The Information Diet Part 4

I remember when, I remember.

I remember when I lost my mind.

There was something so pleasant about that place.

Even your emotions have an echo in so much s.p.a.ce.

And when you're out there without care.

Yeah, I was out of touch.

But it wasn't because I didn't know enough.

I just knew too much.

Does that make me crazy?

Does that make me crazy?

Does that make me crazy?

Possibly.

-Gnarls Barkley.

In 2004, after two years of my Howard Deanbased information diet, I headed home to Albany, Georgia, for Thanksgiving dinner. It's like a national holiday in my giant southern family-come to my family's house on Thanksgiving and you'll begin to wonder whether or not the whole thing about us all being related in the South is true. It seems like the whole state is at our house.

One of my favorite relatives is my dad's brother-Uncle Warren. He's got a deep drawl that makes you want to sip lemonade and sit on the front porch all day, and is so charming that he could convince Alex Trebek to give up on the trivia questions and just go fis.h.i.+ng. He also loves Fox News, and thinks that if we all listened to a little more of it, we all might be a bit better off.

In that fall of 2004, Uncle Warren and I had very different information diets. It had become a sort of family tradition in the years prior for my uncle and I to clash, but this year I made it a point before my voyage home, that Uncle Warren-the symbolic head of the ultra-right-wing sect of the Johnson family-would be proven unequivocally wrong on all issues.

In my mind, I was right, and he was wrong. It just had to be the case. I mean-every news report I'd ever read on DailyKos, every data point I'd seen, and all the polls I'd seen on Zogby agreed with me. If I just explained the "facts" to him, he'd have to admit that, well, he was wrong and, more importantly, I was right.

What I didn't account for was that Uncle Warren watched the news he believed in, too. He showed up with his own set of "facts." I'd also neglected to read the aforementioned studies about how facts tend to be particularly poor at persuasion, especially the ones that you pick up on left-wing blogs or the ones that you pick up in the left-of-center bars in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

The conversation, viewed from the outside, couldn't have been considered coherent. It was just an explosion of nonsense-two grown men shouting at each other about taxes, gun control, and healthcare, with some perfectly good turkey between us. That Thanksgiving, Uncle Warren left early, and things haven't been the same between us since.

It's a shame, really. My uncle and I in a big fight, essentially invading a family tradition because we had developed our own biases, and had both become too attached to our separate-and separating-ideas of reality. Information obesity can inflict some pretty serious damage on families.

Our media companies aren't neuroscientists, nor are they conspiratorial. There's no elaborate plot aimed at driving Americans apart to play against each other in games of reds vs. blues. A more pragmatic view is that our economy is organic. Through the tests of trial and error, our media companies have figured out what we want, and are giving it to us. It turns out, the more they give it to us, the more we want. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

When we tell ourselves, and listen to, only what we want to hear, we can end up so far from reality that we start making poor decisions. The result is a public that's being torn apart, only comfortable hearing the reality that's unique to their particular tribe.

Even our leaders in Congress feel the effects. In September of 2011, Speaker of the House John Boehner said that sometimes talking to the President was like "two different people from two different planets who barely understand each other."[50]

It's a new kind of ignorance epidemic: information obesity.

According to a 2009 Public Policy Polling survey, 39% of people in the United States believe that the United States government should stay out of Medicare (a government-run program). Ten percent of people are not certain or do not believe that Hawaii is a state, and 7% believe that Barack Obama is from France.[51]

We know that we're losing touch, too. Or at least we have a feeling that we're losing our grasp of the facts. In a December 2010 poll done by WorldPublicOpinion.org (run by the Program on International Policy Att.i.tudes at the University of Maryland), 91% of voters said they had encountered misleading information. Fifty-six percent said they'd encountered it frequently. According to Gallup, only 27% of us have a "great deal of confidence" in television news broadcasts-down from 46% in 1993.

These problems don't stem from a lack of information. They stem from a new kind of ignorance: one that results in the selection and consumption of information that is demonstrably wrong. We don't trust "the news" but we do trust "our news," in other words, the news we want to believe in. And that's a far more potent weapon than our cla.s.sic view of ignorance.

In 1969, the tobacco company Brown & Williamson came to the conclusion that the only way it was going to save itself from intense regulation and market loss due to health concerns over cigarette use was through the production of information, rather than the concealment of it. Here's what it said: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public."[52]

With that, Big Tobacco started producing as much doubt as it did cigarettes. It spent millions of dollars on funding research, and academic papers were released saying that Alzheimer's Disease is prevented by smoking cigarettes (makes sense: you'll be dead before you get it), and that smoking may boost immune systems.

Big Tobacco created independent organizations, too, such as the Center for Indoor Air Research to "broaden research in the field of indoor air quality generally and expand interest beyond the misplaced emphasis solely on environmental tobacco smoke." It set up a.s.sociates for Research In the Science of Enjoyment (ARISE) to provide research bolstering the idea that smoking's effects on relaxation could boost immune systems.

Big Tobacco figured something out: it didn't have to worry about people who smoked and didn't watch the news. They'd keep smoking. It needed to create doubt in the minds of smokers who do watch the news to keep them as customers, and it would need to create doubt in the minds of the non-smoking public in order to keep government away from the regulation of secondhand smoke.

In hindsight, we now know that cigarette smoke causes cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other terminal issues. Your health insurance company asks if you're a smoker for a reason: because if you are, you're going to die sooner, and probably cost a bunch of money before you go out. We're now so certain of it that some are suggesting that early smoking deaths could help save Social Security.[53]

The argument about tobacco is mostly settled, but we still face the production of doubt. In 2007, the American a.s.sociation of Petroleum Geologists-the last major scientific body to reject climate change's existence and cause- changed its mind. Climate scientists reached consensus: global warming is "unequivocal" and mankind is the primary cause.[54] Since then, no recognized scientific body has dissented from the theory[55] or rejected the idea of climate change.

In the five years since consensus was reached by the scientific community, the number of people doubting climate change's occurrence has increased. When the battle for scientific minds ended, the doubt production machines s.h.i.+fted into overdrive.

In 1998, a public relations representative for the American Petroleum Inst.i.tute named Joe Walker had foresight. He wrote an eight-page memo suggesting that the inst.i.tute spend $5 million over two years to "maximize the impact of scientific views" consistent with theirs and noted that "public opinion is open to change on climate change."[56] Fast forward to 2007, the Guardian reported that the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute, a think tank funded by companies like ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris, started offering $10,000 "grants" plus travel expenses to scientists who would publish articles emphasizing the shortcomings of theories of climate change.[57]

Slowly but surely, these scientists have produced pseudo and counter facts for money, and muddied the waters of public debate.

In 2009, thousands of emails and doc.u.ments from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit illegally found their way onto the Internet. The emails lit a fire across the Web called climategate, empowering climate skeptics like James Delingpole, author of "365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy" to declare it the "final nail in the coffin for Anthropenic Global Warming."[58]

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that all climate science was "junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood."[59] Soon after, radio host Rush Limbaugh and a variety of climate skeptic "pundits" piled on with sound bites. The leaked emails gave folks like the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute along with allied pundits what they needed in order to create a closed epistemic loop that pulled a significant portion of people away from scientific truth.

Of course, investigation after investigation has shown that the emails were taken largely out of context, and the scientists doing the research were exonerated. That's according to an independent internal review, as well as others by Penn State, the British House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee, the UK's Royal Society, and the United States Department of Commerce. But the damage was done, giving those who wanted to deny climate change's existence something to point to that confirmed their beliefs.

You have to ask yourself what's more likely: that nearly every scientist in the broadest, most skeptical fields of science (everyone from pediatricians to geologists) has been co-opted by Al Gore's secret agenda to make us carpool, or that a smaller number of companies with billions of dollars invested in the status quo are manufacturing doubt so that we don't change. To me, the latter seems a lot more feasible. I've had the pleasure of meeting Al Gore, and he's just not that charming.

Confident Ignorance.

In 2011, comedian Jon Stewart stated that Fox News viewers were "the most consistently misinformed" viewers of the media. It set off a bit of a controversy, and Politifact, a reputable fact-checking organization run by the St. Petersberg Times in Florida, jumped on the story.

They pointed to public polling from Pew and the University of Maryland- reputable pollsters-that found that viewers of shows like the O'Reilly Factor were actually just as knowledgeable about politics (through correct answers to questions like "Who is the Speaker of the House?" and "Who is the president of Russia?"), scored as more highly informed than average media viewers, and were in roughly the same league as viewers of the Daily Show, PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio.

Stewart responded by apologizing to Politifact for being misinformed, but then fired back with a laundry list of news stories that Politifact itself stated that Fox had gotten wrong: headlines like "Texas Board of Education May Eliminate Christmas and the Const.i.tution from Textbooks" and "Cash for Clunkers Will Give Government Complete Access to Your Computer."

The truth is, they're both right, and pinpoint our new kind of ignorance: one that comes from the consumption of information, not the lack of it. The new ignorance has three flavors-all of which lead us to information obesity: agnotology, epistemic closure, and filter failure.

[50] Fox News: O'Reilly Factor, July 22, 2011.

[51] http://www.scribd.com/doc/36367943/PPP-Release-National-819513 [52] http://tobaccodoc.u.ments.org/landman/332506.html [53] http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/bill-mcclellan/article_080530ab-b4b2-5c26-8e44-9eb2efcf5ec5.html [54] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/science/earth/03climate.html?ex=1328158800&en=61f42312221df544&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss [55] http://books.google.com/books?id=PXJIqCkb7YIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262541930&hl=en&ei=uYyGTaz8PKKx0QHQguXhCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false [56] http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/us/industrial-group-plans-to-battle-climate-treaty.html [57] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange [58] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/ [59] https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=188540473434.

Agnotology.

Robert Proctor is an historian at Stanford University, and the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry. Through his study, he coined the term agnotology to describe what Big Tobacco pushed on society in the later half of the twentieth century, and what the coal, petroleum, steel, and other industries through the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute and the national Chamber of Commerce are doing to us now. He defines agnotology as the study of culturally induced doubt, particularly through the production of seemingly factual data. It's a modern form of manufactured ignorance.

Agnotological ignorance does not affect those who don't tune in. It affects those who do. At the University of New Hamps.h.i.+re, Professor Lawrence Hamilton polled 2,051 people across different regions in the United States. He asked them how informed they were about climate change, where they stood on the issue, and what their political party was.

The results shouldn't be surprising if you've read this far: those who claimed to know the most about climate change (as a result of consuming news or scientific data) had the most divergent opinions of its cause. Those who claimed to know very little about climate change were closer together in their opinions.

In 2008, Pew found a similar result around the climate change debate: 19% of Republicans with college degrees believed that global warming was happening because of human activity, versus 31% for Republicans without college degrees. Eighty-five percent of Democrats with college degrees believed that global warming was happening because of human activity versus 52% of those without degrees. The more informed someone is, the more hardened their beliefs become; whether they're correct is an entirely different matter.

Epistemic Closure.

The CATO inst.i.tute is a right-leaning, pro-business, libertarian think tank based in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The offices of CATO are not lined with people holding signs that say "keep your government hands of my Medicare"-but rather with smart people who tend to believe that market forces can settle things more effectively and efficiently than government regulations. While they'll find more comfort at the c.o.c.ktail parties on the right, these politicos tend to hang out by themselves, unable to find an intellectually honest home (or bar) in either party. Most Republicans identify with libertarians. But not all libertarians identify with Republicans.

Julian Sanchez is one of those folks from CATO who is probably too smart and too honest to get invited to too many c.o.c.ktail parties on the right or on the left. In early 2010, Sanchez described a problem he saw with the right: "One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they're liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)"[60]

Climate change is a perfect example of epistemic closure: science is liberal; climate change is from science; thus climate change is a liberal conspiracy. Every news outlet that reports on it must also be corrupted by liberal influence, and thus can be dismissed. But the left succ.u.mbs to epistemic closure too.

Look at the left's unyielding relations.h.i.+p to organized labor: no inst.i.tution with that much money is unquestionably good, yet you'll find many a left-wing operative in Was.h.i.+ngton looking at you sternly if you question a union's motives. Talk with a liberal about former District of Columbia schools chancellor Mich.e.l.le Rhee's idea that teachers ought to be kept on the payrolls based on their performance, rather than their seniority, and you'll find yourself in a screaming match pretty quickly.

With its general distrust of pharmaceutical companies, the left is still listening to the likes of Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy on the now-settled question of whether measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination causes autism. (It doesn't.) The left still bristles at the question of nuclear energy, though for every person that dies from nuclear energy, 4,000 people die from coal production.[61]

Epistemic closure is a tool that empowers agnotological ignorance. As certain information is produced, all other sources of information are dismissed as unreliable or worse, conspiratorial.

[60] http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/03/26/frum-c.o.c.ktail-parties-and-the-threat-of-doubt/ [61] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html.

Filter Failure.

You don't need the liberal or conservative media to make you ignorant. It can come from the production and consumption of information from your friends, and the personalization of that information. The friends we choose and the places we go all give us a new kind of bubble within which to consume information. My experience of delusion on the Dean campaign wasn't just about my media consumption, but also the a.s.sociation with people who thought, consumed, and believed exactly as I did.

We all live in our own social bubbles, which we create and empower through our social relations.h.i.+ps-and interestingly, new research says that these relations.h.i.+ps have profound impacts on us. The friends we select, and the communities in which we work, play, and love serve as filters for us. It's too high of a cognitive and ego burden to surround ourselves with people that we disagree with.

If you're a Facebook user, try counting up the number of friends you have who share your political beliefs. Unless you're working hard to do otherwise, it's likely that you've surrounded yourself with people who skew towards your beliefs. Now look beyond political beliefs-how many of your friends share the same economic cla.s.s as you?

With social media, it becomes more difficult to escape these biases. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, observed that though he worked hard to maintain strong relations.h.i.+ps with conservative friends, the links that they were posting to Facebook suddenly disappeared from his news feed. Why? Facebook had determined that he wasn't clicking on them, and thus Facebook decided to remove them to make more room for the stuff that he was clicking on.

Before Pariser's Facebook feed got personalized for him, though-and before his web searches, online newspapers, and blogs were personalized by other companies-Pariser made some choices of his own: he chose his friends, he chose what to click on, and he chose how long to spend consuming that information. All of that information went in to the algorithms that predict what will interest him in the future.

Those algorithms are everywhere: our web searches, our online purchases, our advertis.e.m.e.nts. This network of predictions is what Pariser calls the Filter Bubble in his book by the same name (Penguin Press)-the network of personalization technology that figures out what you want and keeps feeding you that at the expense of what you don't want. It's different than the A/B testing based on popular opinion; this systemic personalization is supposed to bring us what is relevant to us.

Pariser's filter bubble existed long before the invention of personalized technologies. We started doing it ourselves when we started forming societies and developing our own personal networks. We tend to a.s.sociate with people who believe the same things we do, unless we have to a.s.sociate with them by force of turkey, like me and Uncle Warren.

What is new is automatic personalization as a way of coping with surplus information, and the fact that those choices we're making are having more immediate, more transparent consequences.

Personalization is just a mirror that reflects our behavior back to us, and while some might argue that the best way to make our reflections look better is to change the shape of the mirror, the fairest way to do it is to change what it's reflecting. We build filters around us with every friend we make, and every time we click. Without careful consideration, we risk throwing ourselves into more agnotological bubbles, and drifting farther away from reality.

Chapter 6. The Symptoms of Information Obesity.