The April 2017 issue of Scientific American reports on the impact of false information, conspiracy theories and online echo chambers that generate and perpetuate misinformation. For context, the article mentioned a 2013 World Economic Forum study of echo chambers and false information. That study concluded that the viral spread of false information was a dangerous social trend on a footing equal to the spread of terrorism.
Tens of thousands of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users were analyzed to study the spread of conspiracy theories. The lead researcher writes “Thanks to these studies, we know that humans are not, as has long been assumed, rational. Presented with unfiltered information, people will appropriate that which conforms to their own thinking. This effect, known as confirmation bias, fuels the spread of demonstrably false arguments . . . . And unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to break this cycle.”
The author overstates the case a bit. What the researchers found (again) in their recent study was documented years ago by social and cognitive scientists who study politics. They uniformly see the fundamentally irrational, heavily biased basis of politics and it's grounding in false information, bogus logic, personal morals and self-identity. The irrationality flows directly from the limited cognitive capacity of the human mind to deal with complex societies and technologies. Social complexity and technology have outstripped human cognitive capacity and that could constitute the seeds of human self-destruction.
Many people are uneasy with the complexity. For better or worse, the human mind is a superb machine that unconsciously makes coherence from complexity, even where there's no rational basis for objective coherence. Simply put, the human mind has vast unconscious power to self-deceive by creating false realities and applying flawed common sense to the false realities it thinks it sees. That is a cognitive “user illusion”, a phenomenon that was documented decades ago based mostly on data from the 1950s through the 1970s (see prior discussion on the user illusion.)
The author goes on to observe that attempts to correct false information usually failed and actually reinforced the false beliefs. “It suggested that confirmation bias plays an important role in the spread of misinformation. . . . despite optimistic talk about “collective intelligence” and the wisdom of crowds, the web has in fact driven the creation of the echo chamber. . . . Conspiracy thinking, on the other hand, arises when people find themselves unable to determine simple causes for complex, adverse circumstances.” In other words, the web is fostering collective ignorance as much or more than it fosters collective intelligence or crowd wisdom.
Honest attempts to communicate rationally tend to fail. “Any attempt at reasoned discussion usually degenerates into a fight between extremists, which ends in polarization.” It also ends in no one changing their minds or what they see as facts or how they apply their common sense to the facts they think they see. We've all seen the fight and polarization scenario many, many times.
The 2016 elections and Russia: If one accepts the degree of threat that misinformation represents to civil society, it is reasonable to take, for example, Russian interference in US elections as a very serious, direct attack on American democracy. It also provides an objective basis to conclude that, for example, the constant stream of lies and misinformation about Hillary Clinton did in fact affect people's votes, e.g., to vote for president Trump or to not vote at all.
Right now, conservatives and republicans argue strenuously that although Russian lies and misinformation were applied to favor Trump's candidacy, but that affected no votes. There's no logic or objective basis to believe that Russian interference was 100% ineffective at accomplishing exactly what it was designed to do. That belief is an example of confirmation bias by the conservative mind. That is an example of how quickly, unconsciously and powerfully personal biases and morals distort fact and logic in politics.
A core reason for the existence of this channel is to try to explain some of the cognitive and social biology that drives human irrationality about politics. If people do not come to understand their own biological humanity (cognitive and social biology) to some extent, they remain significantly more vulnerable to people out to manipulate them for their own ends. The internet is the perfect ecosystem to breed and propagate dark free speech to the detriment of human civilization and maybe even to human existence itself.
B&B orig: 3/25/17
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