You can read the first half of this article here Link
We are now two months into a ‘Darth Cheetos’ presidency and all of a sudden the world looks very different, much like a bad dream. Progressives are running amok, there are talks about a resistance and the world (which has always been shit) going to shit. ‘There is a crisis of values’, ‘we must not normalize Trump’, ‘we must stand for our values’ are just some of the popular buzzwords that have come to mark what I will call the ‘post Trump’ era.
While Trump certainly provides a large shift away from the norm and I agree that his ideas are quite dangerous, we shouldn’t forget that this is exactly how democracy works. We have deceived ourselves into believing harebrained nonsense like ‘the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice’, no it doesn’t, it requires a conscious and purposeful steering.
Increasingly we seem to be retreating deeper and deeper into our bubbles, they offer protection, a safe space in all this chaos, where everything makes sense and of course here we can assert our views and have them ricochet right in our faces with less than zero damage.
In the first half of this blog-post, I tried to contextualize filter bubbles and how they are formed with a variety of examples. In this one, I am going to talk about the individual, dangers of group-think and evidence based reasoning.
But first I will define a filter bubble as:
An insulated system of opinions and biases, that automatically labels opposing views and evidence disputing its validity, as invalid without inspection.
On the granular level, this all begins with the individual ~ the self. Let’s take a quick detour to the 17th century, where some French Dude called Rene Descartes (pronounced De-cart) did something interesting to philosophy, the idea is quite intoxicating. It’s called Descartes’ Cogito and goes thus — Cogito ergo sum or ‘I think therefore I am’. And it is sexy because on the surface level, it replaces objectivity with subjective experience and elevates the self to the highest arbiter of truth.
I have said what I have said and no matter what you say, I am not going to change my mind.
Next time you hear people say things like “It’s my opinion’’ to defend their somewhat shitty opinions, they are exercising an iteration of this right. The right to decide for themselves what is true and what is not, and sometimes in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a way of reducing cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort experienced holding two or more contradictory beliefs. We strive to reach a coherence by employing confirmation bias and a host of other heuristics.
How can you escape confirmation bias? Well in the general abstract sense I don’t know if it’s possible. In case of specific issues, you could go out of your way to challenge your worldviews and see what the other side is saying.
We are not born neutral.
Thanks to society, we are indoctrinated with the beliefs of our immediate community. Are your parents Muslim? There is a good chance you would grow up believing in Allah. Now I’m not saying this is bad, it is important. To fit into the social machinery, it is pertinent to believe in certain myths. In fact, large swaths of people cannot cooperate unless they believe in the same myths like money, God, human rights, contracts, government and so on.
The jig is when you begin to notice incoherence in the statutes of your community. The world is bigger than your immediate community. One irony of belief is the fact that though it professes truth, it doesn’t have to based on an empirical assuredness of truth in any sense, most of us substitute the belief itself for evidence. People have preposterous beliefs all the time, beliefs that do not survive even the cursory scrutiny.
As is the very nature of belief, you need to consistently reinforce your beliefs to yourself. This is where confirmation bias sets in, we routinely search for reinforcements to what we already believe to be true. It’s one reason you are encouraged to go to church as a christian, fellowship with like minds strengthens your belief, there is power in the communal fortification. But if you eventually decide to escape this trap, you need to understand that you cannot control the outcome.
Challenging your deepest beliefs honestly, is a process that never ends.
You need to understand that any attempt to control the outcome of inspection is self deceit, and takes you back to square one because the motif is discovery. Ideally you are supposed to approach the subject matter as if you know nothing about it. This gives an appearance of equal chance to all outcomes, even those that are unfavorable to your existing biases.
The most important thing is to be completely honest with yourself.
Inspecting your beliefs is a shitty experience, but the more you do it the better you become, and the easier it becomes to live with the consequences. This is the first step to bursting out of your bubble — Being able to think for yourself. But not the insular self righteous type, one that allows for the possibility that you may be wrong at every step of the way. How can you separate yourself from the pack (read — Bubble) if you always outsource your thinking?
Right from our hunter-gatherers days, human beings have been roving in bands and tribes. We have a tendency to gravitate towards individuals similar to us. This precept has been observed in a vast array of human interaction and in recent times especially on the internet.
For example, the internet provides a vast reach, while at the same time eliminating pesky limitations like geographical distance. Yet somehow we always manage to find people similar to us. The point is naturally, we will often get along with people who share the same views as we do. So we end up in a positive feedback loop where we consistently seek out people who are similar to us (Confirmation bias again). Social media’s suggestive/persuasive algorithms exacerbate this problem by several orders of magnitude. These days you don’t even have to try — the algorithms do all the searching for you.
How do you escape group think?
In theory when you leave one system of belief, you inadvertently move into another, the most important thing is that you’re thinking for yourself at every step of the way. Go out of your way to see what exists outside your bubble. Challenge yourself, allow yourself be challenged, try not to outsource your thinking, scrutinize everything. Refuse to fall into the den of group-think as it can sometimes foster pluralistic ignorance. In the case of pluralistic ignorance, it is not that members of the in-group do not feel doubt or disbelief, but social dynamics (e.g communal reinforcement) influence individuals in ways that makes them suppress their doubts to serve the purposes of the group, even if they suspect bullshit. But beware, sometimes you will incur social costs (and more) if you decide to betray your ideological comrades.
Yes you know ‘%’ to be true, but can you prove it?
The real tragedy of group-think is when you cannot accurately defend your opinion. This might lead to over-moralization of your position. You then demonize and essentialize an out-group, resort to ad hominem arguments where you simply refuse to evaluate arguments based on their merit, but based on your arbitrary valuation of the people making them.
You continue reinforcing the correctness of your ideology in isolation, clinging to an absoluteness that cannot survive scrutiny and resort to binary classifications that do not represent how the real world works. Your ideology loses its appeal, and devolves to an ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’ trope that must consistently be on the attack. This is when your bubble is weakest and requires that you weaponize your ideology. This is one way extremism is born.
Extremists often claim the highest moral ground so nobody can tell them nonsense. Literally.
Ideas spread by different ways: Persuasion, reason, force, repetition, social signalling etc. We need to understand that the entire human value system is artificial, it is completely made up, so you cannot lean on the rightness of your principles alone.
There are no self evident truths.
From history, we know how much people had to fight to get the values of equality and liberty ingrained so much in our collective consciousness, we now think them to be the default. But no they aren’t, there are no defaults. What we have is a collective myth based on widely believed premises that can be shattered at anytime.
Facts != Opinions
There are a lot of people who cannot separate fact from opinion. Earlier I said the thing about belief is that it doesn’t even have to be true, well the thing about facts are they can be proven to be true regardless of what you believe. Facts are independent of how you feel about them. Facts do not change subject to your whims and biases. A fact is not a democracy, it doesn’t care what you believe. Knowing where to delineate between what is fact and what is subjective opinion is vital to getting out of a filter bubble.
There are infinite ways to view an object of inquiry.
We shouldn’t fall into the trap that claims all opinions to be of equal value. Opinions should be evaluated based on how consistent and informed they are. Also we should be humble enough to realize the limitations of our knowledge. A few conclusions that could naturally follow from acknowledging limitations and gaps in knowledge are that your view is limited by the breadth of information you possess, your sense of understanding/biases and the assumption that there are probably more angles to the subject matter than your argument and its counter could cover.
In all this, it is important to realize that the human decision making process is flawed. In filter bubbles, these flaws can be amplified and reinforced without safety nets and checks. It is important to always ask questions, to honestly re-evaluate our stances and last of all be honest.
I will end this by saying some elemental requirements for breaking out of filter bubbles are :
- First realizing there is a problem (this requires cultivating the habit of thinking for yourself)
- Being honest enough to acknowledge incoherence in your worldviews and
- Seeking to correct them
Lastly it is also important to pair all this with an humility that lets you change your mind.
