At one point about a decade ago, not long after college, I had this conviction that over time with more available granular information about the world, people would start to be more epistemic [1] about how they viewed the world. In fact what I found though, was that more information seems to have led to the opposite. That people's interpretation of the same information seems to reinforce already held beliefs about the state of things rather than update their beliefs.
Not sure where that leads the zeitgeist with ever increasing barrage and availability of information, skewed or otherwise.
The epistemological crisis is really the worst thing the internet has brought us. When you have large segments of the population who believe in a completely different "truth" the future doesn't look bright at all.
I'm not sure I believe this myself, but just to throw out a more optimistic alternative, could we perhaps teach people how to use the internet to research, corroborate information, apply critical thought etc.?
Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.
Yeah; I think it just speaks to the fact that there is no substitution to being a well-informed individual. If you're cognizant about understanding the world around you, you're generally pretty good at weeding bad information out and bringing good information in. Unfortunately, I think the internet has a siloing effect and the most sensational voices rise to the top. People get caught in their silos and don't have an easy way to peek outside. Misinformation spreads; and that's scary when trying to quantify the future of our society.
Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
Science is much the same. For a long time, it was this small thing operating off to the side; only elites could afford to indulge in it, and their discoveries affected very few -- so the truth value could remain high because there was relatively little to be gained by distortion. People's lives were largely governed by things that had been around long enough that the culture had evolved to deal with them more or less reasonably, so they didn't need advice from domain experts to provide accurate information -- and where expertise was needed, it flowed from parent to child and from master to apprentice as part of a cultural process that everyone understood.
Obviously that's not the case anymore. The culture can't keep up.
This is sort of a reiteration of the last paragraph of my previous comment:
"the actual problem is (1) the increasing complexity of our society, requiring ever more knowledge to discern truth from anti-truth, and (2) anti-information being actively injected into the system by those who seek to manipulate public opinion."
But I wanted to highlight what I think is happening when people decry the death of expertise as this article does: it's sort of a form of retro-voodoo: 'in order to have the reliable information we once had, we need to restore the old forms'. Bring back BBSes and usenet, and we'll have civil internet dialogue again. Trust experts, and we'll have valid science again.
It doesn't work that way. The external conditions have changed, the bandwidth needs are higher and the noise-rejection needs are greater. The old systems are failing under the increased information demand (which we can't just wish away, nor would we want to) -- and so we need new processes that are better able to deal with that heavier load.
The sentiment is similar to what earlier media theorists have noted: Shoshana Zuboff's eponymous three laws, Elizabeth Eisenstein on the social impact of the printing press, Noam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in Manufacturing Consent, Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Arendt, the Frankfurt School, George Seldes, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, back to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and before.
Opposition to this notion tends to run to one of two, or often both, contradictory arguments:
The problem is, you cannot have it both ways: either free speech is paramount, because it changes things in the real world, or allspeech is meaningless because it has no effect. Once you move off either pole, you're in a land where 1) speech matters and 2) careless, indifferent, or malicious speech has deleterious consequences.
Even John Start Mill, in "On Liberty", directly addresses this: "the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes...."
You cannot build a large-scale, significant communications system without moderation any more than you can create a large-scale city without sanitation and public health systems, or a global rapid transportation network without commensurate epidemiological detection, management, and controls.
In all, the lack leads to the same consequence: a cesspit of disease, infection, and death.
This is why the nintth and ultimate mechanism of technology is hygiene factors.
When I was younger, I believed all we needed was to give people information to get a better grasp on reality. That was my optimism about the potential good of the internet: the ability to access a wealth of information.
Now that I'm older and have spent a lot of years reading discussion boards, my stance is people will predominantly gravitate towards sources that justify their position regardless of whether their source(s) have been wrong before.
3. More generally, all informational channels become battlegrounds, as noted by von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, numerous evolutionary biologists, and others. I've been slowly making my way through Jeremy Campbell's The Liar's Tale which is a big-picture look at this.
4. HN really isn't optimised around truth but conversation, and more specifically sustainable conversation, grounded in intellectual curiosity. There are numerous topics on which HN really is unable to have meaningful discussion (perennial ethnic conflicts are amongst these, as are other political hot topics), and its general tone-policing and penalisation of high-tension topics tends strongly to a status quo bias. (I've criticised HN for this often, despite an increasing awareness and appreciation of why those rules exist, see e.g., thread here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39023516>.)
5. Reporting blatant trolling and suspect motivations to HN mods does often work. Email to hn@ycombinator.com and link directly to the offending content and/or user, with a clear but succinct description of the problem.
6. Voting (up or down) and flagging also have their place. For sufficiently contentious threads this may well lead to something of a high-attrition zone, but often the really egregious crud does sink to the bottom. I find that higher-rated comments tend to be more anodyne than insightful, though occasionally truth does out.
7. I've found that rather than direct engagement, either supporting a counterthread, or writing your own well-reasoned and well-supported counter-thread, is often suprisingly effective. Remember that yours is always the last comment when you write it, though a thread may well have additional life. Sometimes my late efforts prove far more successful than I'd expected, and often I'll see that others have succeeded where I've either failed or failed to try. And again, supporting others' salient and productive engagement even where you don't have time or energy to contribute is highly underappreciated.
8. You don't have to attend every fight you're invited to.
9. Truth is not a popularity contest. Voting systems ultimately don't select for truth or importance, and expecting that from sites such as HN or Reddit will prove disappointing.
10. The meaningful audience is typically not who you're responding to directly, but the overwhelmingly silent majority reading rather than contributing to discussion.
I think the big thing is with the internet, it makes a lot of these things much more discrete, as in, parsing information and evaluating it in chunks, rather than have a sense of continuity. Everything is either on or off, true or false, black or white. Encourages a frame of mind that selectively gathers and redistributes information. It may make sense with present 'state' but it might not make sense with respect to the humanities, respect to art, respect to many of the other sciences, history, etc. Picking up on lots of patterns and applying the data of today to fit the model. Then upvote, downvote, change the world.
IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an absolutely confident tone, display their expertise by answering questions and stating their opinion as if it was
a fact. More people read this, and the cycle begins.
You see it all the time on HN and other forums. If you're an actual expert in a specific (usually scientific) subfield and you read comments about an article in that field, you find that a large percentage are not just factually wrong, but also written in an extremely confident tone by people who have probably studied the topic for about 10 minutes.
By having easy access to all this information people have stopped being humble about what they don't know.
The internet was supposed to create an educated society with information at your fingertips, instead we got fake news and echo chambers spreading extreme thinking
We have huge groups of actively ignorant people supporting the growth of climate change, anti-vaccination, and a host of other dangerous actions.
Now those fighting Ebola outbreaks are getting attacked.
I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like rationality is fast disappearing from this world. It’s only a matter of time before we destroy ourselves.
I realize this type of gloom and doom stuff has always been predicted throughout history, it just seems “this time is different” for real with the intersection of technology and ignorance reaching levels we’ve never seen.
Another problem with the Internet is that it’s made everyone really excited about getting on a soapbox to make sweeping and categorical generalizations about our zeitgeist based on nothing but highly personal experiences.
I think this could be driven by personalization of internet content. It started with the innocuous idea of presenting only the information you need. And, it turned into a system of echo chambers where your world view would be limited to certain ideas that you are comfortable with. And, it leads to lots of cognitive distortions. Also, the abundance of media on the internet force the content of the media to be louder for it to be visible. Nuance has to give way to crass generalization to get deeper media engagement.
I seriously worry about the trend and I am not very hopeful about the direction it takes.
I found this to be true as well. I started off as an extremely rigid thinker, and it's my contact with people holding diverse views on and offline that have changed that. I'm still highly skeptical, occasionally bordering on pessimism, but I'm a much more flexible thinker. I don't seek to judge as much as I just try to understand perspectives.
I really doubt that could have happened, at least in any reasonable amount of time, without the internet.
It's not just the loss of context and taxonomy/ontology of information it's that everywhere in our culture people are being further and further enticed to solely think in terms of arbitrarily coordinated stream of consciousness which means people aren't getting regular practice at sustaining long chains of reasoning and describing those chains comprehensively to other people if that makes sense. I mean just think about the phenomenon of people reading and reacting to headlines, particularly political ones, versus reading the articles and providing sensible input about them. It's not just people are too lazy and entitled to their opinion, its also that reading long chains of information is getting prohibitive for their brain to allocate for. I've noticed this even in myself as once I left philosophical academia (continental European philosophy, to be specific), which involved reading ridiculously long chains elaborating a single idea such as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Heidegger's Being and Time, for SWE, I've gotten increasingly worse at being able read great lengths of text year over year. You can argue one needs to pull themselves up by the bootstrap but this problem is in very similar territory to "I'm the only person on my avant garde social network and everyone else is on Facebook".
I think I disagree. We actually spread lots and lots of "information" via Facebook. In other words, we're "very informed" (whether it's arguably correct information is another story.) But we are, really, becoming more rigid in opinions due to this "information" which means, we are less receptive to new knowledge and new ways of thinking.
(I think, in the big picture, our opinions on this overall point do align, so please don't completely disregard my comment :).)
yeah, rumors, urban legends, folklore, oversimplifications, generalizations, even memes, instead of understanding or even knowing.
This is due to cheap, low quality media, which broadcast and publish any crap imaginable. Pseudo-psychology, pseudo-medicine, pseudo-economics, pseudo-sociology, pseudo-everything.
Just memes made out of other memes. "Sugar is bad, eat fiber". "Paper money is bad, buy gold". "Apple will expand infinitely, buy stocks". "Java is the platform of choice", you name it. And everyone is ready to approve or argue, to express an opinion, based on his own internalized memes.
Uncontrolled consumption of lowest quality media leads to losing ability to see the world as it is, not as some talking heads around describe it.
And all those few standard responses, ready to be displayed whether appropriate or not - not this, then it must be that. lol wut?
Or they're following a newsfeed algorithm that's determining their information-seeking proclivities for them. I honestly find that much more subtly disturbing and manipulatable than willful ignorance – people have ceded control over their information seeking behavior entirely.
The current status quo on the internet is infinitely worse than that though.
The internet and social media allow you to ignore the correct conclusion because it makes a person uncomfortable with the idea that they could be wrong when everything they read reinforces that incorrect conclusion.
There's a well-known narrative that before the Internet, for all of human history, information was scarce and humans found ways to adapt; and since the Internet, information has been overwhelming and humans must find different ways to adapt.
What is disappointing to me is that, with so many more options, people have not adapted by utilizing only the best information. Anyone can read the best sources (with a major exception; see below), but instead they choose more and more crap and now even actively delegitimize the better sources in favor of propaganda. In other words, why hasn't the vastly increased competition in the marketplace of ideas yielded far superior knowledge? Epistemology should be one of the hottest words and hottest subjects of the day.
I hypothesize that it's a failure of the intellectual elite. Instead of spreading their incredible wealth to the world over this new medium, they kept it to themselves behind high paywalls (science journals, OED, JSTOR, etc.). And instead of defending the values of and passion for knowledge and intellect, of the Enlightenment, scholarship, and reason, many I see and talk to adopt the trendy anti-intellectualism, bizarrely undermining their own reason for being.
I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world.
At one point about a decade ago, not long after college, I had this conviction that over time with more available granular information about the world, people would start to be more epistemic [1] about how they viewed the world. In fact what I found though, was that more information seems to have led to the opposite. That people's interpretation of the same information seems to reinforce already held beliefs about the state of things rather than update their beliefs.
Not sure where that leads the zeitgeist with ever increasing barrage and availability of information, skewed or otherwise.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
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