July 2023 - Part 4

The Age of Misinformation

There was a study done a while ago at a reputed university, I forget which. It involved interviewing participants individually and asking them a single question to begin with. The question was, “Have you read the New York Times today?” If the answer was yes, the experiment was over, and the participant sent home. If the answer was no, the experiment would proceed and the interviewer would say something like, “You really ought to see page 14 in today’s Times.” To which the participant would typically respond, “Why, what’s on page 14?” They would then be told, “Well, they did a study on what makes people lose weight the fastest. As it turns out, it’s actually a normal diet along with eating six pieces of chocolate every day. Apparently, there is something about the dioxins in chocolates that causes calories to be burned faster.” Most participants would respond with, “Wow, I didn’t know that was possible” and sometimes ask, “Where did you say you read this?” Some would add, “I recall reading something similar recently.”

By now, it must be obvious as to what the nature of the experiment was. It was to provide the participants with a nonsensical piece of information that was ridiculous beyond belief and then recorded their responses. A resounding majority of the participants did not contest what they were told.

George Orwell observed that the average person living through the twentieth century was no less gullible than the average person who lived during the Medieval times. In the Middle Ages, the average person believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of science, no matter what.

There is something to what Orwell said. It rings intuitively true. We live in the Information Age. There is no dearth of information and yet the average person will believe almost anything. What could be causing this? It is the inundation of information itself that is to blame in the first place. The world has actually become less and less comprehensible to us even as more information has been made available to us.

There is no fact – actual or made up – that will cause us surprise for too long. There is no fact so inconceivable that we will not believe it. Since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction, we are prepared to accept anything. We believe because there is no reason to not believe. We no longer possess social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual reasons to disbelieve. We live in a world that largely makes no sense to us. Not even in a technical sense.

In a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable or false. Nothing is predictable. Nothing comes as a surprise any more.

In the Middle Ages there existed an ordered and comprehensible, even if wrong, worldview that all knowledge and goodness came from God. What the people believed was derived from the logic of their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C. This was lucidly explained to the satisfaction of nearly everyone. So was the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the head of a pin. It made jolly good sense, if you believed the Bible to be the revealed word of God. The medieval world was mysterious. It was filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order. Ordinary people might not have grasped how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of God, but they had little doubt that there was such a design.

The situation we are presently in is much different. It is perhaps sadder, more confusing, and certainly more mysterious. There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. If there is indeed such a thing, there few who understand it and even fewer who can explain it lucidly. Therefore, we are, in a sense, naiver and perhaps more frightened than those of the Middle Ages, for now we can be made to believe almost anything.

Something that was once was our friend, turned against us. By that something, I refer to information. There was a time when information was a scarce resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their local environments. During the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but nearly all information was useful. It was this scarcity that made information both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion. The printing press began the Information age, and we have not been free of it since.

There are two reasons we have lost our ability to make use of information. The first is that we no longer have a coherent view of ourselves, our relationships to one another and to the natural world around us. We do not now where we came from. We do not know where we are going or why. We have stopped thinking about such matters amidst the deluge of information. Which is another way of saying we no longer know what information is relevant or not to our lives. The second reason is we have devoted enormous amounts of time, from the dawn of the printing press, to inventing more and more things that create an endless supply of information. We have only worsened our problem. Just when you might think things couldn’t get any worse, the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us.

The point of this essay is not to blame science or technology or progress itself which are all wonderful things in and of themselves and have undoubtedly made our lives better in many ways. It is to point out that they have also made us unhappier and anxious in other ways. Science and technology cannot provide us with moral frameworks. The Internet will not foster any new mutual understanding. Artificial intelligence will not lead us to self-awareness. Virtual reality will not lead us out of spiritual poverty. These are false promises made by false prophets. These are the ways of fact-mongers, information addicts, and technical assassins.

Does the war in Ukraine rage because of a lack of information? Does racism still persist in America for a lack of information? Are there famines in Ethiopia because of a lack of information? Do couples get divorced for a lack of information? If you had a mental breakdown, would that be due to a lack of information?

What causes us the most misery and pain is not due to a lack of information. Machines and algorithms cannot and are not designed to address the emptiness in our lives. They cannot explain to us why we fight each other or why decency fails us at times we need it the most.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote, "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Things should, in fact, work the other way around. Our self-awareness, natural connections and spiritual wealth must inform the machines and serve as beacons. The unexamined life, as Socrates pointed out, is not worth living. As the walls of information close in upon us, there is no escaping ourselves anymore.