Liberal science has relegated violent creed wars to the history books.
—Jonathon Rauch
We may have just handed a four-year-old a loaded weapon.
That’s what I think we actually did.
—Chris Wetherell, Inventor of Twitter’s “Retweet” Function
What do you do when a truth takes six times as long as its corresponding falsehood to reach the intended audience and the falsehood is 70% more likely to be reshared?
Those were the findings of a 2018 study by researchers at the MIT Media lab, and they are at the heart of why—as I shared in Part 1 of this essay—Jonathan Rauch contends that the Constitution of Knowledge, with its reality-based community and epistemic principles of fallibilism and empiricism is under attack. The rise of social media and its consequent ability to spread misinformation, calculated disinformation, and “shock & awe” levels of psychological assault nearly instantaneously has enabled those who are antagonistic to the notion of objective truth-seeking—for whatever reasons—to undermine the work of those who engage in it, and even worse, to directly attack those individuals and institutions involved in this work.
For example, Rauch points out, fear of being publicly bullied, stalked, and ostracized on-line for simply stating an opinion or offering a critique—no matter how well-intended—has reached such epic proportions on today’s college and university campuses that 70% of professors report feeling at least some concern (and 40% extremely so) “that having an open class conversation on [controversial] topics could result in their being reported to the authorities, receiving bad course evaluations, suffering damage to their reputations and careers, and being shunned by their colleagues” (p. 221). Meanwhile two-thirds of students claim that “their campus climate precluded students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive” (p. 222), and thus, Rauch argues, one of the pillars of the reality-based community risks finding itself silenced and censored—cancelled—by the ability of social media to make life a living hell for anyone who dares to submit a proposition for critique and potential falsification that is preordained as harmful or oppressive by some group or another.
Yet, if the history of the Constitution of Knowledge teaches us nothing, Rauch continues, it is that a diversity of ideas—of propositions to test for fallibility—is essential to the pursuit and expansion of objective empirical knowledge, and therefore, a diversity of voices is equally so. Without them, our own individual biases keep us from even entertaining certain hypotheses, and so potential truths about the world don’t ever become knowledge because the questions leading to that knowledge never get asked. As Rauch puts it:
The problem arises when other groups and other ideas are absent or silent or fail to organize. To say it the [John Stuart] Millian Way: the problem arises where lack of contestation hardens even true opinions into dogmas. To say it the [James] Madisonian way: the problem arises where the republic of science becomes too small, intellectually speaking—when its sphere contracts instead of expanding (p. 230, original emphasis).
And if the reality-based community doesn’t have enough problems already with social media impairing one of its pillars from within, this same digital technology has also made attacks on it from outside the community significantly easier as well. And while I have written before about the origins of what Rauch calls “troll epistemology” and why internet trolls and trolling have become so successful at challenging our notions of truth, Rauch brings some fresh ideas to the table that I want to share.
He first points out that “we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can simply be emitted [without any of the checks and balances required for true knowledge]” (p. 125, original emphasis). Consequently, any and every thought, opinion, fiction, or other “brain fart”—however false, wrong, or delusional—can make its way immediately into our lives via our computers and phones. The result, Rauch states, is that “what troll epistemology can do is degrade the information environment around the reality-based community” (p. 164, original emphasis)—which is highly problematic for the Constitution of Knowledge and its reality-based community because while they do not need everyone to be fellow truth-seekers, they do need most people to be truth-friendly and “to behave in ways which support rather than undermine the Constitution’s ability to do its job” (p. 115; original emphasis).
Thus, what makes trolls so dangerous to the work of those pursuing real knowledge about the real world is that they can overwhelm people’s attention with fake news, conspiracy theories, and other dreck and drivel to the point where they are totally diverted from anything resembling objective empirical reality, utterly exhausted from the bombardment of information. Essentially, trolling blockades the attention of those whom the Constitution of Knowledge needs to be truth-friendly, and as Rauch puts it:
if you cannot be sure at any given time whether you are being manipulated or scammed, then the natural way to protect yourself is to assume you are always being scammed, or to hunker down with online friends in your own private version of reality, or to take a demagogic politician’s word for it (p. 169).
Being truth-friendly then becomes either an after-thought or something one is even antagonistic toward, and the reality-based community finds itself fighting (and in the case of the pandemic, literally) for its life. It is probably one of the reasons Rauch calls trolls “epistemic sociopaths.”
So what are those who value truth to do in a world of anonymous epistemic sociopaths and cancellers? How do we in the reality-based community defend a basic understanding of reality that is as objective as possible within our epistemic limits? Rauch is clear in his response. First, “when we encounter an unwelcome and even repugnant new idea, the right question to ask is ‘What can I learn from this?’ rather than ‘How can I get rid of this?’ ” (p. 198). And second:
Every time I hear a minority-rights advocate say that she should not have to debate haters who question her very right to exist, I say: on the contrary, that is exactly who you need to debate. The hearts, minds, and votes we need to win are those of people who do not already agree with us—a point which might seem obvious but is surprisingly easy to overlook. Recent research supports what activists like me learned firsthand in the gay-marriage struggle: deploring and denouncing people rarely changed their minds, but respectfully listening and talking to them often did (p. 257).
Thus, Rauch’s response is essentially that if we do not treat even the most deplorable as propositions for potential falsification—if we do not abide by the fundamental principles of fallibilism and empiricism at all times—then we have failed to engage in the very work the reality-based community employees to generate the objective communal knowledge we believe should guide both us and our attackers in the first place.
Or as he summarizes it:
In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, [the Constitution of Knowledge] asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comforts of certitude. It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers. [Its daily, never ending, defense can be exhausting, upsetting, and deeply stressful.] But we cannot afford to be snowflakes. Epistemic liberalism, like political liberalism, is a fighting faith (p. 263).
Moreover, when it comes to this fight, Rauch is clear that “I am not an alarmist. To the contrary, I write this book in the spirit of hope and guarded optimism” (p. 18) and that “the reality-based community has withstood much worse. It beat back the inquisitors who imprisoned Galileo, the dictators whose gulags spanned continents, and the racists and homophobes who sought to silence voices of freedom” (p. 264). It is clear that he believes the defense of truth is winnable.
However, here is where I stand concerned. As I write this, a former President of the United States is facing the near certitude of a third criminal indictment, and he is all but bragging about it on his social media platform to stir up his supporters for his run again for the Presidency. As I write this, an extremist anti-abortion group is arguing that a mother who has an abortion should be sentenced to death; it’s leader publicly arguing “an eye for an eye.” And as I write this, the Alabama legislature has redrawn its political map in response to the Supreme Court striking down its former map with an even more partisan one to dilute the Black vote simply because the Court did not explicitly say in its ruling that there must now be two predominately Black districts due to changes in population percentages. Simply put, we live in a world where truth-friendly is rapidly becoming an endangered species, and the anti-intellectuals of our society already greatly outnumber the members of the reality-based community.
What’s more, when Rauch wrote his book, ChatGP3 did not exist; it wasn’t even on the foreseeable horizon. Yet, as I wrote in The End of Truth?, anyone wanting to disinform or even attack can now produce such realistic material that only the most sophisticated digital analysis tools can determine whether it is a so-called “deep fake” or not (and, in fact, I learned shortly after that post that a colleague of mine had already had it happen to him). Worse yet, if Caryn Marjorie’s use of AI—she of the CarynAI “girl-friend” experience—is any example of how people will employ this technology, then we are in deep trouble. News services report that “one fan, at the bot’s encouragement, built a shrine-like photo wall of her;” to which her response was “this is why we have limited CarynAI to only accepting 500 new users per day.”
It is estimated that she will make $5-10 million dollars this year. Simply for consuming oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
AI, therefore, has already demonstrated its potential to provide the trolls and cancellers with the social media equivalent of nuclear weapons against the reality-based community and its Constitution of Knowledge, and even its relatively benign users are not exactly demonstrating restrained wisdom. It is not a lot to give one optimism about Rauch’s defense of the truth. Even though I am in complete agreement with him about the value of such a defense—indeed, will never stop doing so myself—I am left wondering if we are not head more toward the equivalent of the situation in the Koreas, rather than the Allies of WWII, with the epistemic equivalent of a DMZ.
A potential creed war with at best a fragile truce.
References
Associated Press (July 21, 2023) Alabama Lawmakers Refuse to Create a 2nd Majority-Black Congressional District. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1189494854/alabama-redistricting-map-black-districts.
Contreras, B. (June 27, 2023) Social Media Star’s AI Clone Charges a Dollar Per Minute for Chats. The Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-06-27/influencers-ai-chat-caryn-marjorie.
Johnson, C. & Inskeep, S. (July 24, 2023) Trump Could Face Federal Indictment Soon over Effort to Overturn 2020 Election. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/24/1189719400/trump-could-face-federal-indictment-soon-over-effort-to-overturn-2020-election-d.
Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Sarat, A. & Aftergut, D. (March 17, 2023) “Pro-Lifers” Choose Death. Verdict. https://verdict.justia.com/2023/03/17/pro-lifers-choose-death.
Light a Candle 