15 highlights
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It didnât take long for me to realise that the search engine didnât value objectivity highly. For instance, it would often rank tendentious pages from, say, Fox News or Salon, above more neutral pages from news agencies like the Associated Press. I learned that this was because the search formula was configured to favour objectivity less than other parameters like popularity. It wasnât that it was harder to create algorithms that could value objectivity (one simple method was to count the number of Russell conjugations in unquoted text). It was just that web-users wanted objectivity less than they wanted interestingness.
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What good was offering people the truth if they were more interested in consuming gossip, sensationalism, hackery, clickbait, and other forms of vivid fiction?
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As long as human nature was fundamentally irrational, technology wouldnât civilise us, weâd primitivise it. Upon this realisation, my interest began to shift away from technology to psychology. Perhaps, I wondered, the key to our enlightenment lay in upgrading the algorithms of the mind.
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With the rise of social media in the early 2010s, people became more concerned about the role of the web in spreading delusions and promoting dangerous views. This period saw surges in both jihadism and far-right extremism in the UK, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the town of Luton. With a large isolated population of ethnic Pakistanis, Luton had long been synonymous with conservative Islam, and it was a major stronghold of the UKâs deadliest jihadist network, al-Muhajiroun.
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Curious, I decided to relocate to the neighbourhood. I wanted to know whether the townâs problems were really the result of online misinformation, or if, as I suspected, there was a deeper cause rooted in the human brain.
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I approached al-Muhajiroun supporters at their stalls to question them, observed their rallies and protests, attended the same mosques as them, and eavesdropped on them in the streets and in cyberspace.
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The more I studied these men, the more it became clear their radicalisation couldnât simply be blamed on misinformation or ignorance. Theyâd received their fair share of good knowledge from the schools and universities theyâd attended, and they had the same access to the worldâs information as the rest of us. But theyâd rejected it all to appease pathological prejudices.
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It became even clearer that the main problem was not (mis)information but the mind when I began to monitor the jihadistsâ conversations. They spent their days scanning the mainstream media for signs of the fulfilment of apocalyptic prophecies, and any news that could be matched to their prophecies was unquestioningly accepted as true, while anything that didnât was reflexively dismissed as Jewish propaganda.
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What I learned was this: information doesnât enter the mind intact like a puzzle-piece slotted into a jigsaw. Instead, it becomes distorted to fit the shape of its container, like water poured into a vessel. Lutonâs jihadists had been given plenty of good, honest facts by society, but these facts had been warped by their biases to fit their delusions.
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Iâd once wondered what good it was offering people the truth if they were more interested in consuming fiction. But it was now clear that interest wasnât the main problem; even if you could get people to consume the truth, their minds would digest it into fiction.
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Fortunately, I found I could apply my insights into Lutonâs jihadists to regular people all over the world, including myself. I noticed that weâre all guilty of twisting the truth to suit our views. As much as I resented the way the jihadists scapegoated all of humanityâs problems on Jews, I realized I too had scapegoated all of humanityâs problems: on ignorance. And although I thought the jihadists naĂŻve for thinking the solution to everything was a holy book that theyâd never read, I too had foolishly believed humanity could be fixed by a single thing: technology.
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In short, I realised that most of us are not much more rational than the jihadists; itâs just that our irrationalities tend to go unnoticed because they follow societyâs contours rather than reacting violently against them.
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This last issue seemed to me to be the most fundamental. We were so busy thinking about the world (cognition) that we neglected to think about our thinking (metacognition). As such, we didnât understand understanding, leaving us at the mercy of every trick of the mind that prevented us from grasping reality, such as its preference for entertainment over truth, and its tendency to twist facts into fiction.
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A lifelong liberal, I saw that my ideology was making me partisan and irrational, so I reluctantly abandoned my political views. I no longer identify with an ideology, but I retain my basic principlesâequality of opportunity, freedom of expression, truth no matter how inconvenient.
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Many of my friends who didnât abandon ideology enlisted in the culture war and either became âwokeâ or âbasedâ. This polarisation soon become a major talking point in the media, and the idea Iâd rejected years earlier, that algorithms were to blame, became mainstream. Governments and advertisers began ramping up pressure on the tech giants to censor âdisinformationâ and âhate speechâ, as if it were possible to quarantine fools from falsehood.