Our Digital Future: Does fake news last forever? (Part Two)
This is Part Two of an extended version of an article originally published with Quillette.
Are the tech giants going to control our views on issues? Can they distort our perception of the truth and install their ideological narrative in the minds of the population, derailing proper democratic discussion and spawning everlasting fake world-views? Yuval Noah Harari seems to think so, or at least that possibility is implied by his view of people. Lesson number seventeen of his book, 21 Lessons For The 21st Century, is entitled Post-Truth: Some Fake News Lasts Forever:
“Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions…
“The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens.
Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents
reality, its adherents are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they
will not be able to compete with more clear-sighted rivals. Well, that’s just
another comforting myth. In practice, the power of human cooperation
depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.”
It’s not a giant leap from this view to framing the web as a stimulant and reinforcer of fake news. This view begins to crumble if we look at the evolution of ideas over longer periods. When we do this, we learn that the life and death of ideas and their movements are surprisingly fluid. Having seen the fluidity of large-scale ideologies in the long-run, we can then read back these insights to the shorter-term flow of social media influence and fake news.
The Turnover of Adherents to Ideologies and Fake News
When we look at ideological movements, we see many people spreading certain ideas, perhaps zealously and dogmatically protesting in the streets with flags, banners, and sometimes violence. Some movements, peopled by thousands or millions, look like unstoppable, rock-solid juggernauts. But these intellectual “things” are in fact more fluid. If we look closely, we will notice a turnover of membership and, if we cast our gaze over a longer period of time, we witness within these “juggernauts” splits and other dramatic internal disagreements. When we examine the western Communist Parties in the 1930s, we’re at first impressed by what looks like formidable discipline, strength, and staying power. But all the time, some Communist Party members are leaving and new people are joining. Typically, in all such ideological bodies of adherents, there are a few stalwarts who remain at the helm through thick and thin, while the great body of members are continually being replaced.
A similar phenomenon affects religious movements. Eileen Barker found that at least sixty-one percent of those who joined the Unification Church during a four-month period in 1978 had left within two-and-a-half years. Others have found very similar defection rates in various minor religious sects.
Of course, this ignores the interesting question of whether the defectors have given up all the beliefs in the doctrines of the movement they have quit. However, most have probably rejected at least some of the ideas, and examples of comprehensive rejection are certainly not hard to find.
Exactly the same logic of the situation applies to fake news or any ideological deception that Big Tech is trying to install in its users.
Bertrand Russell Island, Bogus Doctrines and Fake News
If humans are rational, then ideologies which fail rational standards will tend to lose support. But even if all humans were very intelligent, sharply critical beings, in addition to being merely rational, there are limits on how quickly they could eliminate error. It’s theoretically possible, therefore, for everyone to be rational and yet for irrational ideologies to persist for centuries or longer, because large movements may have a high turnover rate. If a movement gains new members at least as fast as it loses them to critical argument, the movement’s doctrine may persist for thousands of years even though no one member was ever convinced for more than a year (or, more realistically, if only a comparative handful are enduringly convinced).
The Church of Scientology is one of many ideologies cited in support of the theory that humans can become closed to argument, having fallen victim to false, futile, uneconomic or inconsistent ideologies. However, one study found that 100 percent of new converts quit the Church within five years. Tarot, astrology, ‘9/11 Truth’, UFO-ology, Flat-Earth, and Q Anon may be systems of ideas that people adopt for a while, partly out of playfulness and curiosity, partly out of conviction, only to abandon them several years later. (Here you can substitute your own favorite examples of supposedly “irrational” ideas.)
Even if people were to choose infallibly between correct and erroneous doctrines given several years to decide, we would still expect to see a great number of erroneous doctrines being perpetuated. Let’s push this thought experiment further. Imagine a large population of Bertrand Russells — Bertrand Russell Island — each of whom will inspect every doctrine placed before them, and will infallibly consign each doctrine to its proper place: the error bin or the correct bin. However, in each case, it takes a week to decide. Even on this ideally rational island, all new bad ideas would propagate for a week or more. There would still be a disconnect between the system of ideas spreading and the rationality/cognitive power of the individuals in the population. You don’t have to think that some people are irrational or closed to argument to explain the prevalence of error or stupidity. Even Bertrand Russell Island would have fake news.
My position, expounded in the book The Myth of the Closed Mind, on how people engage with ideas, whether they be faulty ideologies or fake news, is that people are rational. One important way in which they are rational is that they can correct their errors and make continual progress. The reader may suspect that I have conceded much of my case, for if wrong-headed ideologies can gain ground over a long period, then the population as a whole might be described as effectively irrational. I would respond by pointing to major examples of the propagational advantage of truth, that people often believe propositions because they are true.
First, ask yourself is it totally fortuitous that most people today believe, in contrast to a few hundred years ago, that malaria is caused by mosquito bites, or whether this fact about people’s beliefs is in any way connected with the fact that it is true that malaria is caused by mosquito bites. The fact that scientists use the scientific method and believe it’s correct is not altogether unconnected with the truth that it is logically sound and effective. Science is clearly a long-lasting dominant influence in the rise of the Western world. Even now, it is spreading throughout the world, casting anti-scientific aspects of culture aside or at least snaking past them, making them irrelevant. Are we to believe that this has nothing to do with the fact that scientists believe science is valid because it is valid?
The success of science and its theories is clearly something that Harari has to take on. Otherwise, it’s just a random piece of luck that science has been adopted and has triumphed on the stage of history. Remember, my thesis is that truth has a propensity to succeed in competition with falsity. It’s easy to multiply the examples of true and useful ideas that have stood the test of time.
Cosmology and Science are the heirs of Poetic and Religious Myths
Harari pushes the theory that false myths are more successful than true narratives because they unify groups. However, Harari’s examples stand out, not because they show a typical advantage in the life and death of ideas to false myths, but because they are exceptional, tragic historical failures or epic historical victories and defeats. They are highly-charged emotional issues, such as the conflicting territorial claims over the Ukraine and the defeat of the Maji Maji Rebellion of East Africa against German colonization. This latter rebellion was tragically based on the magical idea that German bullets would turn to water if they hit the rebels. The successful Maccabee and Mardi rebellions, Harari says, were also based on false myths. While perhaps being evidence of the short-term, group-unifying effect of shared myths, Harari does not address the question of whether those failed rebellions might have been successful if unified by a true narrative. He also overlooks my point about the separate life of ideas as such and the ever-changing people through whom they live. How long did the Maji Maji rebels remain unified after their defeat, and how long did their tragic illusion of invulnerability to German bullets last? How long did the Nazi ideology last as a significant force after the military defeat of Germany? More fundamentally, Harari’s discussion of myth is surprisingly unhistorical in terms of the long-run rise of western civilization.
Harari cites myths as his examples, but many scientific theories have evolved from myths and creation stories — the beginnings of cosmology (the study of the structure of the world) and cosmogony (the study of the origin and history of the cosmos). Creation myths typically give separate names to the Earth and Sky. Hesiod’s creation story tells of the Sky god Ouranos and the Earth goddess Gaia being locked in an embrace until Gaia’s son Chronos forced them apart. It was the poetic personification of the Earth and the Sky — a seemingly silly idea for modern science — that was momentous. This enabled the Earth to be conceived as an object of definite shape rather than just “the shapeless and amorphous ground or soil”. This, in turn, made it possible set in motion a succession of critical discussions in ancient Greece, began and institutionalized by Thales and his student, Anaximander. The critical method of science could hardly have begun without having something to criticize — even if it’s a poem or story. These early poetic constructs led later to Parmenides’s theory that the Earth is a sphere and then eventually to Copernicus’s and Newton’s theories. This growth of knowledge from what to our elevated position looks like fairy tales — fake news on a grand scale — shouldn’t be possible according to Harari’s theory, which gives a preponderant influence to the falsity or flaws within myths, and not to the seed of explanatory truth or usefulness they may contain which, within a critical ethos, may lead to the growth of knowledge.
I do not maintain that the most rationally defensible beliefs will inevitably or quickly triumph. I maintain that they have a competitive edge, a built-in advantage, in the contest of ideas. The possession of rationally preferable qualities, such as being closer to the truth, is a net advantage in the survival and spread of ideas, though this inbuilt advantage may, on a particular occasion, be swamped by some other influence.
Conclusion
One systemic suppressive influence on the corrective processes in the growth of knowledge, and hence the survival advantage of truth, is the meddling of the state, aided and abetted by the well-meaning but patronising people who gave us The Social Dilemma. A major unexamined axiom of Tristan Harris and his organisation, the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) is that for society-wide problems, the democratic state is always or probably the best problem-solver.
However, there are unintended systematic consequences of using the state to keep corporations in check, rather than leaving that to free entry and competition. As the founders of public choice economics, Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, taught us, government has its own economy. For example, in order to understand how people in a government bureaucracy behave, you need to know the set of incentives and disincentives each government agent faces. Government is not just a perfectly obedient mechanism that implements policies in a clockwork manner, but is subject to the economics of human choice.
Tristan Harris and his CHT have overlooked the economics of the beast.
With a small “night-watchmen” state, it might be feasible for the ordinary citizen to inspect the government’s business. However, the costs to any citizen to monitor all of the thousands of programs emerging from the myriad ministries of our bloated governments is extremely high compared to the miniscule benefit or cost imposed on him by any one of those policies. Introducing state-licensing for a trade, for example, has typically meant that the established corporations with their accumulated capital, political connections, and specialism in their field get to “assist the state” in writing the rules that govern their niche. With all these forces mounted against the citizen, it’s not surprising that we then get stuck with politically stronger versions of the overbearing corporations which our “radically reimagined” and “comprehensive” policies were meant to curb.
There is a better way. Free entry to support the competition of ideas and the invention of new types of communicative platforms such as Clubhouse, Parler and Signal is the way forward. Free entry is an escape from old-style crony capitalist democracy that lends itself to corruption and the closing off of new entrepreneurial start-ups by the established tech giants. The CHT has fallen for the old fallacy: If you are confronted by a leviathan, just invoke a larger leviathan.
Paradoxically, in Harris’s well-meaning attempt to disrupt Big Tech’s channelling of the masses, he may unintentionally crush the autonomy he is trying to save by his own state-backed “comprehensive” planning of our digital future. I think we can re-imagine our future ourselves, thank you. Why should we believe that a group of twenty bright people at CHT can out-invent and out-imagine the thousands of yet unknown entrepreneurs and inventors in our digital future? As we will know them only in the future, at this moment they are only possible people who will enrich the world with their solutions for greater autonomy and flourishing. Perhaps CHT aren’t the tech visionaries we first thought they were: they are the old-school reactionaries in youthful garb.
Three cheers for Free Entry and the £50 per month smart-phone podcast.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Ray Scott Percival is author of the book The Myth of the Closed Mindand director of the documentary Liberty Loves Reason. He organised the Annual Conference on the Philosophy of Sir Karl Popper for 10 years, and served as associate editor on the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. He has published in New Scientist, Nature, National Review, and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @Ray_S_Percival.
