Staying strong in the age of Internet Belief Polarization.

Internet Fragmentation

Open Societies, like philosopher Karl Popper describes, are what today is perceived as one that protects freedom of communication and information, imposes little government censorship, and has diversely owned media. Open Societies are societies that can easily become “abstract” or “depersonalized”, and the Internet has a large part in this. The Internet allows us to extract and isolate our interests more quickly, to have anonymity, and become friends with people that we never met. Popper warned that with increased freedom of expression and consumption, comes the risk of increased individual isolation.

Although Popper’s prediction on risks of individual isolation is true to a certain extent, what really happened is the formation of group polarization- isolated tribes instead of isolated individuals. We could argue that Popper’s prediction is still right because most of those tribes are virtual and therefore one never really belongs to it and becomes an isolated individual within an isolated group.

Cass Sunstein sustains that one reason the Internet contributes to polarization is that repeated exposure to an extreme position, with the suggestion that many people hold that position, will predictably move those exposed, and likely predisposed, to believe in it. An example that the book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data” by Michael P. Lynch, gives is that people on a steady diet of Fox News will become more and more conservatives, people who read the Huffington Post will become more liberal, and so on. Sunstein is basically saying that true fragmentation of the society happens because some people, not originally fixed in their views and not that different from each other, end up in extremely different places, simply because of what they are reading and viewing. It is basically living in a digital echo chamber.

This fragmentation is heavily reflected on our social media- the accounts that you and your circle/independent tribe follows automatically splits us into groups. Internet and social media fragment our moral, religious, and political values and is very likely to influence who we will vote for, how we feel about a certain thing, and progressivey pushes us to be less and less reasonable.

Manipulation and Loss of Reason

A popular example of manipulation is Zohnerism: the use of scientific fact for an unrelated false conclusion, and basically twisting simple facts to confuse people.

Here is the story: In 1997, 14-year-old Nathan Zohner presented his science fair project to his classmates, seeking to ban a highly toxic chemical, Dihydrogen monoxide, from its everyday use.

Throughout his presentation, Zohner provided his audience scientifically correct evidence as to why this chemical should be banned. He explained that dihydrogen monoxide:

• Causes severe burns in while it’s in gas form
• Corrodes and rusts metal
• Kills countless amounts of people annually
• Is commonly found in tumors, acid rain etc
• Causes excessive urination and bloating if consumed
• Zohner also noted that the chemical is able to kill you if you depend on it and then experience an extended withdrawal.

He then asked his classmates if they actually wanted to ban dihydrogen monoxide, and 43 out of the 50 children present voted to ban this clearly toxic chemical. However, this chemical isn’t typically considered toxic at all; in fact, dihydrogen monoxide is simply an unconventional name for water.

Nathan Zohner’s experiment wasn’t a legitimate attempt to ban water, but instead, an experiment to get a representation of how gullible people can really be. Also, all of the points that Zohner used to convey his point were 100% factually correct; he just skewed all of the information in his favor by omitting certain facts.

And this occurs a lot more often than you think, especially when politicians, conspiracy theorists, etc., use proven facts to persuade people into believing false claims. The fact that people can mislead, and be misled so easily, is highly unsettling, and this happens every day on Internet and social media.

War for Truth

Michael P. Lynch’s book refers to a powerful example of polarization and tells how the fight, pretty obsessive, to find the truth leads to increased tribalization and turns us into enemies of one another, pushing us to aggressive and extreme ways to settle the war to truth.

Internet is great, it gives so much that we wouldn’t even think to know some things without it, and we must be grateful for it. However, the other side of the medal is that by giving us so much information, it gives us more things to disagree with, and allows us to always, no matter what, find someone or something that agrees with us, never giving us the chance to grow for the better. Internet is not the origin of the fragmentation problem, but it is exaggerating it.

One would think that creating a fact-checking platform would be the ideal way to settle the war, just like a judge who sentences what is right or wrong, but unfortunately, truth wars have grown to such proportions that the very idea of fact-checking is seen as suspect. When the option of having a judge in the conflict is lost, then this debate becomes very difficult to resolve.

Moreover, science cannot be arbitrary in the battle because science is actually as materially fragile as religion is- everyone, scientists or not, must start their quests for knowledge with some unprovable general truth/starting point, one that can only be accepted by faith.

Then, if everything is grounded on a general truth that can only be accepted by faith, there is no superiority in terms of foundation between science and anything else, so why don’t we just accept life how it is and liberate ourselves from the obsessive search for truth, a battle for a truth that in the end should concern only us, free independent thinkers different from one another.

As the book says, civil societies need a common currency to exchange reasons, but how do you fight a battle if you don’t even have a delimitation of the battleground to refer to? We all are different with different experiences and therefore different evidence to support our opinions, but unfortunately, we can never agree on what counts as evidence, so all of our debates become useless.

Reasonability is nice but not the solution: you can only change an opinion with good advertising and emotional associations. Knowledge/truth fragmentation will stay and this is how it is because most often value judgments are a result of intuition and emotion, things that are impossible to change and work on. Reasons matter except when intuitions object and truth is an intuition since it is not grounded on anything. We need to exchange reasons and play by shared epistemic rules if we are going to solve the information coordination problem that faces all societies.

Staying Strong and United

Several things to be less divisive with each other:

• exchange reasons and play by epistemic rules
• critical thinking is like a muscle that needs to be continuously worked upon and is the key to not fall into fragmentation
• learn to think by ourselves
• learn to read opposite sources of information
• learn how to read in-depth and not do google-knowing
• improve our values, epistemic, intellectual and political: Richard Rorty: “if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself”
• stop the cycle of feeding ourselves with sources that reinforce our prejudices and never challenge our basic assumptions

You have to fight to find inner peace and liberation because truth is not a battle to be fought between tribes but rather a personal quest based on our own personal collection of evidence that we obtained through our life experiences.

SM