Category: Cognitive Science

Intolerance and polarization as survival strategies

Nicklas Lundblad1 Comment

A recent study in PNAS suggests that we can at least start thinking about that through inversion – the study of what intolerance is. By looking at the areas of the brain that activate during polarized responses etc a group of researchers are now arguing that intolerance is strongly correlated with a need for certainty.

If polarization is the response to uncertainty in our society, we can readily see how the increasing complexity of societies, and the weaker ability we have to predict the future, contribute to dividing us.

But why do we react this way?

If we take an evolutionary stance to the problem it is not hard to see situations in which the best reply to uncertainty is not Julia Galef’s scout mind, but rather the solider mind that narrows the options and favors belief over doubt – any kind of threat, still unidentified, from the forest or, say, a sound in the middle of the night, should not awake curiosity as much as a strong set of beliefs about that threat – wrong or right.

What is intriguing is that it does not matter what the belief is. If you meet social uncertainty with a strong national-conservative set of beliefs or if you meet it with socialist convictions; nature does not care what you believe, it is only interested in making sure you believe something, because doubt will kill you.

Beliefs will kill you too, if you believe the wrong thing, but in many cases it does not matter if you believe it is a sabre tooth tiger in the forest or an enemy tribe, it only matters that your response is the same. The content of the belief is immaterial to the evolutionary outcome – you leave and survive.

If you choose to believe it is just a branch snapping, and stay – then you run the risk of being eaten, of course, but here is the beauty of the fact that both left and right-wing polarization exists – could evolution have favored randomized belief as to divide groups up in the face of uncertainty?

Whoa! This is speculation across many dimensions – not least suggesting that there is a group selection element here – but entertain the thought for a bit, acknowledging that it is fanciful. What if evolution divides groups in the face of uncertainty to ensure that survival is not dependent on a single belief?

And you really do not need to imagine that there is group selection going on; you could just assume that we have a threshold to beliefs in the face of uncertainty that triggers if too many people seem to believe the same thing or not many people enough seem to believe it. It would be the opposite of peer pressure — peer opposition, built into our natures – an evolve tendency to disagree to a degree.

If nothing else it suggests that uncertainty – not probability – is still dominating our societies, now through polarization, even if the economist profession has done away with uncertainty as a concept and replaced it with calculable risk.

On the size of disagreement and the public sphere

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How large is the public sphere? How large can it reasonably be? If we assume that the public sphere is at least to some degree rooted in our biological nature, it seems as if we could answer the question partially by looking at how large our social networks reasonably can be. This in turn leads us to examine things like the Dunbar number – Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis about how large a group our neurological capacities can sustain.

The Dunbar number – arrived at by looking at brain sizes in primates and how they relate to group sizes – reveal that we have, biologically, a boundary at about 100-230 people.

This has been interpreted to mean that the thousands of friends we have in social networks cannot all be real friends, and that we are deceiving ourselves about how many social contacts we can manage – but there is naturally a connection here also to our ability to carry a polity.

The size of our politics matter – there is a palpable difference between politics in the city and politics in international organisations – and as we debate the relationship between technology and democracy, one of the things we may want to examine more closely is the question of how we organize that size.

A flat global public sphere seems impossible, if we propose that there are biological boundaries at around 200 people — and the results of the size / deliberation mechanisms mismatch likely leads to a break down fairly quickly.

One application of this is free speech. It is interesting to note that free speech also has a size. Even in dictatorships small groups form where people speak freely, but the difference – or at least one difference – between dictatorships and democracies is the size of groups that enjoy free speech. The term “free speech” obscures the question about size and assumes that the audience can be of any size – something that was never proposed by any theorist, or even analysed more in detail.

The second limiting factor is also biological – it is the amount of attention we can effectively pay to a discussion and debate. If time is too fractured and our attention dissolved in distraction we lose our ability to disagree meaningfully as well.

How large free speech can be – how many people can deliberate together – is an open research question. The creation of a global public sphere seems unlikely. What is more concerning is that even national public spheres seem to hold up poorly in some cases. Solutions are also hard to come by – is what we need here some kind of sharding of the public sphere? Is there a way to decompose and then re-assemble free speech so that it scales better than if everyone just screams into the same digital aether?

One way to think about the relationship between free speech and technology is to examine the functional perspective and ask what it is that we need free speech for. Two alternatives readily present themselves to such an analysis: the first is discovery, finding ideas an opinions that can be evaluated and used to advance human society. The second is deliberation, the debate and discussion about how we make decisions in our societies. The first is roughly a market place of ideas and the second a Habermasian public sphere. The first perhaps more American and the second more European in origin.

What did you do to my public sphere?

Now, what technology does is that it vastly expands our powers of discovery, but at the same time does nothing – and there by degrades – our capability to deliberate within that enormous space of opinions.

Developing means to think through how we design disagreement in networked environments then seems to become key. Human interaction is always designed, and some of the most detrimental social outcomes flow from the assumption that we have a natural social ability to do something — there are few if any natural social abilities in complex societies like modern day states. It all is designed, either by ourselves or by chance (I do not believe in malicious designers behind our challenges here – that both overestimates and underestimates the nature of the work we need to undertake here).

What if our democracies are not networks, or do not functions as networks, but need to be designed as networks within networks, limited by considerations of our biological capability – group size and attention – to carry a structured disagreement?

Revising goals (Strategy II)

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In Gary Klein’s work on insights, Seeing What Other’s Don’t (2013), the author spends a fair bit of time on discussing what happens when we have had an insight, and why so many organizations ignore them. His explanation is that many organizations lack a process for changing goals or adapting objectives. Klein notes:

People often resist goal insights. Organizations tend to promote managers who tenaciously pursue their assigned goals. They are people who can be counted on. This trait serves them well early in their careers when they have simpler tasks to perform, ones with clear goals. That tenaciousness, however, may get in the way as the managers move upward in the organization and face more difficult and complex problems. When that happens, the original goals may turn out to be inappropriate or they may become obsolete. But managers may be incapable of abandoning their original goals. They may be seized by goal fixation.

Klein, Gary from Seeing What Others Don’t (2013) p 220

Even in formal tests, we seem to be unable to update or revise our goals when events change, Klein cites a study looking at how managers performed in simulations where events made goals obsolete:

The Sengupta study tested hundreds of experienced managers in a realistic computer simulation. The scenario deliberately evolved in ways that rendered the original goals obsolete in order to see what the managers would do. They didn’t do well. Typically, the managers stuck to their original targets even when those targets were overtaken by events. They showed goal fixation, not goal insight.

Ibid p 221

One reason for this is that when we work with goal insights we reach a point where we have to revise our beliefs, and this means that we have to admit, at least to ourselves, that we were wrong. That smarts and may even light up the same areas in the brain as those that are connected to physical pain if it is associated with rejection.

“What should we do with all of these insights?”

It seems obvious, then, that most organizations do not revise their goals often enough. So, how can we change that? One way is to build goal revision into review cadences – and ensure that it is not associated with individual pride or pain, but with adaptation. You could even imagine appointing a goal challenger – someone who suggests a goal revision in the meeting. This would be a bit like a devil’s advocate, but with a constructive twist: the person in question needs to challenge the goal and suggest an alternative goal.

There are probably great savings here too. A lot of good money is thrown after bad goals.

Interestingly, organizations that focus on OKRs are probably especially vulnerable to this – because they invest so much in the objectives and key results. These become canonical, and questioning them is seen as weakness. It is almost built into OKRs: the idea that you should never reach your OKRs at 100% is tacit admission that it is better to work towards and objective and fail – than change the objective. This is why I increasingly think that the use of OKRs may need to be complemented with a focus on capabilities and adaptation – and goal revision is a part of that adjustment.

The key thing to get right here is to make sure that goal revision is not confused with goal reduction, and this is where the OKR-model has definitive strengths: it commits us to reach an objective that is ambitious – a BHAG, big, hairy and audacious goal – and doesn’t let us get off with something easier. So when revising a goal we need to test it for audaciousness – but that is completely doable!

Goal revision is not equal to lowering your ambitions or expectations. It is allowing insights to cut through.

Writing the history of this moment

Nicklas Lundblad1 Comment

At the end of the New York Times article detailing the decision by Twitter to de-platform president Trump, there is a short note that hides a real, and vexing problem:

Beyond muting Mr. Trump’s biggest megaphone, Twitter’s decision could create headaches for the Trump administration when it comes to complying with the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires the preservation of presidential materials and communications.

Conger, K and Isaac M “Twitter Permanently Bans Trump, Capping Online Revolt” NY Times 2021-01-09

This is a bigger problem than it may seem. Imagine you are writing the history of this moment in 100 years or so – what are your source materials? How do you understand the crumbling of the shared reality of our polity? What means do you have to assert if the popular hypothesis that this was all about “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” really is born out by the evidence?

For the record, I think that all technology does here is to increase the distinction between what Julia Galef calls soldier mind and scout mind (this Long Now Foundation video is a must watch!) – and that the choice to believe what unifies a group is a natural, although harmful, choice that has evolutionary roots — and that this in turn means that our challenge is that when we build shared cognition to find ways to counter act not technology-driven filter bubbles as much as evolutionary patterns of thinking.

A must read from Julia Galef

That is a significantly harder problem and may even say something about the possible sizes of shared cognition that we can sustain as a society — how large can an episteme, a shared set of facts, be in both number of items and number of actors? What is the maximum size of an episteme that can be the foundation of a polity? What kinds of shared cognition can support a democratic polity? These are important questions and the require that we have access to and can study the emerging patterns of shared cognition in our society – and like it or not, Twitter is a form of shared cognition – the study of which will be essential to understand our options of institutional design for future democracies.

But none of this will be possible if we allow what Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, has called “bit rot“. Our digital behavior is eroding faster than behavior that requires paper or other media, and it is eroding in several dimensions. It is eroding in noise, noise working as an acid that slowly eats away at any semblance of a canon or mainstream set of data, and it is eroding in deletion where data is deleted consciously or through everything from mechanical failure to loss of formats, applications and operating systems.

In many ways we live in a paradox, an amnesiac information society where knowledge is key but ultimately ephemeral and bound to be lost.

There is value in ephemerality, and some applications thrive on designing it – the social media posts that evaporate after a few days or few clicks serve a purpose, and SnapChat deserves special credit for first thinking seriously about how much of our social behavior that is usefully capture for the sake of our autonomy and self-determination, but the reality is that very little of ephemerality is consciously designed.

A library is one model for conscious curation.

The opposite of designed ephemerality is conscious curation. It is alarming to see that not only do we not design our ephemerality, we also have lost the will and capability to consciously curate the data that we produce. Digital preservation efforts without curation will lose something important, the emphasis and articulation of our age in the historical record. What we save is essential for understanding who we are, and what we value. And what survives anyway will speak volumes of our prejudices and blind spots.

One useful frame or concept here is that of the “archive”. As detailed in this recommended paper by Marlene Manoff, the concept of the archive recurs across disciplines as a version of everything from externalized human memory to the source of power. Philosopher Michel Foucault suggested that the archive is really the set of institutions and technology that allows us to think through participating in the discourse of our time – and so implicitly suggesting that control over the archive is control over a society. Societies that lose any ambition to archive, to remember or to carry a discourse will never be able to build that common framework of facts – because we do not think in facts as much as we do in narratives.

This is important, I think. Any attempt at reinstitution of a shared framework of facts will fail unless it is grounded in an archive and a practice. There is no world in which is effective to just tell people what the facts are. That never helps. What you need to be able to do is to allow people to navigate in the world and find a compass to allow them to find their way. Truth may not be so much believing certain propositions as engaging in certain practices.

Consciously curating this moment seems key, and a large part of that is all of the commentary that is written and shared through newspapers, magazines, blogs etc — but a longer curation, a slower curation where data is saved for future research and analysis is largely missing. If we don’t have that – if we allow this moment to be lost in time, refusing to archive it together, we risk not just the trite “repetition of history” supposedly inflicted on those who refuse to learn from it, but a more foundational loss of history that slowly will erode other democratic institutions our powers of shared cognition are increased without the archive to give us a north star.