What was once a more-or-less harmless, single-issue troll has morphed into something far more monstrous and formidable: a veritable Swiss-army knife of bulls**t, a perfect storm of bad ideas, a walking Wikipedia of stupid.
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“Many errors can be corrected with five minutes of internet research. Unfortunately none of them are worth correcting.”—Aaron Haspel, Everything (2015)
When I was a kid, there were still people in my working-class neighborhood who believed that if you scared a pregnant woman, her baby would be born with a tail. Ignorance like this of shockingly medieval proportions was everywhere to be found. Few of my friends had a working 20th-century knowledge of human anatomy, much less the natural world. But I’m happy to report that the Internet, and especially Wikipedia, has cleared up much of this ignorance. My children have access to far more accurate knowledge about things like how a woman gets pregnant than most of my friends did at their age. What’s more, to the best of my knowledge, none of their friends believe in babies with tails. To this extent, then, the Internet has indeed been a force of enlightenment in our world. We’re probably better at remembering names and dates accurately than previous generations were.
Unfortunately, however, the Internet’s enlightenment has been limited in scope. Just as globalization and the overuse of antibiotics have produced resistant strains of bacteria—super-bugs, capable of doing a great deal of damage—the Internet has produced resistant strains of ignorance—super-idiots, capable of doing a great deal of damage. The problem, which I’ve discussed at length elsewhere, has to do with a basic flaw in how we reason. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the only thing worse than thinking through important political matters alone, is thinking through important political matters amongst people who share all of your assumptions. We need to be exposed to challenging unorthodox ideas on a fairly regular basis. But social media (and search engines like Google) are making it easier and easier for us to silence radical voices (by dismissing them as “trolls”), and retreat into homogeneous online echo chambers. This is a worrisome trend. The ease with which we can Facebook “block” trolls ought to give pause to all who value democracy, intelligent debate, and the open society. Why? Because no amount of intelligence or education can replace this kind of diversity. Because smart people with MAs and PhDs are blinded by bias.
Reasoning researcher David Perkins has demonstrated in numerous studies that IQ is a remarkably poor predictor of a person’s capacity for “fair and balanced” reasoning. Most of his studies look something like this:
- Give the person an IQ test to establish their score.
- Ask them how they feel about a contentious political issue.
- Now ask them to come up with reasons and arguments to support the other side.
- Ask them to come up with reasons and arguments to support their side.
As you might imagine, pretty much everyone sucks at finding support for the other side. What’s interesting, though, is that people with high IQs suck just as much as people with low IQs. All of this changes, however, when people are asked to come up with support for their side. There you see a big difference. Test subjects with high IQs can come up with many more reasons and arguments to support their position—regardless of which side they happened to be on!—than those with low IQs. What’s more, Perkins found that people with high IQs are exceptionally good at presenting their position in a clear, elegant, and logically-consistent fashion, which, as you might imagine, makes whatever they happen to be saying seem that much more plausible. You might say that people with low IQs are like terrible lawyers, whilst people with high IQs are like really good lawyers. But the Web’s changed all of this. Rather rapidly. These days, anyone with an internet connection can become a really good lawyer.
These days, any simpleminded partisan with a political ax to grind can find an online community of like-minded whack-jobs who’ll be happy to provide him with plenty of ideological ammunition (e.g., bogus stats, pre-fab arguments, etc.). Before long, what was once a more-or-less harmless, single-issue troll has morphed into something far more monstrous and formidable: a veritable Swiss-army knife of bullshit, a perfect storm of bad ideas, a walking Wikipedia of stupid. There are those who see this as a kind of progress, as a perfect example of the democratization of knowledge in the Information Age. But I think it’s more like giving nuclear weapons to a crazy little country run by coked-up child soldiers. Regardless, what’s done is done, and there’s no turning back: the genie’s out of the bottle. These Frankenstein creations of the Internet are now, as they will continue to be for quite some time, a major obstacle to 21st-century Enlightenment.
—John Faithful Hamer, The Village Explainer (2016)
Originally published at Committing Sociology. Reprinted with permission.
Photos courtesy of author.