Metaphors for public discourse

Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

… the notion that scholarly ideas and findings can escape the nuanced, cautious world of the academic seminar and transform into new forms, even becoming threats, becomes more of a compelling metaphor if you think of academics as professional crafters of ideas intended to survive in a hostile environment. … the escape of a faulty idea could have—and has had—dangerous consequences for the world.

Academic settings provide an evolutionarily challenging environment in which ideas adapt to survive. The process of developing and testing academic theories provides metaphorical gain-of-function accelerations of these dynamics. To survive peer review, an idea has to be extremely lucky or, more likely, crafted to evade the antibodies of academia (reviewers’ objections). By that point, an idea is either so clunky it cannot survive on its own—or it is optimized to thrive in a less hostile environment.

Think tanks and magazines like the Atlantic (or Foreign Policy) serve as metaphorical wet markets where wild ideas are introduced into new and vulnerable populations. Although some authors lament a putative decline of social science’s influence, the spread of formerly academic ideas like intersectionality and the use of quantitative social science to reshape electioneering suggest that ideas not only move from the academy but can flourish once transplanted. This is hardly new: Terms from disciplines including psychoanalysis (“ego”), evolution (“survival of the fittest”), and economics (the “free market” and Marxism both) have escaped from the confines of academic work before.

There are great interests as well as many challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems. In this setting, an online user is the environment; neither the reward function nor the environment dynamics are clearly defined, making the application of RL challenging.

Together, these innovations have done nothing less than transform our way of living, learning, and relating to one another. But they have always had natural enemies. One, an ancient parasite, has recently mutated into something like an epistemic super-virus.

Rather than being static, [theories like QAnon] are more like viruses that constantly adapt and reconfigure themselves in order to persist and spread more rampantly. The supporters of these movements actively look for messaging that allows them to escape policy violations; often while doing so, they land on softer and more moderate ways to frame their ideology—and in the long run, this allows them to reach and convince an even wider audience. It’s almost like a bacterial infection that becomes more insidious and difficult to treat after resisting a partial course of antibiotics.

To review, there’s a general idea that strong (social) selection on a characteristic imperfectly correlated with some other metric of goodness can be bad for that metric, where weak (social) selection on that characteristic was good. If you press scientists a little for publishable work, they might do science that’s of greater interest to others. If you select very harshly on publication records, the academics spend all their time worrying about publishing and real science falls by the wayside. … A hypothesis I find plausible is that the Internet, and maybe television before it, selected much more harshly from a much wider field of memes; and also allowed tailoring content more narrowly to narrower audiences. The Internet is making it possible for ideas that are optimized to appeal hedonically-virally within a filter bubble to outcompete ideas that have been even slightly optimized for anything else. We’re looking at a collapse of reference to expertise because deferring to expertise costs a couple of hedons compared to being told that all your intuitions are perfectly right, and at the harsh selective frontier there’s no room for that. We’re looking at a collapse of interaction between bubbles because there used to be just a few newspapers serving all the bubbles; and now that the bubbles have separated there’s little incentive to show people how to be fair in their judgment of ideas for other bubbles, it’s not the most appealing Tumblr content. Print magazines in the 1950s were hardly perfect, but they could get away with sometimes presenting complicated issues as complicated, because there weren’t a hundred blogs saying otherwise and stealing their clicks. Or at least, that’s the hypothesis.

I would like to coin a ‘‘Malthus’s law’’ of information. Recall that Malthus noted that number of stomaches grew geometrically but the amount of food grew linearly. Pool (1984) noted that the supply of information (in virtually every medium) grows exponentionally whereas the amount that is consumed grows at best linearly. This is ultimately due to the fact that our mental powers and time available to process information is constrained. This has the uncomfortable consequence that the fraction of the information produced that is actually consumed is asymptoting towards zero.

I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost.

… In both studies, daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also increased motivation to take political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political systemthat evoked these emotions in the first place. Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions; and regulating these emotions using effective cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action. Although people can protect themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently-used regulation strategies appear to come with a trade-off between well-being and action.

Genetic mechanisms designed for survival in prehistoric times can be maladaptive in the modern day. Thus, our genetic mechanisms for storing and using fat, for example, evolved in times when doing this was essential for our survival. But these mechanisms no longer serve our survival needs in a modern technological society, where there is a McDonald’s on every other corner. The logic of markets will guarantee that exercising a preference for fat-laden fast food will invariably be convenient because such preferences are universal and cheap to satisfy. Markets accentuate the convenience of satisfying uncritiqued first-order preferences, and they will do exactly the same thing with our preferences for memes consistent with beliefs that we already have—make them cheap and easily attainable. For example, the business model of Fox News (targeting a niche meme-market) has spread to other media outlets on both the Right and the Left (e.g., CNN, Breitbart, the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller, the New York Times, the Washington Examiner). This trend has accelerated since the 2016 presidential election in the United States.

In short, just as we are gorging on fat-laden food that is not good for us because our bodies were built by genes with a selfish replicator survival logic, so we are gorging on memes that fit our resident beliefs because cultural replicators have a similar survival logic. And just as our overconsumption of fat-laden fast foods has led to an obesity epidemic, so our overconsumption of congenial memes has made us memetically obese as well. One set of replicators has led us to a medical crisis. The other set has led us to a crisis of the public communication commons whereby we cannot converge on the truth because we have too many convictions that drive myside bias. And we have too many mysided convictions because there is too much coherence to our belief networks due to self-replicating memeplexes rejecting memes unlike themselves.

… like convenience food companies, the social media industry has seduced us by concocting a product that takes advantage of characteristics and inclinations that we possess because they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. In the case of caloric needs, our brains orient us toward seeking lots of calories, fats, and sugars. In the case of social needs, our brains orient us toward vigilantly monitoring the social world and maintaining good relational and moral standing within our close networks and broader tribes. This modern social diet, however, undermines healthy socializing and contributes to growing social problems of loneliness, social disengagement, and tribal conflict just as a fast or junk food diet undermines healthy eating and contributes to a range of health problems.

A juvenile critic recently said that television was “chewing gum for the eyes.” In the late nineteenth century, a bitter critic called cheap novels “the chewing gum of literature, offering neither savor nor nutriment, only subserving the mechanical process of mastication.” But chewing gum (an American invention and an American expression) itself may have a symbolic significance. We might say now that chewing gum is the television of the mouth. There is no danger so long as we do not think that by chewing gum we are getting nourishment. But the Graphic Revolution has offered us the means of making all experience a form of mental chewing gum, which can be continually sweetened to give us the illusion that we are being nourished.

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Finally, getting back to the hurricane/climate change metaphor, one can add two remarks. The first is that fighting a hurricane is supposed to be easier than fighting climate change but, as a matter of fact, it is not. While being different in their objectives, style, and methods, Russia is no less a challenge than China. The second is that climate change makes hurricanes more likely, which raises the question of Russia-China interactions on information warfare: To what extent are they emulating, copying each other, or even exchanging good practices, from the Donbass to Hong Kong?

Perhaps the most apt historical model for algorithmic regulation is not trust-busting, but environmental protection. To improve the ecology around a river, it isn’t enough to simply regulate companies’ pollution. Nor will it help to just break up the polluting companies. You need to think about how the river is used by citizens—what sort of residential buildings are constructed along the banks, what is transported up and down the river—and the fish that swim in the water. Fishermen, yachtsmen, ecologists, property developers, and area residents all need a say. Apply that metaphor to the online world: Politicians, citizen-scientists, activists, and ordinary people will all have to work together to co-govern a technology whose impact is dependent on everyone’s behavior, and that will be as integral to our lives and our economies as rivers once were to the emergence of early civilizations.