“Who won the Dave Smith / Douglas Murray debate on Rogan?” friends asked recently. “Neither,” I said. Both are wildly entertaining debaters for different reasons, yet neither is more discerning than he is doctrinaire. Dave Smith is the type who probably went around smacking people upside the head with Man, Economy and State, and lately hollers *What about the children?* after consulting with the Hamas Ministry of Health. Douglas Murray is the sort that, when he feels cornered in a debate, will double down on Oxford smugness and an appeal to *experts,* which is a tough case to make in the post-COVID era. Yet neither was ever going to get on the Joe Rogan Experience, saying *I don’t know*.
Maybe you played Telephone as a child. The idea was to whisper something into a classmate’s ear, then she would turn and whisper that into another classmate’s ear—and so on—until all twenty-five kids got a message.
By the end of the whisper chain, a kid would announce an entirely different message from the original. Everyone would wonder how “Trumpeting elephants” could be transformed into “Bumbling celebrants,” or whatever.
Now, imagine every time you open your smartphone, you’re playing an enormous game of telephone mediated by screens, symbols, and vast distances, not to mention people just as prone to transmission error as your second-grade classmates. Add those with strong opinions and perverse incentives to the digital whisper chain. Between you and the truth lie many distortion filters.
But matters are worse.
Our vulnerability to bias, self-deception, and availability cascades means the title above applies to all of us. When certain people are paid handsomely to hold some perspective, it’s easy for those who have more accurate perspectives with no pay to be washed out of the information landscape.
We used to pay people to have accurate perspectives. We called them “journalists.”
Everyone loves a good story to confirm his priors. Feeling certain in one’s rectitude is cheap, after all. Operating with humility, circumspection, and the willingness to suspend judgment is difficult and costly, especially when there is a perceived social cost (or social media cost) to declaring neutrality on some matter. It’s no accident that the most doctrinaire people also fancy they possess the most accurate information.
But why would this be the case? And why would those most deeply committed to their worldviews do a better job of gathering more complete information, and be more willing to parse it with detached discernment?
“There but for the grace of God go I,” wrote this opinionated SOB.
Extortion and Distortion
Let’s make a conservative assumption about anything that issues from the so-called Intelligence Community (IC), which includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, and DoD. These agencies have two fundamental mandates: extortion and distortion. Most declassified information is likely to fall on a continuum that starts with accurate information, then goes to distorted information, and ends with false information. Let’s assume that ten percent can be considered mostly correct and ten percent can be considered mostly fake. What’s left is this: 80 percent of the information from the IC is distorted to varying degrees. That means American taxpayers live in a Hall of Mirrors, especially regarding international affairs.
Whether one refers to Military Information Support Operations (MISO), psyop, strategic communication, or defense support to public diplomacy, the Department of Defense is conducting activities that loosely or completely qualify as public diplomacy.
American Security Project
What’s worse is that if 80 percent is distorted and 10 percent is false—with only 10 percent being accurate—we have virtually no way of independently verifying or falsifying the information. Of course, no one has to make the case that politicians lie. That’s just one among a thousand reasons, Dear Voter, your opinion on some matter counts for almost nothing.
For Joe Voter, who pays more attention to draft picks, there is a 90 percent chance he will form a distorted opinion on a single issue among thousands of issues when Election Day comes around in two years. Sure, democracy is a joke, but not even Jeff Bezos has enough money to buy accurate information due to the problems of rational ignorance and rational irrationality. No wonder, then, that Joe Voter’s incentives are neither to seek truth, which is expensive, nor to suspend judgment, which can be socially isolating or just unsatisfying.
No wonder, then, that Jeff Bezos subsidizes America’s Pravda. It’s cheaper to polish prose than any hi-res epistemic lens.
Instead, we face incentives to seek solidarity with an ingroup and parrot its opinions or remain steadfastly committed to a principle in an area where principles do not readily apply, such as international affairs.
So what on earth are we to do?
Boyd, Bayes, and Bordersian Coherence
The first thing we must do is admit we all live in an information Hall of Mirrors like the one at the carnival funhouse—only less fun. I wish I could say there is a straightforward way to escape this situation, behold the undistorted truth, and form opinions with complete moral clarity.
Instead, pretty much all we have is Boyd, Bayes, and Bordersian Coherence.
Boyd
Bayes
Bordersian Coherence
Despite clumsily making my name into an adjective, I believe processes set out by Boyd and Bayes involve the inner work of finding coherence. That is,
In short, both OODA-loopers and Bayesian Scouts have not just to gather information and weigh likelihoods, but they must also determine which information fragments, narratives, and statistical sleights-of-hand make the most sense in the totality of our belief set at any given moment (coherence).
Of course, the process is recursive, so we must keep doing it. The powerful know even the best loopers, scouts, and coherentists are a small remnant that will become exhausted, which is why it’s so easy to get sucked into tribal/coalitional thinking as a means of outsourcing one’s cognition.
Tough.
We have to remain steadfast and strong in the face of information warfare, not because we should expect voting harder will ever mean much, but because we need to prepare our critical thinking for a future in which our collective sensemaking will be improved.