Thinking Beyond Science

Despite how fractured and dystopian this moment feels, it isn’t fundamentally new. It is instead the most recent phase in a lengthy cycle of disruption and renegotiation spanning centuries. Yes, the technologies built to capture human attention at scale are more powerful today than they have ever been. Yes, their influence feels more threatening than ever. But their invention follows a historical path that has been well traveled by our species. This path follows a process of increased amplification of viral ideas and speech, accompanied by an explosion of unintended consequences, then followed by controls and guidelines placed to try to maintain a kind of epistemic balance—a balance of good information over bad. As groups of people begin observing the harms of these new tools, they push to renegotiate their implicit contract with them. They learn to demand more from their media. We are in the midst of one of these cycles now, a period that feels like we are trapped in a dark valley.

Each of these periods of major disruption are punctuated by confusion, disorder, and violence as small groups of activists and innovators exploit these tools to advance an agenda. Adaptation eventually comes, but at a cost to some small fraction of amplified speech. Not all speech is curtailed, but the speech that exploits our natural tendency to engage with the extreme, the inaccurate, and the inflammatory. Society recovers as it figures out how to establish a semblance of accountability, tolerance, and cohesion based on who has access to the most minds. To those of us born into the age of modern journalism, this most recent disruption feels like a slide into chaos. But there is a pathway out.

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that one of the greatest misconceptions about empathy is that it is a benevolent emotional feature above all else. Instead, he draws a clear line between empathy and what he calls “rational compassion,” noting how many problems can come from feeling empathy. The empathetic impulse to feel another’s pain is very helpful in interpersonal relationships with lovers and friends, he says, but as a guide for moral decision-making, it is flawed, parochial, and inconsistent.”

It’s also frequently manipulated for political gain. Bloom argues that empathy has historically played a role in the lead-up to every major war, supported by a concerted political effort to outline the specific dehumanizing acts of the enemy. In democracies around the world, this is done by describing the atrocities of the opposing regime.

We were born into an information revolution. We consume exponentially more content on a daily basis than our ancestors did. Every generation increases the quantity of information produced and consumed, and that quantity tracks on a steep curve: Our parents consume more content than their parents, and so on. We are living through an ever-increasing explosion of the availability of information, and the velocity of its injection into our minds.

But our brains didn’t evolve to process this much new data. All information can be measured in bits— a binary digit, a one or a zero. Any stream of characters, language, sound, or images can be distilled down to this basic unit. It’s the code used by computers, made legible to us in the words we see presented on our screens.

Our conscious minds have a hard speed limit—a bandwidth restriction that we cannot get around. We can process a maximum of 126 bits per second of language. A single conversation with another person takes around sixty bits per second of our mental capacity-half our average attentional bandwidth.

But while we are often exposed to more than 120 bits per second, our brains have a unique tool that allows for us to tune out the noise: an attentional filter. This filter is with us during every waking moment, screening out the excess inputs. It evolved to help our ancestors decide what to focus on when. Without it they would have been lost.

Every species has a different type of attentional filter. Cats track rapid movement of small objects and the high-pitched noises of potential prey. Dogs use their filter to discern between a huge number of potential scents. But humans are unique. Our filters are hypersocial. These filters evolved as a result of living in a collective, causing us to naturally focus on social interactions. We innately want to know what the other people around us are doing: Which actions are looked at as right and wrong? Who is important? What is our standing in the community? As a result, our attentional filter is hyper attuned to our social worlds.*

Today our brains spend much of the time plugged into a network saturated with social information. We find ourselves obsessed with metrics that reflect these social signals. Despite our best efforts, it feels nearly impossible to pull away.

The first internet age began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s as research into microprocessors allowed for the rapid size reduction of supercomputers. Gradually, these machines made their way into our offices and homes. There were real barriers to entry: computers were still expensive, and if you wanted to get online, you had to connect to an ISP with a complicated mode. You also needed knowledge of network protocols. And if you wanted to really build things, you needed to read and write code. For these and other reasons, the early internet was filled with a homogenous group of humans who tended to be progressive and highly educated with an inclination toward counterculture ideals. Many of the earliest pioneers worked at universities. and research institutions, where the US and Europe had made major investments in new technology during the Cold War.

Source : Source : Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos by Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64005201-the-master-builder

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