Michael Prescott's Blog

Ban social media

Years ago I contemplated writing a blog post called "Usenet is hell." For those who don't remember, Usenet was an early bulletin board system that allowed people to chat with each other in unmoderated forums. I guess it's still around, but I haven't heard anything about it in a long time. But I did use it, back in the day. 

Until I decided it was hell.

Here was my reasoning. The heavenly planes, we are told, are self-selecting. People of similar beliefs, similar temperaments, similar levels of spiritual and emotional development cluster together in spheres manifested out of the collective unconscious of the inhabitants. Each community is essentially friction-free. 

Earth, by contrast, is a far more challenging environment. Souls at all levels of development are thrust into a shared reality. Advanced spirits and primitive, barely evolved spirits coexist. Though we can choose our friends, we cannot choose our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, or the people we rub elbows with on the street. Conflict, oppression, violence, and cruelty are the predictable results of disparate people bumping up against each other. 

And then there was Usenet. Here was an environment that seemed appealing at first, but ultimately struck me as being as unheavenly as possible. Anyone with access to a computer could join in any conversation. People with widely differing worldviews, psychologies, and levels of maturity interacted directly. In theory, this was a great opportunity to bring people together and expand everyone's horizons. In practice, it was a recipe for malice, intolerance, and abuse, as people who normally would never meet suddenly came in contact and discovered how much they disliked each other.

The conflict was exacerbated by the unique properties of online communication. People could post anonymously, allowing them the freedom to viciously mock, insult, and defame their opponents. The social cues that mitigate conflict in personal encounters — facial expression, tone of voice, body language — were absent, making misunderstandings and escalation of conflict far more likely. And the loudest voices, the most obnoxious, hateful, and crazy ones, inevitably dominated any discussion. In a variant of Gresham's Law (bad money drives out good), the bad commenters drove out the better ones. 

A constant babble of angry and spiteful voices all putting each other down, spewing venom, spitting malice — it seemed a lot like hell to me, and I mean that literally. If heaven is a community of likeminded souls in a "consensus reality," then hell must be a community of angry souls in perpetual conflict, trapped in a reality that reflects their lowest drives and crudest impulses. 

Usenet is largely irrelevant now, having been supplanted by more popular forums: Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms categorized as "social media." These forums initially promised more control over your personal community of online friends. You can friend or unfriend, follow or block. But the discussions are still unmoderated, and the reality is that conflict is still ever-present. The inexorable compulsion to take potshots at anonymous semi-strangers from the safety of our computer keyboards overrides all safeguards. Facebook and Twitter started out as rather benign environments filled with cat videos and cameraphone pics of tonight's dinner. Today they are hotbeds of controversy and acrimony, as people rake each other over the coals for differences over politics, religion, sexuality, TV shows, comic books — you name it. 

And it's tearing out society apart.

This sounds like an overstatement. But I don't think it is. Since the rise of social media, our society has become more polarized than I can ever remember. Of course there will always be strong differences of opinion in a democracy, but I can't recall a time when the two sides actively hated each other with such reckless passion. It used to be the case — and by "used to be," I mean three or four years ago — that only the most marginal members of society talked about a new civil war. Now the idea has gone mainstream, with many sober commentators observing that the lack of mutual respect or even basic civility between left and right is reaching the boiling point.

Many factors no doubt have contributed to the rise of incivility in our national discourse, but social media may be the dominant one. It's not just a question of being constantly confronted with opinions contrary to your own, thrust at you and demanding your attention. It's the angry, personal tone of much of the messaging. You open your Facebook or Twitter feed, only to see yourself characterized as a moron, a monster, a terrible human being, a fascist, a racist, a communist, another Hitler, another Stalin, a loser who lives in his mom's basement, a paid tool of corporate or collectivist interests, a liar, a scumbag, a clown, an ignoramus, an illiterate, a redneck trailer-trash rube, a welfare-cheating leech, a garbage human being, a piece of shit. 

It's almost impossible not to respond in kind. We are not hardwired to turn the other cheek indefinitely. The fight-or-flight reaction kicks in. We either leave the forum or we start to hit back. And the more we hit back, the more "triggered" the other guy gets, and the more he lashes out at us. 

Multiply this encounter thousands of times over the course of the year for any given social media user, then multiply that result by the number of users in our society. Is it alarmist to suggest that it's having an impact? Or unduly negative to suggest that the impact is predominantly bad? 

I think we have become addicted to a technology that is demonstrably detrimental — detrimental to ourselves as thinking, caring persons, and detrimental to society as a community of shared values and mutual respect or, failing that, at least mutual restraint.

And I don't think the worries about Civil War 2.0 are necessarily overstated — or at least not much. We may not be on the verge of a new Fort Sumter incident, but it's entirely possible we are entering the territory of Bleeding Kansas, on a national scale. 

What to do? I'm doing my best to cut back on social media. I've deleted my Twitter account, but this was no real hardship, since I rarely used it. More difficult is restraining myself on Facebook. The goddamned site really is adductive — literally so. I believe that getting positive feedback ("likes") gives you a small jolt of pleasure, which then prompts you to seek more "likes." Eventually you're always thinking of pithy things to post that will earn you more of those all-important thumbs-up. As "likes" become more important to you, negative and hostile responses loom larger also. Your ego gets increasingly caught up in a meaningless, pointless  game of oneupmanship. You're like a gambling addict pumping quarters into a slot machine; you know you should stop, but not yet — you just need to pull the lever one more time ...

If quitting is hard, and participating is destructive to self and others, what is there to do? My modest proposal: ban social media.

Outlaw Twitter, Facebook, and similar forums. Dissolve their parent companies. Delete everyone's account. 

A drastic measure? Yes. Practical? In theory, sure, though I'm not holding my breath for our political class to take on multibillion-dollar compilations, especially since these platforms are so easily weaponized for use in political campaigns. 

Would such a ban be an unconstitutional infringement on free speech? Many people would say so. My view is that banning a platform is different from banning speech. People would still be free to vent in many other forums; they just wouldn't have the particular forums offered by social media companies. As an analogy, many communities have banned billboards because they regard signage as detrimental to the beauty of their neighborhoods. This is an inconvenience for advertisers who wish to use billboards as a promotional tool, but it's not a violation of their rights; they are still free to advertise in other ways. One platform has been outlawed, but others are available. The judgment has been made that the negatives posed by billboards (they're ugly, they obstruct views, they distract drivers, etc.) outweigh their positives. 

I've come to believe that the negatives of social media likewise outweigh the positives, and in a far more serious way. The incessant drumbeat of online conflict is ripping at the seams of our social fabric. Life without Facebook and Twitter might be marginally less convenient for some of us, but societal breakdown, open warfare, and blood in the streets would be an inconvenience of considerably greater magnitude. 

Do I think such a ban will actually happen? Not a chance. But it's the most straightforward way out of the digital hell we've unwittingly constructed for ourselves. And as our online anarchy continues to escalate, real-world chaos can't be far behind. 

The drunk at the bar

Not too long ago I wrote a post about how the Internet may be subtly changing our brain function and creating anxiety in the process. Recently, however, it occurred to me that there’s another, much more obvious factor at work in producing the edginess and unease that characterize modern society – an unease that makes little sense when you consider the unprecedented safety, affluence, and comfort that most people in developed nations enjoy.

When the Internet made its debut, it was hailed as a revolutionary communications technology that would allow us to get in touch with people from all parts of the world and to be exposed to all points of view, thus leading to greater international understanding. This was a wonderfully idealistic way of looking at things, and like so many idealistic dreams, it has foundered on the sharp rocks of reality. While undoubtedly the Internet has fostered some degree of global understanding, it has probably done more to introduce us to points of view that we would be better off not encountering. The egalitarian nature of the Internet, where anybody’s comment counts as much as anyone else’s, has led to a peculiar situation in which all too often we find ourselves hemmed in by idiocy.

Think of it as the “drunk in the bar” syndrome. Everyone is familiar with the movie trope of a drunken bar patron spouting off a bunch of nonsense while the guy on the barstool next to him listens uncomfortably. In real life, nobody takes the drunk at the bar seriously, for two reasons. First, since we are up close and personal with him, we can see that he is just an inebriated slosh whose slurred ramblings can be safely disregarded. Second, we encounter him in a social context, surrounded by other bar patrons who are presumably better grounded than the drunk and able to see him for what he is. Our own skepticism is thus reinforced by the healthy skepticism of those around us.

But on the Internet, everything is different. The crank, the loon, the angry drunk, the mentally disturbed loner is not always immediately identifiable as such. He can seem pretty rational. All we have to go on is his typewritten words and his avatar. We are seeing only what he wants us to see. We aren’t seeing the whole person. We aren’t reading body language. We aren’t hearing tone of voice. One set of typewritten words is very much like another. As long as the errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation are not too egregious, we are inclined to assume that whoever produced them is a basically reasonable person – by which we mean, of course, a person like us.

In addition, we read this Internet comments alone. Though there may be other participants in the online discussion, they are distant from us. We don’t have the advantage of a crowd of essentially rational bystanders who are able to instantly back up our own intuitive assessment. Each other person is at just as much of a loss as we are, and each one is dealing with the drunk at the bar in isolation.

None of this would matter if there weren’t so damn many drunks at the bar. One of the unsettling things about the Internet is that it has exposed just how many disturbed people there are. They were probably always out there, but in the pre-Internet age, we rarely noticed them. Most of them were never very social; their letters to the editor were probably not printed; their tirades against the TV news or the Illuminati probably went unheard. They existed apart from the rest of society, largely unknown, without a voice.

The Internet has given them their voice. That may be good for them, but it’s not so good for the rest of us.

It’s not so good, in part, because encounters with these people on a daily basis can become extremely trying. Dealing with craziness is hard. Just ask any psychiatrist. The rate of burnout in those parts of the medical profession that deal primarily with the mentally ill is extremely high. Not only is it frustrating, even exasperating, to try to handle crazy people, but it can also be mentally and emotionally destabilizing. The well-known “gaslighting” phenomenon comes to mind. If enough people try to convince you that your perceptions are wrong and your grasp of reality is shaky, you may start to believe them. Paradoxically, the crazy people can make you question your own sanity. Trained professionals at least have some idea of how to deal with this problem. The ordinary layman does not.

But there’s a larger reason why it’s not so good to give the drunk at the bar a megaphone. As more extreme and bizarre ideas flood our intellectual space, they tend to crowd out more sane and rational positions. In economics, there’s a rule called Gresham’s Law, which holds that bad money drives out good. On the Internet, it seems that bad ideas drive out the good ones, at least in many cases.

The exponents of crazy theories are not restricted by logic, facts, moderation, common sense, or consideration of other people’s feelings. They are not restricted by anything. This makes them annoying, but it can also make them effective. They simply shout down any objection, sweeping aside factual criticisms with wild inventions, and deflecting logical objections with personal attacks. Internet arguers are much like the people in Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming.” 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The unrestrained, ruthless proponents of nutty ideas have a built-in advantage over anyone pleading for sanity. Sanity is boring. Sanity speaks with a quiet voice. Sanity is polite, self-effacing, willing to admit to self-doubt, open to criticism, and aware that its judgments may be wrong. In online debate, all of this comes across as weakness, while the ranting bluster of the drunk at the bar comes across – at least to many people – as strength. And so the crazy positions gain adherents, while the sane positions, humdrum and uninspiring as they are, slowly retreat.

The foregoing is not, of course, an original observation. It’s just something I probably should have included in my earlier discussion of Internet. The sheer power of this new technology to shape our culture and our national discussions is actually rather frightening and very poorly understood.

By the way, I don’t exempt myself entirely from the above criticism. I’m sure I’ve had my own “drunk at the bar” moments, both here and on social media. The very nature of posting opinions online seems to encourage shoot-from-the-hip punditry, which can often backfire. Blogs and social media mean that none of our thoughts, no matter how fleeting, need to go unexpressed. But many thoughts are probably better off unexpressed. And unfortunately, those with the self-restraint to stay quiet are probably the more reasonable and rational ones, while those who pop off at any opportunity are the more excitable and crazy ones. This is another way in which they dominate the conversation and seize more territory in our intellectual space.

I don’t see a way out of this situation. Barring some massive solar flare that wipes out electromagnetic communications for the next generation, the Internet is here to stay. And truly, I wouldn’t want to be without it. But there are times when I almost wish that it would go away.

Or at least that the drunk at the bar would finally shut up.

The Internet vs. the Zeitgeist

Many years ago I read an odd little book called The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. It’s one of those desperately magisterial tomes like Julian Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness — an overview by a nonspecialist attempting to assimilate a raft of information from disparate disciplines into a new overarching theory — and like Jaynes’ book, it’s worth reading even if most of its conclusions are probably wrong.

Shlain’s theory is that the advent of widespread literacy, especially in alphabetic languages, brings about changes in brain function, shifting the dominant hemisphere from right to left. He believed that the right hemisphere is associated with “female”traits while the left is associated with “male” traits; thus, the switch from one hemisphere to the other precipitated societal changes that worked to the disadvantage of women. In the original period of alphabetic literacy, the old goddess religion, matriarchal and pacific, was suppressed and replaced by new god-centered, patriarchal, militaristic faiths. In the much later period after the invention of the printing press, when literacy was rapidly extended to much of the population instead of being limited to an elite, there were further reactions against women, including the witch-burning manias that flared up unpredictably around Europe. Finally, Slain speculates that the rise of movies, television, and the Internet — all of which place more of an emphasis on visual information — will cause a shift back toward equality of the sexes and a more peaceful world.

I am skeptical of the gender assignments given to the two sides of the brain, and even more skeptical when Shlain extends his thesis to the cells of the eye, distinguishing between “male” cones and “female” rods. I am also skeptical that the goddess religion, as he describes it, even existed; while fertility statuettes with exaggerated female features turn up in many prehistoric sites, it’s a bit of a stretch to infer a matriarchal society, much less a time of Edenic peace. We don’t even know if these female figures were goddesses or simply charms, perhaps used to ensure a favorable pregnancy.

Though Shlain’s thesis is far from proven, one aspect of it has stuck with me – the idea that changes in communication technology can rewire the brain, with destabilizing societal effects.

Which brings us to what’s going on today.

Throughout much of the developed world, and certainly in the United States, we see intensifying polarization between increasingly extremist and uncompromising ends of the political spectrum. On a daily basis we’re treated to public displays of hysteria – wild outrage expressed by both left and right, though for different reasons. No area of life is off-limits. Escapist movies about comic-book superheroes give rise to charges of racism and sexism. Twitter and Facebook have become ideological battlegrounds. Restaurants offering ethnic foods are flashpoints for controversies about “cultural appropriation” (as if all culture is not appropriated from somewhere). Sports shows and teams are boycotted for political reasons. Everything is a hot button issue.

Many explanations for this new intensity in our political life have been advanced. It is said that the middle class is being “squeezed”; yet statistics indicate that while both middle-class and lower-income shares of the population have shrunk over the past 35 years, the percentages of Americans defined as upper-middle class and rich have grown – suggesting the middle class is contracting mainly because some of its members are migrating to a higher tax bracket.



Source: Urban Institute study

Or it’s said that middle-class affluence simply has less to offer us than it once did. But this seems to be a case of looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Recently, in doing research for a time travel novella that takes place in 1972, I was intrigued to discover how much lower the standard of living was for middle-class people in that era. Houses, for example, were significantly smaller and had fewer amenities, while many ubiquitous modern-day items would have been considered science-fiction. A computer you carry in your pocket, which connects you to databases throughout the world and incidentally serves as a videophone? Household robots that vacuum or mop your floor? Wall-size flatscreen TVs with hundreds of channels, many commercial free and uncensored, in high definition? Self-driving cars, prosthetic limbs almost indistinguishable from the real things, medical treatments using genetic engineering to target specific cells, an orbiting telescope that sees to the ends of the universe …?

No matter how you look at it, our opportunities for leisure, recreation, and discovery are greater than ever. And the average middle-class American today lives like a sci-fi character in a '70s TV show  

It is also claimed that people are frustrated by unchanging social problems such as race and gender discrimination; but again, this claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There is far less discrimination in the developed world today than in any previous generation. As an example, a newspaper article I came across from 1972 reported casually that the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks had just voted to reaffirm their policy of not admitting blacks as members, a policy that was only rescinded in 1976 under intense legal pressure. The same newspaper regularly published the names of divorced couples in what I took to be a sign of the social stigma attached to divorce. (Mary Tyler Moore's groundbreaking sitcom of that era was originally intended to depict her as a divorcée,  but the network balked at anything so controversial.) Interracial relationships were illegal in many states and virtually unheard of anywhere. Gays had to remain closeted or face ostracism and abuse, including physical attacks. And on and on. No matter how you look at it, society has grown much more open and tolerant. A black president, a serious female presidential candidate, gay marriage – all would have been completely unrealistic 40 years ago.

Crime is down, too. Way down. Parts of New York City that were virtual no-go zones four decades ago are thriving now. Remember the scene in 1973's Live and Let Die when James Bond nearly gets killed in Harlem? That's right - in 1973, Harlem was too dangerous for James Bond. 

And let’s not forget that in 1972 draftees were being sent to fight and die in Vietnam. The casualties that the US accepted in that unpopular war were far higher than US losses in any recent conflict (58,209 American deaths in Vietnam vs. 4,497 in Iraq and 2,356 in Afghanistan), yet the war dragged on for years, and those who opposed it were labeled traitors.

America of forty years ago often seemed to be spiraling into chaos, with assassinations, urban riots, war, Watergate, the energy crisis, sky-high homicide rates, skyjackings, rampant prejudice and closed-mindedness, cult movements, apocalyptic predictions of the End Times, and TV fodder consisting almost exclusively of mind-numbing pap ("the glass teat," Harlan Ellison called it) ... and if we think our present conditions are worse, we are only fooling ourselves. 

But if the external circumstances – the economic, social, political, and cultural climate – have not worsened, and have in fact improved by any objective standard, then why are people becoming so upset about everything, to the point where it can reasonably be argued that we’re experiencing a “cold Civil War”?

People often point to cable TV and the Internet, both of which feed news consumers a steady diet of inflammatory stories while encouraging people to confine themselves to channels or websites that reflect their own biases; as a result, people become trapped in an echo chamber or bubble that reinforces and amplifies their opinions. This is clearly true. But I’m not sure it’s the whole truth, and this leads us back to Leonard Shlain and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.

It’s at least arguable that the advent of the Internet poses as big a social and psychological challenge as the advent of literacy did for previous societies. I’m not sure anyone yet understands how the brain is affected and changed by the constant processing of online information – not only when one is sitting at a computer, but when one is using a smartphone or any web-connected device. It may not be too far-fetched to think that literacy altered brain function by making the left brain more dominant. Is it possible that the Internet is altering brain function in some new way?

What if the intuitive process of clicking on links and following one link to the next while chasing down snippets of information tends to activate the intuitive faculties of the brain, popularly supposed to reside in the right hemisphere? Perhaps this very process, endlessly and obsessively repeated, has the effect of deemphasizing or inhibiting those qualities associated with the left hemisphere — notably logical reasoning, goal-setting, and objectivity. There is a widely publicized claim that Internet usage correlates with a decline in attention span; though this study may be junk science, it’s hard to deny that the rapidity and convenience of the Internet can make it intolerably frustrating to plow through the pages of a book in search of information. There may be other, more subtle changes in neurological/psychological functioning that are not yet understood or even recognized. Could the surge in diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, autism, and Asperger’s syndrome be related to widespread neurological reprogramming?

Let’s suppose so. Even if most of us aren’t affected that profoundly, we may still feel as if things are somehow getting out of control. The changes in our mental processing may bring on the same kind of anxiety, confusion, mania, and hysteria (think of the witch burnings) that Shlain sees as the historical result of rapid advances in literacy.

In other words, it’s just possible that we are undergoing a massive transition from one mode of consciousness (developed as a result of general alphabetic literacy) to a new mode of consciousness (currently developing in response to the new technology of the Internet). And because we experience this change as something alien, we look for a cause outside ourselves, even though actually it is the inner workings of our mental mechanism that are directly responsible. Feeling confused and lost, we latch on to any convenient bogeyman to explain our chronic insecurity. We don’t hunt witches, but we do harass anyone who thinks differently than we do. Alt-right types mock and insult their critics and spread vicious memes. “Social justice warriors” define anyone who disagrees with them as racist, misogynistic, fascist, etc. The problem is always Someone Else.

By getting wired up to an endless supply of digital information, we may be rewiring our own brains – and experiencing all the unintended side effects that go along with a neurological remodeling job. The trickle of information from books and magazines that we perused in our spare time has become a spurting garden hose of facts, opinions, memes, urban legends, “fake news,” lies, distortions, slanders, and insults, illustrated with vivid images and sounds, 24 hours a day. And our beleaguered brains are melting under the strain.

Again, this is only a speculative hypothesis. It may be all wrong. It’s almost certainly at least partly wrong. But it just might be partly right. It could help to make sense of the rapid and baffling descent into hyper-partisanship, political polarization, and escalating demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings (on the left) and border walls and authoritarian crackdowns (on the right). In an era of relative peace and prosperity, when the West faces no true existential threat remotely comparable to the Axis powers of World War II or the USSR of the Cold War, it is truly strange that we find ourselves coming apart at the seams. We live in what should be seen as a Golden Age, yet we’re obsessed with apocalyptic visions and paranoid fantasies.

Instead of scanning the cultural and political trends of the modern world to understand our anxieties, perhaps we need only direct our attention to the softly glowing screen in front of our face.

Mental illness and the Internet

An interesting article appears in the latest issue of The Atlantic, arguing that the trend toward hypersensitivity on college campuses reflects an unhealthy and counterproductive set of coping mechanisms. Called "The Coddling of the American Mind," it points to a series of cognitive distortions that are associated with neurosis and shows how each of these is encouraged by the strange new campus culture of "trigger warnings" and "microaggressions." Authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that instead of cultivating supersensitive students who will be ill-equipped to deal with the sharp elbows and rough edges of the real world, colleges ought to train incoming freshmen in simple methods of identifying and combating cognitive distortions.

All of this is interesting enough in itself, but it got me thinking about a related but slightly different issue – namely, the Internet, and how it affects social interactions and personal well-being. It seems to me that the same cognitive distortions that are at play in the arena of the college campus are also very much on display in social media, Internet news sites, and blogs.

Let's look at some of these cognitive distortions, which were first popularized by psychologist David Burns, and see how they might relate to our everyday online experience.

Mental filtering - focusing on the negative aspect(s) of a situation while ignoring everything else. We see this all the time on political sites which exclusively report news detrimental to the other side of the partisan divide. The result, for people who rely on these sites, is the growing sense that everything in the world is going wrong and that those who are opposed to them politically have nothing positive to offer.

Black-and-white thinking - when anyone who disagrees with us must be evil or crazy. I've seen conservative sites that insist "liberalism is a mental illness,” and liberal sites that say "conservatism is a mental illness.” We also see this kind of thinking on sites devoted to Skepticism, in which anyone who suggests that there could be some merit to parapsychology is immediately disparaged as a nut, a moron, a liar, or a huckster out to make a quick buck. And we see it on New Age sites that similarly disparage anyone who registers even moderate skepticism as "part of the problem," a person with "negative vibrations," a cynic, “unevolved,” and so forth.

Jumping to conclusions. This fallacy seems to be particularly prevalent in social media, where the trend lately has been for outraged lynch mobs to go after some particular person who's offended them. In many cases, the outrage is based on a superficial and incorrect understanding of the situation – often taking something out of context. A recent example involves a dentist who killed a lion while on safari in Africa. When he made the mistake of tweeting a photo of himself with the carcass, he came under sustained attack from people opposed to big-game hunting. He even had to close his practice for a while and go into hiding because of death threats. And yet the full context painted a different picture than the simplistic story spread via Twitter. The game park's survival depends on the large fees paid by hunters. The dentist's native guides specifically directed him to that particular lion. And in the absence of any natural predators, some form of culling must take place to control the animal population. While it is still possible to disapprove of hunting as a sport (I'm not too sympathetic toward it myself, as my short story "Rite of Passage" makes clear), the full story at least made the dentist out to be something other than a heartless monster.

Fortune-telling and catastrophizing - the tendency to anticipate the worst possible outcome (fortune-telling), or to assume that this outcome has already occurred (catastrophizing). The two fallacies are closely connected. Such reasoning is found all over the Internet. Political sites see any policy they disapprove of as the harbinger of an unspeakable catastrophe. Skeptical sites insist that any acceptance of paranormal phenomena must lead to a new Dark Age.

Note how quickly the prediction (fortune-telling) turns into fact (catastrophizing) in the believer's mind. From arguing that current trends will lead to (say) dictatorship, the political writer segues into the conclusion that we are already in a dictatorship. The Skeptic's prediction that belief in the paranormal will bring on a new Dark Age quickly becomes the conclusion that we’re already living in a Dark Age of ignorance and superstition.

Another example would be sites devoted to arguing either for or against anthropogenic global warming, with proponents claiming that a planetary disaster of unprecedented proportions is now inevitable, and opponents claiming that any restrictions on carbon dioxide output will bring our technological civilization to a screeching halt. And then there are financial sites that see every market correction as the first step toward total economic, social, and political collapse, and keep their readers in  chronic state of anxiety and panic.

Personalization - making everything personal. We need look no further than the comment threads of many sites and blogs to find people who immediately take any contrary opinion as a personal attack. Comment threads tend to deteriorate into mudslinging contests for this very reason. The fact that commenters can hide behind screen names and usually have no personal connection with their interlocutors makes it all too easy to lash out in an angry, sarcastic, or belittling fashion without worrying about the consequences.

Emotional reasoning - “if I feel it, it must be true, and the more strongly I feel it, the more true it is." It's impossible to avoid this fallacy if you spend any time on the Internet. All too often, arguments are made on the basis of strong emotion, rather than any factual basis. If somebody feels strongly that Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya and faked his birth certificate, it is simply impossible to talk him out of this opinion. He feels it, dammit, so it must be true – and who are you to question his feelings? Or, to take an example from the opposite side of the political spectrum, if somebody feels that the minimum wage should be $20 an hour, it's almost always a waste of time to point out that an unrealistically high starting wage will eliminate entry-level jobs and increase unemployment. Arguing for a $20 minimum wage makes a person feel good about himself – makes him feel that he is caring, kindhearted, and idealistic – and this feeling is more important than any facts.

I've also seen this fallacy displayed on paranormal sites where evidence is presented without much concern for accuracy. When I point out that certain case histories have been misreported, I sometimes get the reply that the factual particulars don't matter – we shouldn't get "bogged down" in details. What this means is that we shouldn't pay attention to facts that get in the way of the feelings we want to have.

A few months ago I encountered a very clear example of this fallacy on Facebook. The above image of a monkey carrying a puppy had gone viral, with the caption that the monkey was rescuing the dog after a factory explosion in China; the uplifting message was that if animals can show such concern for each other, then surely we as humans can do no less. Well, I Googled it and quickly determined that the story was not true. The photo was not taken in China, and there was no factory explosion. In fact, the monkey was not rescuing the dog, but just playing with it, as the photographer herself has stated. But when I mentioned this, the reaction I got from other people on Facebook was sharply negative. They didn't want to know the truth about the picture. One of them told me explicitly that it made her feel good to think that the monkey had rescued a puppy, and she didn't want her feelings altered by facts.

Always being right. This one speaks for itself. Many online arguments continue in perpetuity, with neither side willing to give in or walk away. And the longer the argument goes on, the more likely it is that other fallacies will come into play – that the combatants will start to personalize, engage in emotional reasoning, catastrophize, resort to black-and-white thinking, and so forth.

In listing these distortions, I don’t mean to suggest that I'm immune from them myself. Sadly, the opposite is true. For instance, my insistence on getting the facts about the monkey picture was probably a case of “always being right.” I’m prone to catastrophizing when it comes to political developments. I often have a mental filter about current events, seeing only the negatives (which make headlines) and ignoring the positives (which are easily taken for granted).

There’s nothing new about these distorted ways of thinking. People have always reasoned fallaciously in just these ways. What is new, I think, is the extent to which we're exposed to cognitive distortions on a daily basis if we spend a lot of time online. Chronic exposure to social media, political sites, comment threads, and even blogs like this one can subtly teach us counterproductive and illogical ways of thinking; the more we encounter these fallacies in other people without recognizing them, the more inclined we are to duplicate their distortions. Then we ourselves encourage the same kind of distorted thinking in other people, and the fallacies spread and intensify.

The rise of the Internet has obviously contributed to the growing polarization of our society. The most often-cited reason is that the Internet allows people to hang out in isolated echo chambers and groupthink ghettos where their own biases are constantly reinforced. While this is true, another factor is that so much online commentary and discussion engenders black-and-white thinking, mental filtering, catastrophizing, and other fallacies that encourage us to demonize anyone with a different point of view.

This may also partly explain the sharp polarization between Skeptics and proponents of the paranormal, who seem to have so little common ground. Sometimes when arguing against certain dubious pieces of evidence for life after death, I’ve been told, “You’re only helping the Skeptics when you do that” - as if what matters is not getting at the truth, but winning the debate. This mindset can take hold most easily when the opposite side is viewed as evil, vicious, duplicitous, and lacking in any positive qualities - a view encouraged by most of the cognitive distortions listed above.

Is there any solution? Actually, yes. The best way not to fall prey to these errors is to identify them in our own thinking and then replace our distorted thought patterns with more realistic ones. Many articles and books offer advice on how to do this. There are also apps, such as this one for the iPhone, which allow you to write out your troubling thoughts and then identify which cognitive distortions are at work.

Besides all that, it would probably be helpful for all of us to spend less time online. Speaking of which, I think now I'll turn off my computer and head outside.

Cheerio!

Running a MOOC

So who out there knows what a MOOC is?

Until yesterday I didn't. But now I know the acronym MOOC stands for massively open online course – Internet education that's open to everybody.

And on January 5, a really big MOOC covering the field of parapsychology will begin. Details are here.

The impressive roster of lecturers includes (among others):

• Carlos Alvarado and Nancy Zingrone, who are organizing the event;
• Stephen Braude, author of Immortal Remains;
• well-known psi researcher and author Dean Radin;
• remote viewer Joe McMoneagle;
• Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project;
• Richard Broughton, past president of the Parapsychological Association.

Did I mention that the 22-day MOOC is free? You only have to enroll, which you can do at the link.

The duke of URL

Here's a cost-free way to contribute to cutting-edge research into mediumship. Use this URL as your portal to Amazon.com :

http://www.amazon.com/?tag=windbridge-20

If you bookmark this URL for Amazon (replacing any Amazon bookmark you may already have), and use it whenever you start shopping there, a percentage of your purchases will be directed to the Windbridge Institute in Arizona—one of the very few scientific facilities that take a serious interest in after-death communication.

It doesn't cost you anything, and the more people who do it, the more funds will be generated for the institute. (Click here and scroll about halfway down the linked page for examples of studies already carried out by Windbridge.)

Wiki is still wacky

I'm linking to a political post in The Federalist, but my purpose is not to start a political discussion. What's interesting about this article, "Why Is Wikipedia Deleting All References to Neil Tyson's Fabrication?", is what it says about the mindset of hardcore science fans (as distinguished from actual scientists), many of whom undoubtedly fall into the militant debunker camp.

From the article:

Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science ...

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened ...

Judging by many of the responses to the three pieces I wrote detailing Neil Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes and embellishing stories (part 1, part 2, and part 3), you’d think I had defamed somebody’s god. It turns out that fanatical cultists do not appreciate being shown evidence that the object of their worship may not, in fact, be infallible.

Which brings us to Wikipedia. Oh, Wikipedia. After I published my piece about Neil Tyson’s fabrication of the George W. Bush quote, several users edited Neil Tyson’s wiki page to include details of the quote fabrication controversy. The fact-loving, evidence-weighing, ever-objective editors of the online encyclopedia did not appreciate the inclusion of the evidence of Tyson’s fabrication. Not at all ...

Literally every single mention of Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes has been removed from Tyson’s Wikipedia page ...

These lovers of science don’t actually love science, because science requires you to go where the evidence takes you, even if it goes against your original hypothesis ...

Tyson may be a great scientist, but what he’s selling at a price of $70 per ticket isn’t science. He’s selling the self satisfaction that comes from moral preening. Neil Tyson is adored by people who want the sweet feeling of smug, intellectual superiority without all the baggage of actually being intellectually superior in any way.

Harsh, but I think the same critique can be leveled against many (but not all) of the knee-jerk skeptics who confidently reject any evidence for psi, even when it's clear to more knowledgeable persons that they have only a superficial grasp of the issues involved.

For instance, I remember one online skeptic who dismissed crisis apparitions by declaring that the percipients were "in crisis" and so naturally they started hallucinating—blissfully unaware that a crisis apparition involves a crisis not for the percipient but for the person whose apparition is seen. (The percipient is typically quite relaxed.) Another skeptic announced that Leonora Piper could have easily guessed that the spirit communicator "George Pelham" was actually George Pellew, because the names were so similar—unaware that the Pelham name was never kept secret from Mrs. Piper, and was used only in published writings about the case, not in the seances. Yet another declared that the book and newspaper tests performed with Gladys Osborne Leonard were invalid because the investigator, Charles Drayton Thomas, stated that his father had designed the tests to prove survival. The skeptic complained that a proper experimenter doesn't set up an experiment to prove a preconceived opinion. This is wrong on two counts: a) experimenters do indeed try to prove particular hypotheses, and b) Drayton Thomas's father was deceased at the time and communicating through Mrs. Leonard, so it was not any living experimenter who was setting up the tests.

Now, a caveat: some highly knowledgeable skeptics are out there. They have done their homework, they know the facts, and they raise interesting and challenging points. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the posers, the wannabes—the ones who posture as experts without having any actual expertise. 

Anyone who had studied the literature would know what a crisis apparition is, or that Pelham was an alias chosen to protect his family, or that Drayton Thomas frequently communicated with his father through Mrs. Leonard. The people raising these objections simply have not done the reading, and thus have no grasp of the empirical facts they are attempting to dispute. They merely want to look "smart," and the way to do this, they think, is to parrot other people in their circle. It becomes a form of groupthink, as people compete with each other to be as dismissive and bullying as possible.

And there's the irony—people who claim to be dedicated to rationality, independent thought, and critical thinking turn out, in these cases, to be indifferent to facts, oblivious to their own ignorance, and unable to see obvious holes in their own reasoning. Like insecure high school students, they're interested mainly in seeking the approval of those in their in-group.

Insecurity, in fact, lies at the root of this behavior. If Neil Tyson's fans were truly secure in their conviction that he is impeccably honest and rational, they would not need to police the Internet deleting his own quotes and attacking those who call attention to his mistakes. Nor would "guerrilla skeptics" need to scrub James Randi's Wiki page of any criticism, or scrub Rupert Sheldrake's Wiki page of any positive info. They would let the facts speak for themselves.

Ultimately, this strange and rather sad behavior is not about science, or reason, or saving civilization from mysticism and a new dark age, or any of the self-aggrandizing motives these folks subscribe to. It's simply the cheapest possible way to be be one of the cool kids, and to feel "smart."

The debate to NDE all debates

A debate about life after death between proponents and skeptics will be live-streamed online tomorrow (Wednesday). The debate will center on NDEs. Details here.

In support of the statement that "Death is not Final" will be seminal researcher of the NDE, Dr. Raymond Moody, and neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, who has had an NDE himself and written a book about it (Proof of Heaven). Skeptic Dr. Steven Novella and physicist Sean Carroll will argue against the claim.

Some background on the participants:

Steven Novella

Sean Carroll

Raymond Moody

Eben Alexander

The streaming video can be seen here, starting at 6:45 EDT, May 7.

Special thanks to my Facebook friend Peter Dewey for alerting me to this event. Though I doubt I'll watch (I hate debates - they just get me ticked off), I'm sure some of this blog's readers will be interested.

FYI

Typepad has been hit with some distributed denial of service attacks which have put some blogs offline and fouled up the posting and commenting on others. Until the problem is fixed, this blog may be offline at certain times, and comments may take longer than usual to post.

In the meantime ...

Comments don't seem to be working at the moment. It's a TypePad thing ...

Update: TypePad seems to have fixed the problem, or maybe it fixed itself.