching from among many (sometimes hundreds or even thousands, if you're especially diligent) sources makes you feel like a careful information consumer, someone who's not simply being spoon-fed information by those interested in making a profit.
Perhaps mainstream media was always interested in making a profit. They also were (and continue to be) interested in maintaining the status quo. It's been pointed out many times how this maintenance of the status quo was a bad thing, how it keeps populations from questioning despotic regimes, antiquated laws, bigotry, etc. But getting free of status-quo-enforcing sources of information has it's potential downsides. We may be disappearing down information rabbit holes based on shock value and pre-existing notions of how the world is.
But the point I wanted to make here relates to the certainty we have when we search that what we find is all there is. It seems to me to be counterproductive to refer to this as the illusion of agency or the illusion of choice, as one might be tempted to do. All decisions are made from incomplete information menus that are influenced by others who do not necessarily have our best interests in mind. But you can be more or less aware of the degree to which the information presented in those menus is complete and how it may be biased. The very act of searching makes it a bit harder to see these things clearly.
The object of media literacy is not to eliminate bias in one's media diet or finally obtain complete information, but to increase awareness of bias and incompleteness.
Post script: what I've really been describing is "What You Find Is All There Is" (WYFIATI). "What You Search For Is All There Is" really describes the sense that the world is defined by what you're curios about or interested in, which is a separate but related cognitive bias.
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