Truth, post-truth and Neal Stephenson
Part of the point of the shift to In Tenure Veritas is to write more fun posts, rather than the annoying garbage about whatever idiotic things are happening in day-to-day politics. With that in mind, and the "veritas" part in mind, here's my recommendation to everyone: read Neal Stephenson's new novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. It matters for the modern world.
Everything in this post will be accessible if you haven't read the book, but if you plan to read it and don't want any spoilers, turn back now.
Quick summary, and all you need to know to explain the fun stuff: Fall is a sort of sequel to Reamde, in which Richard "Dodge" Forthrast begins by having to go in to the doctor for a minor medical procedure under sedation. He ignores medical directives to go in with an empty stomach, because... what's the worst that can happen? It's a very "Dodge" thing to do. He... dies. As per a directive he signed years earlier, his brain is preserved until it can be scanned into a computer system that becomes a digital afterlife, and wackiness ensues. For anyone who is a hardcore Neal Stephenson fan, the book also connects to the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes, and those names will mean something, but even if you have never read a Neal Stephenson book before, it all makes as much sense as a stand-alone book. It's just bloody weird, and the whole thing turns Miltonian.
My point for today, though, is what happens along the way, before Dodge's brain can be scanned. Reamde takes place in something vaguely like our world, so getting from our world to a scanned-brain in "Bitworld" requires technological development. And along the way, social development. Therein lies some of the real fun of the book, and Stephenson venting about how much politics and the world suck in the modern, post-truth age.
Read it.
Stephenson takes some liberties, of course, but things start going even more off the rails than they are now with the following stunt, perpetrated by the main basically-villain of the book. The villain arranges a DDoS attack on the internet service provider and telephones for Moab, UT. He also arranges some faked videos of a mushroom cloud. And, with nobody communicating out of Utah, can the villain convince people that Moab really has been nuked? More faked videos of fake scientists, fake press conferences, etc. help the hoax...
In the book, it takes about a day for the hoax to get fully debunked, but during that day, people go nuts. In my opinion, it should take less than a day because the power company should see that the power lines are unaffected, and likewise water supply and... Never mind. Anyway, the point is, the hoax freaks people out for a short period of time, before it is debunked, basically to show how easy it is to mess with people in the modern world.
What comes next? Well, a lot of people, of course, decide that the real hoax is the claim that Moab wasn't nuked! Moab doesn't exist! "Remember Moab" flags and stickers and whatnot start popping up everywhere from conspiracy cranks, and the character of Maeve Braden, who was in Moab becomes the object of conspiracy theory hatred. Why? Because people are wacko.
And here, doesn't it sound like Stephenson is onto something? Let's ignore, for a moment, the question of how long it would take to debunk the Moab hoax, and ask instead what happens afterwards. We have extensive social science, including research from Brendan Nyhan, on what happens when you try to debunk people's false beliefs, be they about "death panels," or any other wackadoo idea, and they just dig in further. Create a hoax about Moab getting nuked, then show that it was all a hoax, and a bunch of wackos will start spreading the conspiracy theory that the real conspiracy is the claim that it wasn't nuked.
How many? Right now, bluntly, I don't know. That would depend on whether or not one political group sees an angle in adopting the conspiracy theory. A minority, but Stephenson was just getting started.
Along comes a computer programmer buddy of Dodge's, from his old company. Pluto. Pluto is an idealist, and not very bright about social interaction. He is fascinated by the nature of the hatred directed at Maeve Braden, and he approaches Maeve and her eventual husband, Corvallis (C+, yes, really), with a proposal. He has a program which will basically do what the social media part of Russian election interference does, on a massive, automated scale. It will subject Maeve to so many internet messages of hate, which are so obviously inconsistent with the other messages of hate, that no sane, intelligent person could see it as anything other than a program running on the internet. What's more, Pluto would tell the world what was happening, and release the code, as open-source code. See? That would fix everything, because nobody could ever believe any of that nonsense about Maeve anymore because it's all obviously "fake news." The result would be that the internet as it exists would have to be scrapped and replaced with a better system with information verification because... c'mon. This is so obviously nuts that everyone will realize it and collectively get together and adopt a system in which this doesn't happen anymore. Creative destruction.
Of course, this is the kind of plan that can only make sense to a programmer who doesn't understand people. Of course it doesn't work. Why not? People are... not what Pluto thought.
Instead, the old internet gets scrapped, and replaced with a system which is the reductio ad absurdum of the existing media environment. Stephenson-- sneering elitist that he is-- poses to us that what happens is that we wind up with a new internet in which the vast majority of "information" generated is generated by bots of the kind that Pluto devised, and with the death of journalism, people instead pay for an "editor." Their editor is rarely a human. Only the richest humans have human editors. Your editor is usually just a program that chooses what kind of messages get through to you based on what you choose to watch, read, see, the people with whom you interact... yeah.
The consequence is an even more bifurcated world, sneeringly described by Stephenson, not merely as an ideological siloing of the population, but as a complete balkanization of the country in which the cities are populated by the reality-based world, in which people choose editors that try to filter out the garbage (like claims that Moab was nuked), and the boonies are populated by wackos who have all joined a new church called the Church of Leviticus, based on the idea that the biggest conspiracy in history is the Sermon on the Mound/crucifixion story, so they preach Leviticus and burn crosses. And don't you dare tell them that Moab exists.
The thing about the book is that all of this is the stuff that happens before Dodge's brain gets scanned into Bitworld, giving us a bunch of biblical/Paradise Lost type stuff about a digital afterlife. Neal Stephenson is so much fun.
Spend a bit of time thinking about what's going on here. There's a lot. I may come back to this in subsequent posts, depending on how much I feel like digging into Fall, but let's start with the basic propensity for conspiracy theorizing. Stephenson poses it as something that divides, eventually the urban/rural populations. Not subtle. Of course, most people are susceptible to at least some conspiracy theories (see, for example, Goertzel's 1994 article from Political Psychology), but some left/right divides have emerged in the last few years (see Miller et al.'s 2015 AJPS piece). Really, though, associated with conspiracy theorizing is the problem of sorting truth from fiction. Argument by authority is a logical fallacy, but sorting fact from fiction when you cannot test reality yourself requires trust, and the basic informational problem is whom you trust. Stephenson poses the distinction as the distinction between the reality-based community and the wackos because, like I keep saying, he's not being subtle, and when there is a side that chooses to adopt a lie-- like Moab getting nuked-- there is reality, and there is the lie. Either you seek out reality, or you don't. You let yourself believe the comforting lie. Or rather, comfort may not be the consideration because perhaps letting people scare the crap out of you is the point.
That, of course, leads to a question that I will pose to any reader or political observer. What scares you, and on what basis? Some fears are overblown. Some are not. How do you assess them? The reality-based community is supposed to assess them on the basis of objective measures. In Fall, the world is bifurcated between the reality-based community, who pays for editorial services that select messages on the basis of factuality, and the nutjobs in the boonies who just want to be scared, but only by certain things. Like, those people who nuked Moab. What do you fear? Are those fears objectively grounded in terms of their statistical likelihood of occurring? (Or the reality of their past occurrence?) Are they connected to the magnitude of the stakes? When these things get out of proportion, you have a problem, and this isn't all fixed by one of Stephenson's "editors," even without Leviticans who burn crosses and execute you for wearing clothing made of mixed fibers.
So, how close are we to Fall, informationally? Um...Reamde Read it.
Oh yeah. Thanks for sticking around, and by all means, spread the new address around to anyone who might like the new direction of the blog.
Everything in this post will be accessible if you haven't read the book, but if you plan to read it and don't want any spoilers, turn back now.
Quick summary, and all you need to know to explain the fun stuff: Fall is a sort of sequel to Reamde, in which Richard "Dodge" Forthrast begins by having to go in to the doctor for a minor medical procedure under sedation. He ignores medical directives to go in with an empty stomach, because... what's the worst that can happen? It's a very "Dodge" thing to do. He... dies. As per a directive he signed years earlier, his brain is preserved until it can be scanned into a computer system that becomes a digital afterlife, and wackiness ensues. For anyone who is a hardcore Neal Stephenson fan, the book also connects to the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes, and those names will mean something, but even if you have never read a Neal Stephenson book before, it all makes as much sense as a stand-alone book. It's just bloody weird, and the whole thing turns Miltonian.
My point for today, though, is what happens along the way, before Dodge's brain can be scanned. Reamde takes place in something vaguely like our world, so getting from our world to a scanned-brain in "Bitworld" requires technological development. And along the way, social development. Therein lies some of the real fun of the book, and Stephenson venting about how much politics and the world suck in the modern, post-truth age.
Read it.
Stephenson takes some liberties, of course, but things start going even more off the rails than they are now with the following stunt, perpetrated by the main basically-villain of the book. The villain arranges a DDoS attack on the internet service provider and telephones for Moab, UT. He also arranges some faked videos of a mushroom cloud. And, with nobody communicating out of Utah, can the villain convince people that Moab really has been nuked? More faked videos of fake scientists, fake press conferences, etc. help the hoax...
In the book, it takes about a day for the hoax to get fully debunked, but during that day, people go nuts. In my opinion, it should take less than a day because the power company should see that the power lines are unaffected, and likewise water supply and... Never mind. Anyway, the point is, the hoax freaks people out for a short period of time, before it is debunked, basically to show how easy it is to mess with people in the modern world.
What comes next? Well, a lot of people, of course, decide that the real hoax is the claim that Moab wasn't nuked! Moab doesn't exist! "Remember Moab" flags and stickers and whatnot start popping up everywhere from conspiracy cranks, and the character of Maeve Braden, who was in Moab becomes the object of conspiracy theory hatred. Why? Because people are wacko.
And here, doesn't it sound like Stephenson is onto something? Let's ignore, for a moment, the question of how long it would take to debunk the Moab hoax, and ask instead what happens afterwards. We have extensive social science, including research from Brendan Nyhan, on what happens when you try to debunk people's false beliefs, be they about "death panels," or any other wackadoo idea, and they just dig in further. Create a hoax about Moab getting nuked, then show that it was all a hoax, and a bunch of wackos will start spreading the conspiracy theory that the real conspiracy is the claim that it wasn't nuked.
How many? Right now, bluntly, I don't know. That would depend on whether or not one political group sees an angle in adopting the conspiracy theory. A minority, but Stephenson was just getting started.
Along comes a computer programmer buddy of Dodge's, from his old company. Pluto. Pluto is an idealist, and not very bright about social interaction. He is fascinated by the nature of the hatred directed at Maeve Braden, and he approaches Maeve and her eventual husband, Corvallis (C+, yes, really), with a proposal. He has a program which will basically do what the social media part of Russian election interference does, on a massive, automated scale. It will subject Maeve to so many internet messages of hate, which are so obviously inconsistent with the other messages of hate, that no sane, intelligent person could see it as anything other than a program running on the internet. What's more, Pluto would tell the world what was happening, and release the code, as open-source code. See? That would fix everything, because nobody could ever believe any of that nonsense about Maeve anymore because it's all obviously "fake news." The result would be that the internet as it exists would have to be scrapped and replaced with a better system with information verification because... c'mon. This is so obviously nuts that everyone will realize it and collectively get together and adopt a system in which this doesn't happen anymore. Creative destruction.
Of course, this is the kind of plan that can only make sense to a programmer who doesn't understand people. Of course it doesn't work. Why not? People are... not what Pluto thought.
Instead, the old internet gets scrapped, and replaced with a system which is the reductio ad absurdum of the existing media environment. Stephenson-- sneering elitist that he is-- poses to us that what happens is that we wind up with a new internet in which the vast majority of "information" generated is generated by bots of the kind that Pluto devised, and with the death of journalism, people instead pay for an "editor." Their editor is rarely a human. Only the richest humans have human editors. Your editor is usually just a program that chooses what kind of messages get through to you based on what you choose to watch, read, see, the people with whom you interact... yeah.
The consequence is an even more bifurcated world, sneeringly described by Stephenson, not merely as an ideological siloing of the population, but as a complete balkanization of the country in which the cities are populated by the reality-based world, in which people choose editors that try to filter out the garbage (like claims that Moab was nuked), and the boonies are populated by wackos who have all joined a new church called the Church of Leviticus, based on the idea that the biggest conspiracy in history is the Sermon on the Mound/crucifixion story, so they preach Leviticus and burn crosses. And don't you dare tell them that Moab exists.
The thing about the book is that all of this is the stuff that happens before Dodge's brain gets scanned into Bitworld, giving us a bunch of biblical/Paradise Lost type stuff about a digital afterlife. Neal Stephenson is so much fun.
Spend a bit of time thinking about what's going on here. There's a lot. I may come back to this in subsequent posts, depending on how much I feel like digging into Fall, but let's start with the basic propensity for conspiracy theorizing. Stephenson poses it as something that divides, eventually the urban/rural populations. Not subtle. Of course, most people are susceptible to at least some conspiracy theories (see, for example, Goertzel's 1994 article from Political Psychology), but some left/right divides have emerged in the last few years (see Miller et al.'s 2015 AJPS piece). Really, though, associated with conspiracy theorizing is the problem of sorting truth from fiction. Argument by authority is a logical fallacy, but sorting fact from fiction when you cannot test reality yourself requires trust, and the basic informational problem is whom you trust. Stephenson poses the distinction as the distinction between the reality-based community and the wackos because, like I keep saying, he's not being subtle, and when there is a side that chooses to adopt a lie-- like Moab getting nuked-- there is reality, and there is the lie. Either you seek out reality, or you don't. You let yourself believe the comforting lie. Or rather, comfort may not be the consideration because perhaps letting people scare the crap out of you is the point.
That, of course, leads to a question that I will pose to any reader or political observer. What scares you, and on what basis? Some fears are overblown. Some are not. How do you assess them? The reality-based community is supposed to assess them on the basis of objective measures. In Fall, the world is bifurcated between the reality-based community, who pays for editorial services that select messages on the basis of factuality, and the nutjobs in the boonies who just want to be scared, but only by certain things. Like, those people who nuked Moab. What do you fear? Are those fears objectively grounded in terms of their statistical likelihood of occurring? (Or the reality of their past occurrence?) Are they connected to the magnitude of the stakes? When these things get out of proportion, you have a problem, and this isn't all fixed by one of Stephenson's "editors," even without Leviticans who burn crosses and execute you for wearing clothing made of mixed fibers.
So, how close are we to Fall, informationally? Um...
Oh yeah. Thanks for sticking around, and by all means, spread the new address around to anyone who might like the new direction of the blog.
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