musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

You may know all that can be known, but I know the rest…


It’s hard to know how to know what to call knowledge nowadays, don’t you think? It sometimes seems to be a little like the former American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld’s cryptic description of the state of information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002 being, among other things, ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’, or ‘unknown unknowns’ – with no clear definition of any… leaving one to conclude our knowledge about anything is nothing but a clever, if opaque, obfuscation.

It still rings true about some things, I suppose, though: the quality of knowledge propagated by the internet. Clearly the information is not all misleading; one just has to be clever about the source and how it is presented. I refer, of course, to the risk of being inadvertently trapped in either an epistemic bubble, or an echo chamber online. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the ‘other side’ whereas an echo chamber is when you don’t trust people from the ‘other side’. I have to admit that I required an essay that I happened upon the other day to clarify the difference for me.[i]

As it tried to make clear, an epistemic bubble (‘epistemic’ refers to knowledge or its degree of validation) is an informational network from which relevant but contrary opinions -ie on the other side of an argument- have been omitted so you don’t even know about them.

An echo chamber on the other hand, purposely excludes voices from the other side because they are not to be trusted; their opinions have been discredited; they are not, and should not be, part of your belief structure -just in case. In a way, I suppose it is sort of like a cult where its members are isolated from outsiders because, non-members are untrustworthy.

Nowadays, I think most of us are aware of bubbles and echo-chambers in our social news feeds, but because the algorithm is working quietly behind the scenes and providing us with comfortably agreeable opinion pieces, it’s all too easy to forget to be vigilant; all too easy to acquiesce in what we get without exercising due diligence as to its source.

Still, even knowing the dangers of these biases, how should I react to a purveyor of opposing opinions in a conversation when I’m pretty sure they’re misguided? I mean, is it possible that I, and not they are wrong? It’s all well and good to pursue sources online, but harassing somebody in a conversation to provide proof of their contention is tricky. To insist that they are mistaken -or worse, don’t know what they’re talking about- does not usually win arguments, or friends.

But let’s face it, there’s a lot of information out there, and if it tends to agree with our own opinions, how can we decide if that means we are correct? Not all forms of corroboration are meaningful: the fact that the UK’s prestigious Guardian newspaper reports something might count as a fair reason to believe it, but any extra copies of same edition of The Guardian that one encounters isn’t additional evidence. For that matter, how can we tell whether any evidence is just a result of our own selection criteria?

Epistemic bubbles are perhaps easier to dispel than echo chambers, however: simply expose its members to alternate opinions without demeaning them. Not so with echo chambers, though; remember, its adherents have been conditioned to mistrust other viewpoints, as well as those who hold them; the power and enthusiasm of already held opinions are turned against contrary evidence with a carefully maintained internal structure of belief: evidential pre–emption. Let’s face it, modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every other member of that chain; so it’s not just a matter of exercising more intellectual autonomy… Echo chambers are built to withstand contrary opinions by anathematizing them. Contradicting them adds sanctimony to the effort: one religion’s sincerely held credos contradicting those of a rival.

In a way, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry: they’re engaging in critical reasoning with the evidence to which they are exposed; they are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world. And yet… they are systematically misinformed about where to place their trust. Echo chambers are not double-speak megaphones; they’re not trying to go through the motions of speech without actually committing themselves to any real substantive claims: they know what they believe. For those of us outside the chamber, the variety of our informational sources will put an upper limit on how much we’re willing to trust any single person, trust the infallibility of any particular viewpoint. But opposing information is, in fact, counterintuitive to an echo chamber.

So, is there a way to help an echo-chamber member to reboot? Direct assault tactics – bombarding them with ‘evidence’ – won’t work: echo-chambers are not only protected from such attacks, but their belief systems will judo such attacks into further reinforcement of their worldview. Instead, we need to attack the root systems themselves, and restore trust in at least some outside voices.

Personal encounters may help: a child, a family member, a close friend coming out as it were. These encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust. If I demonstrate goodwill in action by actually listening, then perhaps there is some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge. So if one can demonstrate goodwill to an echo-chambered member, is there a glimmer of hope…?

I remember trying to convince a friend of mine to quit smoking. But, her parents smoked, her brother smoked, and all of her close friends smoked. Of course she knew it was considered an unhealthy habit, but like her parents and friends, they had all been unable to quit; her grandparents -both in their 80ies- still seemed in good health despite smoking all their lives. “Maybe some of us have some sort of genetic protection,” she once suggested to me during an argument. I’m not sure whether it was an attempt to recruit me into her ranks, or to agree that she had a valid point if I wanted to continue to date her…

But, alas, to her I remained other, I suppose; someone who would forever try to convince her to change her mind, so she never made an effort to compromise; nor did I. We were just too different, too stubborn for common sense to have any sway, and we decided to go our own ways, still convinced that each of us was right.

I occasionally reminisce about what might have happened if we’d  come to some form of compromise; then I think of the words of the Indian-born English Journalist Rudyard Kipling in his 19th century Barrack Room Ballads: ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ He was referring to the difference in attitude of the colonizers to the colonized in the old British Empire, I suppose. But perhaps he was simply a man of his time; perhaps he and my long-ago friend saw no need to understand the other side…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult

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gozzter

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