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(Source -- much more is explained in detail from Aeon)
Quote:Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.
But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
Current usage has blurred this crucial distinction, so let me introduce a somewhat artificial taxonomy. An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview. But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests. When we take networks built for social reasons and start using them as our information feeds, we tend to miss out on contrary views and run into exaggerated degrees of agreement.
An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.
In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
C Thi Nguyen
is an assistant professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University working in social epistemology, aesthetics and the philosophy of games. Previously, he wrote a column about food for the Los Angeles Times. His latest book is Games: Agency as Art (forthcoming).
My comment: a society that neglects philosophy yet churns out a surfeit of factoids, rumors, myths, and outright falsehoods offers no means of establishing truth as an alternative to falsehood and cannot distinguish relevance from triviality. We have no shortage of ideas, but many of those are simply wrong (Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, the Holocaust is a hoax, cocaine is harmless, 'race' is a reliable divide on ability and character) or abominable (it is fine to mess with children or persecute religious minorities).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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His definition for epistemic bubble is what most people mean when they say "echo chamber".
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Quote:An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.
In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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"It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust." - That's the point.
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One of the faults of an echo chamber is that although one may think oneself more right due to incremental confirmation of one's beliefs, one learns nothing. This is very different from objective reality, whose objective is the refinement of knowledge although political beliefs and language may be very different in Beijing and Buenos Aires, scientific reality is the same. Even a cold war cannot change that reality. (Culture? I have no specific knowledge of whether Buenos Aires has a vibrant Chinatown, but I would not be surprised).
To step out of the echo chamber is to realize that biases (including to the extent of bigotry) that one thinks pure truth are anything but that. Discovering that people with very different foundations of religious faith can have much the same ethical values can be a shocker. It is a necessary one.
...This is the eightieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the consequence of a gangster regime making an assessment that it could win a quick and decisive war against the United States and reshape the surrounding area of a thug empire expanding a colonial empire into places in which such was unwelcome. So were the earlier colonial empires of the French in Indochina, the British in Malaya and India, and the Dutch in Indonesia. America had already planned to give independence to the Philippines, knowing well that it was not going to ever be a part of the USA. With a population now of 109 million it would give the expanded USA a population of roughly 440 million and have nearly a quarter of the electoral vote as a state. How a Philippine state would give huge power in American politics is obvious enough. The gangsters in Tokyo believed that their more compact empire closer to themselves would be easier to rule and would have logical cohesion.
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere was of course a nightmare with the Japanese overlords bleeding the people of their expanded empire to feed their soldiers on the advance or controlling the empire. Demonization of a political entity that did horrible things to people who ended up as subjects or captives is to be expected. America became an echo chamber on how awful the Japanese were. At the end of the war, occupying troops would find that the Japanese people were not valid reflections of Hideki Tojo and other war criminals, just as the people of Italy were not reflections of the bombastic absurdity of Benito Mussolini. At the end of the war much had to be forgotten or at least treated as a gross anomaly.
Single-Party dictatorships of all kinds are nasty regimes, and they tend to do the very worst possible to people. There lie America's main enemies of the Second World War. There lies the Greater Gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union, the superficial chaos covering the despotism of China under Mao, and basically all Communist regimes. There lie the murderous regimes of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Apartheid regime of South Africa, Ba'ath regimes in Syria and Iraq, Daesh, contemporary Iran, and the Rwandan dictatorship that established Hutu Power over the dead bodies of Tutsis. Those regimes are themselves echo chambers, and the more that the echo chamber drowns out other ways of thought, freedom dies. There may be fervent participation as a supposed exercise of civic ritual that is also a good way to prevent unwelcome difficulties on the job or in getting ration coupons. The echo chamber of a totalitarian regime drowns out the screams of its victims and numbs the conscience, moral values, and needful empathy of people who avoid the worst (although their lives become more circumscribed).
Within five years of the Pearl Harbor Attack, the single event that defined the Crisis of 1940, partisans had executed Mussolini and displayed his cadaver in a degrading way; Hitler had offed himself in a bunker, and Tojo was under arrest to be tried as a major war criminal. Few predicted that on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. Britain and the Soviet Union were still reeling, and by March 1941 many thought that it was only a matter of a short time before Australia and New Zealand would undergo a particularly brutal and genocidal occupation with a 'restructuring' of their populations.
As I write this I recognize that the United States, in 1945 the model of freedom for much of the world (except for Jim Crow practice that was itself doomed) has done severe backsliding on freedom. Freedom House still has the USA among the free countries and is thus the world's most populous democracy as India goes into the "partly free" category. It may be an odd coincidence that in the five months from September 11, 2021 to January 6, 2022 we have had, are having, or will soon have the 80th, 20th, and first anniversaries of three of the most infamous days in American history. People not born on or before December 7, 1941 (there are comparatively few left who can remember hearing the speech in which President Franklin Roosevelt announced a declaration of war upon the Japanese thug state with the words " a date that will live in infamy") occasionally hear his words resound. Eighty years since, Japan is a model democracy. It might be a horrible place in which to be a criminal... well, fcuk crime. I don't want my car stolen or my home broken into. We had the memory of the 9/11 attack, and on the whole we have solved little except to make air travel safer until COVID-19 started hijacking jetliners. The Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan doing Taliban stuff again. In a little less than a month we will face the first anniversary of the Capitol Putsch.
The Pearl Harbor Attack and 9/11 were done by people not Americans. The Capitol Putsch was done by Americans far from representative of America as a whole. These people have gone through American schools from K-12 to secondary education. They should have assimilated the rules of our system in defining who wins and who loses elections and thus who wins elected office and the grave responsibilities therein. They should know that disruption of the political process is tolerable only if the system is itself unrepresentative. They should know that elected officials do not decide who wins a Presidential election. They should know that attacking the police is a crime whether one is a well-connected political fanatic or a street thug that the locals dread.
Republicans should ask themselves, if they think that people in majority-minority communities do not vote for arch-conservatives, why those people see themselves unable to align with the plutocratic agenda as does the majority of the rest of America instead of deciding that such people are un-American due to their voting habits. The GOP used to be simply the Party amenable to economic growth at the expense of the environment, job growth through corporate profits and low taxes, exorbitant rents to foster the building of new housing, and personal responsibility through the gutting of the welfare system. As conservatives of the Reagan era said, if you hate your job because it doesn't provide a living, then take another job that you thoroughly hate. After all, there will be Pie in the Sky When You Die -- if you comply and smile inste4ad of griping.
OK, maybe that is a raw deal.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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12-07-2021, 05:28 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-07-2021, 05:30 PM by Eric the Green.)
(12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Right, and I don't know how we deal with an echo chamber at its root, as opposed to waving facts in it. I'm not sure what anyone recommends as a mean of breaking through echo chambers, other that people from outside it trying to penetrate it, and thereby make a chamber more open like this one is to all views. And I don't know that this works either. Can "trust" be rebuilt within a society of echo chambers? That would be nice, if it were possible.
That's why I tend to think the only way out is to fight it out. Hopefully through elections, since politics is war made more civilized. But that has been the history of 4Ts.
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(12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibility. Without social responsibility, social entropy is virtually guaranteed. I don't see that changing easily.
That's the definition of tribalism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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(12-07-2021, 05:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Right, and I don't know how we deal with an echo chamber at its root, as opposed to waving facts in it. I'm not sure what anyone recommends as a mean of breaking through echo chambers, other that people from outside it trying to penetrate it, and thereby make a chamber more open like this one is to all views. And I don't know that this works either. Can "trust" be rebuilt within a society of echo chambers? That would be nice, if it were possible.
That's why I tend to think the only way out is to fight it out. Hopefully through elections, since politics is war made more civilized. But that has been the history of 4Ts.
We've had our share of alternative posteres, Classic-Xer being the most recent and continuous. Have we changed any minds -- especially his? I say no, and the opoosite is equally true: we haven't wavered either. The old argument that strongly held views only change under duress seems to hold. I'm not sure what that duress may be in the future, but apparently, we're not there yet.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(12-08-2021, 11:03 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: (12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibility. Without social responsibility, social entropy is virtually guaranteed. I don't see that changing easily.
That's the definition of tribalism.
Yes it is, and we're the worse for it.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(12-08-2021, 12:36 PM)David Horn Wrote: (12-07-2021, 05:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Right, and I don't know how we deal with an echo chamber at its root, as opposed to waving facts in it. I'm not sure what anyone recommends as a mean of breaking through echo chambers, other that people from outside it trying to penetrate it, and thereby make a chamber more open like this one is to all views. And I don't know that this works either. Can "trust" be rebuilt within a society of echo chambers? That would be nice, if it were possible.
That's why I tend to think the only way out is to fight it out. Hopefully through elections, since politics is war made more civilized. But that has been the history of 4Ts.
We've had our share of alternative posters, Classic-Xer being the most recent and continuous. Have we changed any minds -- especially his? I say no, and the opoosite is equally true: we haven't wavered either. The old argument that strongly held views only change under duress seems to hold. I'm not sure what that duress may be in the future, but apparently, we're not there yet.
Military or diplomatic calamity? An economic meltdown of the severity and duration of 1929-1932? One of the worst plagues in human history seems to be confirming biases instead of shattering them.
The concept of "every man for himself" practically ensures that practically everyone gets burned in a zero-sum game.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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12-09-2021, 10:49 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-09-2021, 10:52 AM by pbrower2a.)
(12-08-2021, 12:36 PM)David Horn Wrote: (12-07-2021, 05:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Right, and I don't know how we deal with an echo chamber at its root, as opposed to waving facts in it. I'm not sure what anyone recommends as a mean of breaking through echo chambers, other that people from outside it trying to penetrate it, and thereby make a chamber more open like this one is to all views. And I don't know that this works either. Can "trust" be rebuilt within a society of echo chambers? That would be nice, if it were possible.
That's why I tend to think the only way out is to fight it out. Hopefully through elections, since politics is war made more civilized. But that has been the history of 4Ts.
We've had our share of alternative posteres, Classic-Xer being the most recent and continuous. Have we changed any minds -- especially his? I say no, and the opposite is equally true: we haven't wavered either. The old argument that strongly held views only change under duress seems to hold. I'm not sure what that duress may be in the future, but apparently, we're not there yet.
The people most fully deluded (like Classic X'er) and the people who are right and have a high level of evidence for their positions (I hope that I am one of them, at least as facts will show) may be similarly convinced. I see plenty of promotion of faith as a virtue. Faith has value only as fortitude in the defense of truth. Faith in an illusion brings harm. Con artists (and demagogues like Donald Trump are precisely that in politics) and propagandists try to inculcate faith in something that should be suspect.
When the world crashes around Classic X'er he will feel burned as few people can be. I may be naïve in my optimism about the goodness of Humanity in general (well, so was Anne Frank), but I well know one cost of being a pessimist: as a pessimist one usually ends up having one's pessimism confirmed, and not to good results.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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(12-09-2021, 10:49 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: When the world crashes around Classic X'er he will feel burned as few people can be. I may be naïve in my optimism about the goodness of Humanity in general (well, so was Anne Frank), but I well know one cost of being a pessimist: as a pessimist one usually ends up having one's pessimism confirmed, and not to good results.
Don't count on C-Xer's life actually crashing. After all, the world of myth and 'belief' existed long before the world of rationaity and science. It's less efficient, but seems to work for the true believers.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(12-08-2021, 12:36 PM)David Horn Wrote: (12-07-2021, 05:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Right, and I don't know how we deal with an echo chamber at its root, as opposed to waving facts in it. I'm not sure what anyone recommends as a mean of breaking through echo chambers, other that people from outside it trying to penetrate it, and thereby make a chamber more open like this one is to all views. And I don't know that this works either. Can "trust" be rebuilt within a society of echo chambers? That would be nice, if it were possible.
That's why I tend to think the only way out is to fight it out. Hopefully through elections, since politics is war made more civilized. But that has been the history of 4Ts.
We've had our share of alternative posteres, Classic-Xer being the most recent and continuous. Have we changed any minds -- especially his? I say no, and the opoosite is equally true: we haven't wavered either. The old argument that strongly held views only change under duress seems to hold. I'm not sure what that duress may be in the future, but apparently, we're not there yet.
Right. We are on schedule according to my predictions and the cycles I know, including the saeculum.
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