Today, I watched a woman train her dog by restricting his access to his favorite toy. She threw the toy into the water and let him jump in to get it. When he came back, she took the toy away and set it on the ground. When the dog tried to pick up the toy, she scolded him. She had full control over that dog because she had control over his favorite toy.
My guess is that many internet platforms exercise a similar level of control over their human users, even the communities that purport to encourage thoughtful debate.
Online arguments are sort of like video games for people who like to play with words and if there are a bunch of people that you don’t want to disrupt the trances of everyone else’s work/game balance, you need to corral them in a place where they might play with one another.
You can corral young people in a university and filter out those who like to play with words, those who like to play with numbers, and those who like to figure out how to say the same thing in twenty different ways, each less intelligible than the last. This form of conditioning will ensure that these people will respond in predictable ways when their favorite toys are presented to them.
Edward Witten is a master of describing the same basic physics in twenty different ways and this profile in Quanta says as much, if you are able to read between the lines and decode the academic jargon. (Hint: ‘dualities’ means ‘the languages are saying the same thing’.)
As life sends indoctrinated university students into the workforce, they may find themselves surrounded by people who don’t like to play their favorite games. Instead of learning some new games with the real people in their community, they they often search for playmates on the internet.
I have a hard time finding people to play with and I’ve been told that it might be because my thoughts come across as too intense. I use a quiet voice and I’m not ‘in your face’, tricky, or impolite, but what I think about tends to require a bit of mental stretching to understand and most people would rather talk about the weather. I can respect that. I’ve never enjoyed trying to do the splits.
Based on the reaction people have to what I write on the internet, I see that it just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. In terms of unecessary jargon, what I write must provoke an inflammatory reaction in a memetic immune system that is sparked by too much cognitive dissonance.
When I’m in a bad mood, instead of concluding that I am terrible at explaining things, I conclude that many of the people who react badly to me are either not that smart or they are too distracted to be smart.
The truth is that they may not see the value in it. Why do the splits? It hurts. Why rock the boat? Why explain the details of what is rocking the boat? Perhaps the rocking of the boat has to achieve a larger amplitude before people get confused and go out in search of intelligent explanations rather than the pablum fed to them by bot-infected Twittering thought leaders who are bought and paid for by goodness knows who.
In my search for intelligent life on the internet, I came across a site called Less Wrong. It marketed itself as a space for rational debate with high standards, but when it comes to the internet, I’ve learned that many brands are quite ironic, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
At first glance, all I could see was that they were proponents of the use of exclusionary language – jargon. They would write lengthy articles that could be easily decoded if you had a good vocabulary and imagination. For those without such tools, the exclusive style gave arguments which were quite simple the air of complexity, rationality, and authority.
I started to feel confused when I realised that some of the articles appeared to be downright satirical, as in one entitiled “Anthropomorphising Humans”. I complimented the satire and was downvoted and asked why it was satirical. (!!??)
Oh my, I thought, ‘Either they are pretending to not understand that this is a satire or they really don’t understand how to think rationally. If so, this will be a hard audience to win over because they will give the appearance of being able to think while having no self-awareness about their limited perspective.’
I read another article and was confronted by yet more satire:
Today I’d like to pose the following conundrum: When you pick up a cup of water, is it your hand that picks it up? Most people, of course, go with the naive popular answer: “Yes.” Recently, however, scientists have made a stunning discovery: It’s not your hand that holds the cup, it’s actually your fingers, thumb, and palm.Yes, I know! I was shocked too. But it seems that after scientists measured the forces exerted on the cup by each of your fingers, your thumb, and your palm, they found there was no force left over—so the force exerted by your hand must be zero.
less wrong article on fingers and hands
He goes on to explain at length that in most people, a hand and fingers are inextricably tied together since they map to the same physical space, like two different coordinate systems. It honestly never occurred to me that this wasn’t obvious to all people.
I kept reading and finding more and more articles like that and couldn’t figure out if these people were for real or if they were brilliant satirists or if they were cynical psychopaths who enjoyed making fun of people who couldn’t think.
To test this community, I posted a few articles that I thought would spark some interest in how the scientific method is being misapplied within the physics community, but they attracted detractors and no champions.
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oAsHa6xYMTBJWJGX6/the-new-scientific-method
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TazbHrwvF47jSn4ey/the-ghost-of-joseph-weber
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wnmFHcPBchzk8uuQY/the-schumann-resonances
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yE9ZwbGJ6m6Eiudsj/filtering-out-what-you-want-to-see
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3Ry4jw8jqgb55kKAt/evolution-of-group-delusion
Articles like ‘The New Scientific Method’ were immediately downvoted into oblivion and I was quite surprised since these articles had been quite popular elsewhere.
The primary attacker was a person who argued at length that
- directly adding together uncorrelated phase errors from unsynchronized measurement devices is a valid way to reduce the timing error of your measurement
- organizing randomly scrambled timing data according to a criteria called ‘weirdness’ or ‘deviations from expectations’ was valid
- there is no such thing as a noise floor when you can take more timing data
If I didn’t know better, I would think that this gish galloper was acting like a caricature of irrationality and executing a form of psychological warfare designed to discourage people like me from criticising certain sacred cows of the scientific community.
My gut reaction was, ‘People can’t really be this stupid. I can’t believe that the internet has allowed for the formation of a commmunity of so many people with this level of obtuseness. They give a perfect appearance of academic competence, yet they can’t seem to understand simple things. Is this what Nassim Taleb was thinking about when he wrote of the epidemic of people who were ‘intellectual-yet-idiot’?’
What is funny is that while I’m sure that a spider web of psychological warfare that disconnects people from their rationality can effectively drain the life-force from young men who want to belong to a group, women in science have often spent decades within a black sheep role and they will be immune to this sort of pressure because if you’ve never been invited into the group, the pressure to conform will have no effect on you and criticism will roll off of your back like water off of a duck.
I’m sure I’m not important enough to warrant such attention, in fact my whole physics career seemed designed to teach me how unimportant I am, but there are PR firms that pay people to orchestrate such attacks to discourage certain types of people from spreading their thoughts on the internet. This can even be automated.
I feel sorry for the people hired to carry out these sorts of pointless jobs. Then again, these are the sorts of people who professionally destroy innocent people’s reputations with accusations of all manner of perversions – bestiality, pedophilia, etc.. Dark PR firms (mostly in London and New York) are 1984 personified and, for some reason, the people they hire never developed a sense of shame. People come in all sorts of varieties.
Although I do not imagine that there are teams of people who scheme to mentally destroy specific people on the internet, I do imagine that many internet communities are managed by groups that set in place rules designed to squelch certain ideas. After being banned from every forum in which I posted on Reddit, this experience on Less Wrong was a slight improvement because they simply refused to distribute what I’d written to their community rather than outright banning me from posting.
I imagine that people who have high security clearance must have a similar issue with not being able to find a place to chat about the things that concern them. They know too much, so they can’t just write down all of the horrible things they’ve seen and expunge their feelings of horror or shame in the traditional, confessional ways that the rest of us have available to us. Perhaps they are encouraged to write their thoughts and send them into a censorship apparatus which tosses them into a memory hole, never to be seen again. Perhaps they try to give these security workers the illusion that their words will someday work their healing magic, but now is not the right time for them to be released into the public consciousness. Perhaps some of their stories are turned into the plotlines of children’s cartoons so that when they emerge into the light of day, people will not find them so shocking or frightening. Teen Titans Go! has some weird plotlines.
When I asked the moderator of Less Wrong what I did to provoke such a negative reaction, he wrote that because my articles were related to current scientific experiments, they didn’t fit the more general applications of philosophy of science to which they typically constrain themselves. He then proceeded to defend a person who had argued that organizing randomly scrambled data according to a criterion called ‘weirdness’ is a valid scientific method. When I objected, he insisted that I didn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘randomness’.
If you think about that for a minute, that is rather condemning of that moderator. He also accused me of ‘playing the bias card’ with everyone I had engaged. I had done no such thing. I had only suggested that a person who was doing image analysis as his profession would naturally be upset by my claims about the validity of his methods involving a ‘wierdness criterion’.
A site is only as good as its moderators and this makes me think that I should hang out a flag for people who want to have a space for rational debate.
So, if you want to have some rational chats about science, philosophy, culture, or whatever, I welcome you to use my comment section as a forum or submit guest posts. I’m not the best at engaging everybody who wants to talk (since I’m not particularly chatty) but I will try to do better than that Less Wrong moderator did. At a minimum, I won’t defend indefensible reasoning. If that moderator knew he was defending nonsense, he was gaslighting me and that is something that psychopaths do. If Less Wrong is funded by the state to corral and demotivate independent thinkers, it should be defunded. That is just evil – and counterproductive in the long run as it prevents the natural corrective processes from taking place, leading to stickiness in the system that sometimes snaps in jarring ways. It is better to have a bunch of static electricity than a gigantic lighting bolt.
In any case, on the internet, you never know when you are dealing with a naive autist or a wolf in sheep’s clothing and I honestly couldn’t figure out the makeup of the Less Wrong community. The level of self-awareness seemed highly variable.
Kirsten Hacker 