GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore
When social media first appeared on the scene, many of us had high hopes it could play a positive role in community development and civic affairs, as indeed it has. What we did not anticipate was the long-term impact of the digital advertising model that supported it. That model is based on click-throughs, and one of the most effective ways to increase them was to present content that reinforces the recipient’s existing views.
Statisticians call the attraction to one’s existing point of view confirmation bias, and we all have it. As individuals, we believe we are in control of this, but it is obvious that at the level of populations, we are not. Confirmation bias, fed first by social media, and then by traditional media once it is converted to digital, has driven political and social polarization throughout the world. It has been further inflamed by conspiracy theories, malicious communications, fake news, and the like. And now we are faced with the advent of yet another amplifier—artificial intelligence. A significant portion of the fears about how AI could impact human welfare stem from how easily it can be put to malicious use through disinformation campaigns.
The impact of all this on our political life is chilling. Polarized media amplifies the impact of extremism and dampens the impact of moderation. This has most obviously been seen in primary elections, but it has now carried over into general elections to the point where highly unqualified individuals who have no interest in public service hold some of the most important roles in state and federal government. The resulting dysfunction is deeply disturbing, but it is not clear if and where a balance can be found.
Part of the problem is that confirmation bias is an essential part of healthy socialization. It reflects the impact that narratives have on our personal and community identities. What we might see as arrant folly another person sees as a necessary leap of faith. Our founding fathers were committed to protecting our nation from any authority imposing its narratives on unwilling recipients, hence our Constitutional commitment to both freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
In effect, this makes it virtually impossible to legislate our way out of this dilemma. Instead, we must embrace it as a Darwinian challenge, one that calls for us as individuals to adapt our strategies for living to a dangerous new circumstance. Here I think we can take a lesson from our recent pandemic experience. Faced with the threat of a highly contagious, ever-mutating Covid virus, most of the developed economies embraced rapid vaccination as their core response. China, however, did not. It embraced regulation instead. What they and we learned is that you cannot solve problems of contagion through regulation.
We can apply this learning to dealing with the universe of viral memes that have infected our digital infrastructure and driven social discord. Instead of regulation, we need to think of vaccination. The vaccine that protects people from fake news and its many variants is called critical thinking, and the healthcare provider that dispenses it is called public education.
We have spent the past several decades focusing on the STEM wing of our educational system, but at the risk of exercising my own confirmation bias, the immunity protection we need now comes from the liberal arts. Specifically, it emerges from supervised classroom discussions in which students are presented with a wide variety of challenging texts and experiences accompanied by a facilitated dialog that instructs them in the practices of listening, questioning, proposing, debating, and ultimately affirming or denying the validity of the argument under consideration. These discussions are not about promoting or endorsing any particular point of view. Rather, they teach one how to engage with any point of view in a respectful, powerful way. This is the intellectual discipline that underlies responsible citizenship. We have it in our labs. We just need to get it distributed more broadly.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Pixabay
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