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'Applying transparent and innovative statistical approaches we show that social media effects are not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size'.

'Moving forward access to this kind of data will be key to understanding the many roles that social media plays in the lives of young people', Professor Przybylski added.

The advantage of having many different waves of data from the same people is that it enables researchers to speculate on whether changes in one characteristic cause changes in another. This can be done by asking whether changes at one time in one factor predict another more strongly than the reverse

irst, as we might expect, people’s personality characteristics and values are fairly stable. People’s responses to both the personality inventory and the values scale did not change much over time. However, the responses to the personality inventory changed less than the responses to the values survey.

Overall, some personality characteristics and some values are related. Agreeableness was correlated with the value of being prosocial (that is, wanting to engage in positive actions for society). Conscientiousness was correlated with conformity (which reflects that conscientious people tend to want to follow rules including societal rules). Extraversion was related to the value of enjoyment. Openness correlated with the value of self-direction. There were no strong correlations between neuroticism and any of the values.

In addition, personality traits appeared to influence a variety of measures of well-being. People high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness tended to show higher measures of well-being while being high in neuroticism was linked to decreased measures of well-being.

First, in an era in which key findings fail to replicate, this study solidifies the relationship between personality characteristics and values that have been observed before. It also demonstrates that both personality characteristics and values change slowly.

Second, this work suggests that changes in personality characteristics (which reflect people’s underlying motivation) have a bigger impact on values than changes in values have on people’s personality characteristics.

Third, this work suggests that both personality characteristics and values are related to people’s sense of well-being. However, personality characteristics seem to have a broad impact. Changes in personality can precede changes in well-being, but it appears that changes in well-being may actually have an impact on people’s values.

Moreover, to the extent that people have unconscious biases, there is no clear-cut way to measure them

The main tool for measuring unconscious bias, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been in use for twenty years but is highly contested.

meta-analytic reviews have concluded that IAT scores — in other words, unconscious biases — are very weak predictors of actual behavior.

The vast majority of people labeled “racist” by these tests behave the same as the vast majority of people labelled “non-racist.” Do we really want to tell people who behave in non-racist ways that they are unconsciously racists, or, conversely, tell people who behave in racist ways that they aren’t, deep down, racists at all?

This gets to the underlying flaw with unconscious bias trainings: behaviors, not thoughts, should be the target of diversity and inclusion interventions.

Scientific evidence suggests that the relationship between attitudes and behaviors is much weaker than one might expect.

Even if we lived in a world in which humans always acted in accordance with their beliefs, there would remain better ways to promote diversity than by policing people’s thoughts.

Organizations should focus less on extinguishing their employees’ unconscious thoughts, and more on nurturing ethical, benevolent, and inclusive behaviors.

This means focusing less on employees’ attitudes, and more on organizational policies and systems, as these play the key role creating the conditions that entice employees (and leaders) to behave in more or less inclusive ways.

Instead of worrying what people think of something or someone deep down, we should focus on ways to eliminate the toxic or prejudiced behaviors we can see. That alone will drive a great deal of progress.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is chief talent scientist at Manpower Group and a professor at University College London and Columbia University.

But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”

So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?

At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents

its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.

In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others.

The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.

A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attribute

Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.

Punitiveness

A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure

Deplatforming

A critical culture tolerates dissent rather than silencing it. It understands that dissent can seem obnoxious, harmful, hateful and, yes, unsafe.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to shut up and shout down its targets. Cancelers often define the mere act of disagreeing with them as a threat to their safety or even an act of violence

Organization

Critical culture relies on persuasion. The way to win an argument is to convince others that you are right.

By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.

Secondary Boycotts

With its commitments to exploring a wide range of ideas and correcting rather than coercing the errant, a critical culture sees no value in instilling a climate of fear

But instilling fear is what canceling is all about. By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: “you could be next.”

Moral Grandstanding

Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.

Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both

Truthiness

Concern for accuracy is the north star of a critical culture. Not everyone gets every fact right, nor do people always agree on what is true; and yet people in a critical culture try to present their own and others’ viewpoints honestly and accurately.

canceling is not about seeking truth or persuading others; it is a form of information warfare, in which truthiness suffices if it serves the cause.

Those are my six warning signs. If you spot one or two, you should fear that a canceling may be happening; if you see five or six, you can be sure.

Though our critics like to claim that those of us who worry about cancel culture just don’t like being criticized on the internet, cancel culture is all too real. And though it may at times bear a superficial resemblance to critical culture, the two are diametrically opposed—and not so very difficult to tell apart.

The second kind, autonomous motivation, is what we’re seeking. This is when you feel like you’re self-directed, whether you have a natural affinity for the task at hand, or you’re doing something because you understand why it’s worthwhile.

Ms. Winder, who teaches workshops on reconnecting to your sense of purpose, often has students free write about what makes them come alive.

Clinical psychologist Richard M. Ryan, one of two scientists who developed a well-known approach to understanding motivation called self-determination theory, encourages those seeking lasting motivation to take a deep dive into their values.

when you connect the things that are important to you to the things you need to do — even the drudgeries — you can feel more in control of your actions. What do you love about your work? What core value does it meet?

Looking forward to a reward isn’t the best for long-term motivation. But several studies suggest that pairing small, immediate rewards to a task improves both motivation and fun.

Social connections like this are critical to rekindling motivation,

suggested considering how your motivation is tied to the people around you, whether that’s your family or your basketball team.

Reaching out lifts others, too. “Letting someone know that you are thinking of them is enough to kick-start their motivation,” and reminds them that you care,

People also motivate each other through competition.

Students in competitive groups exercised much more often than those in supportive social networks,

New athletic adventures can be motivational gold, too. A 2020 study suggested that trying out novel activities can help you stick with exercise.

Treating ourselves with compassion works much more effectively than beating ourselves up,

“People think they’re going to shame themselves into action,” yet self-compassion helps people stay focused on their goals, reduces fear of failure and improves self-confidence, which can also improve motivation, she said.

Students who were encouraged to be compassionate toward themselves after the test studied longer and performed better on a follow-up test, compared to students given either simple self-esteem-boosting comments or no instruction.

“The key thing about self-compassion and motivation is that it allows you to learn from your failures,”

The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon

The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.

The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.

These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.

There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u

All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.

Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?

Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?

Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.

By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”

Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.

Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.

Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors

User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.

When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,

“Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”

Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data

Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.

As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.

This is the economic context in which disinformation wins

In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.

A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained

The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”

Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.

Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.

Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.

In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information

Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.

Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic

The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.

Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.

With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.

The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.

Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement

Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.

Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.

when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.

All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.

We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications

The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.

Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.

like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.

Where does that leave us?

Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.

instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.

We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes

This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces

Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.

Instead, discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called “private.

No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests

the sober truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of far more basic questions:

How should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century?

What new charters of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are required to ensure that data collection and use serve the genuine needs of individuals and society?

What measures will protect citizens from unaccountable power over information, whether it is wielded by private companies or governments?

The corporation that is Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it will not voluntarily change its economics.

when the next disaster or derailment comes along, in my own life or the life of our society, I hope that I will be ready to trust experts as far as it seems wise to trust them — while always being aware that there are more things under heaven than their philosophies encompass, and a lot of strange surprises lurking deep below the not-entirely-solid earth.

Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.

“We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”

They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”

In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.

The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior

In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.

“Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.

Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years,

said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas

His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.

In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.

Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.

Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.

Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.

“Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”

“Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.

The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could get only about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.

In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.

According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.

In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.

The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.

One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.

Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store free of charge.

In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.

Sometimes, changing your circumstances is difficult but absolutely necessary, such as in cases of abuse or violence. And sometimes, changing your circumstances is fairly easy: If you are lethargic every morning, start going to bed earlier.

But in the gray areas in between, fighting against reality can be impossible, or incredibly inefficient. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a chronic illness for which there are no promising treatment options. Perhaps your romantic partner has left you against your wishes and cannot be persuaded otherwise.

In these sorts of situations, changing how you feel can actually be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural.

No surprise, then, that chronic stress often leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms in modern life. These include the misuse of drugs and alcohol, rumination on the sources of stress, self-harm, and self-blaming

That can be blamed in part on biology. Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger.

In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.

But in the modern world, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.

you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.

Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis

Similarly, the Stoics believed that human reason, practiced studiously, could override knee-jerk emotions.

Buddhism posits that our minds are habitually unbalanced, but not intrinsically so; the key is to build new habits of thinking.

These ideas (especially the last) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy, such as rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies for changing our reactions to negative situations in our life—and thus becoming happier.

4. Give more.

you can follow four steps to arrive at a happier frame of mind:

1. Notice your feelings.

Self-observation requires that you be mindful of what you are feeling in the moment and approach your emotions with detached curiosity.

Say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless Zoom meetings and no real human contact. Rather than fantasizing about quitting, spend some time dissecting your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day are they worst?

Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, I started taking virtual meetings while out for a walk. It made a big difference.

2. Accept your feelings.

in much of life, negative feelings are part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Furthermore, ample research shows that negative emotions and experiences help us find life’s meaning and purpose.

In the journal you started in Step 1 above, ponder the things that you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they spark in you. Ask what you are learning about yourself from each of these feelings, and how you might grow as a result.

3. Lower your expectations.

Once, as a young man, I told my father over the phone that I planned to quit my job. “Why?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I told him. He paused for a long time, and finally said, “What makes you so special?

My problem—and it’s a common one—was that I had set unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.

Calmly ask yourself whether you’re asking the world for something it can’t or won’t give you. If you are, you might be looking in the wrong place for your bliss

you shouldn’t assume that all your happiness can come from any single romance, material object, or activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others.

Ancient thinkers recognized this difficulty but believed that we can manage our reactions effectively if we have the right tools.

Research from the INSEAD business school in France shows that people who consider themselves a victim of circumstances don’t feel like they have any responsibility for them. They are also likely to be victimizers themselves, hurting the people who try to help them.

One way to break this cycle is to help others voluntarily and charitably. Not only is serving others one of the most effective ways to raise one’s own happiness; maintaining the two opposing ideas that you are both a victim and a helper is very difficult.

C is to collect a lot of information. Thirty years ago, the challenge was finding information in a card catalog at the library. Now it's, how do we separate the good stuff from the bad stuff?

A is to analyze both sides. Lawyers have to turn the coin over and exhaust counterarguments or we'll lose in court.

So lawyers are trained to look for the gray areas, to look for the questions are not the answers. And if we kind of orient our thinking that way, I think we're less likely to shut down competing points of view.

My argument in the book is, we can feel good about a decision even if we don't get everything that we want. We have to make compromises.

I tell my students, you'll get through the bar. The key is to look for questions and not answers. If you could answer every legal question with a Wikipedia search, there would be no reason to hire lawyers.

Lawyers are hired because there are arguments on both sides, you know? Every Supreme Court decision that is split 6-3, 5-4, that means there were really strong arguments on both sides.

T is, tolerate the fact that you won't get everything you want every time

So we have to be very careful about the source of what you're getting, OK? Is this source neutral? Is this source really care about facts and not so much about an agenda?

Step 3, the collecting information piece. I think it's a new skill for all of us that we are overloaded with information into our phones. We have algorithms that somebody else developed that tailor the information that comes into our phones based on what the computer thinks we already believe

No. 2 - this is the beauty of social media and the internet - you can pull original sources. We can click on the indictment. Click on the new bill that has been proposed in the United States Congress.

then the book explains ways that you can then sort through that information for yourself. Skills are empowering.

Maybe as a replacement for sort of being empowered by being part of a team - a red team versus a blue team - that's been corrosive, I think, in American politics and American society. But arming ourselves with good facts, that leads to self-determination.

MARTINEZ: Now, you've written two other books - "How To Read The Constitution" and "What You Need To Know About Voting" - along with this one, "How To Think Like A Lawyer - And Why.

It kind of makes me think, Kim, that you feel that Americans might be lacking a basic level of civics education or understanding. So what is lacking when it comes to teaching civics or in civics discourse today?

studies have shown that around a third of Americans can't name the three branches of government. But if we don't understand our government, we don't know how to hold our government accountable

Democracies can't stay open if we've got elected leaders that are caring more about entrenching their own power and misinformation than actually preserving democracy by the people. I think that's No. 1.

No. 2 has to do with a value system. We talk about American values - reward for hard work, integrity, honesty. The same value system should apply to who we hire for government positions. And I think Americans have lost that.

in my own life, I'm very careful about who gets to be part of the inner circle because I have a strong value system. Bring that same sense to bear at the voting booth. Don't vote for red versus blue. Vote for people that live your value system

just like the Ukrainians are fighting for their children's democracy, we need to do that as well. And we do that through informing ourselves with good information, tolerating competing points of view and voting - voting, voting, voting - to hold elected leaders accountable if they cross boundaries that matter to us in our own lives.

Some reports appear to show that at least some of the gunman’s communications used Apple’s encrypted iPhone messaging services, which makes messages almost impossible for anyone else to read when sent to another iPhone user.

Facebook parent company Meta, which also owns Instagram, says it is working with law enforcement but declined to provide details.

A series of posts appeared on his Instagram in the days leading up to the shooting, including photos of a gun magazine in hand and two AR-style semi-automatic rifles. An Instagram user who was tagged in one post shared parts of what appears to be a chilling exchange on Instagram with Ramos, asking her to share his gun pictures with her more than 10,000 followers.

Meta has said it monitors people’s private messages for some kinds of harmful content, such as links to malware or images of child sexual exploitation. But copied images can be detected using unique identifiers — a kind of digital signature — which makes them relatively easy for computer systems to flag. Trying to interpret a string of threatening words — which can resemble a joke, satire or song lyrics — is a far more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems.

Facebook could, for instance, flag certain phrases such as “going to kill” or “going to shoot”, but without context — something AI in general has a lot of trouble with — there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze.

A recent Meta-commissioned report emphasized the benefits of such privacy but also noted some risks — including users who could abuse the encryption to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking and spread hate speech.

Security experts say this could be done if Apple were to engineer a “backdoor” to allow access to messages sent by alleged criminals. Such a secret key would let them decipher encrypted information with a court order.

after the military in Myanmar used Facebook to stoke the murder of the Rohingya people, Haugen began to worry that this was a playbook that could be infinitely repeated — and only because Facebook chose not to invest in safety measures, such as detecting hate speech in poorer, more vulnerable places. “The scale of the problems was so vast,” she writes. “I believed people were going to die (in certain countries, at least) and for no reason other than higher profit margins.”

After a trip to Cambodia, where neighbors killed neighbors in the 1970s because of a “story that labeled people who had lived next to each other for generations as existential threats,” she’d started to wonder about what caused people to turn on one another to such a horr

ifying degree. “How quickly could a story become the truth people perceived?”

she points out is the false choice posited by most social media companies: free speech vs. censorship. She argues that lack of transparency is what contributed most to the problems at Facebook. No one on the outside can see inside the algorithms. Even many of those on the inside can’t. “You can’t take a single academic course, anywhere in the world, on the tradeoffs and choices that go into building a social media algorithm or, more importantly, the consequences of those choices,” she writes.

In that lack of accountability, social media is a very different ecosystem than the one that helped Ralph Nader take on the auto industry back in the 1960s. Then, there was a network of insurers and plaintiff’s lawyers who also wanted change — and the images of mangled bodies were a lot more visible than what happens inside the mind of a teenage girl. But what if the government forced companies to share their inner workings in the same way it mandates that food companies disclose the nutrition in what they make? What if the government forced social media companies to allow academics and other researchers access to the algorithms they use?

In 1972, using duct tape and spare parts in the basement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Clauser and a graduate student, Stuart Freedman, who died in 2012, endeavored to perform Bell’s experiment to measure quantum entanglement. In a series of experiments, he fired thousands of light particles, or photons, in opposite directions to measure a property known as polarization, which could have only two values — up or down. The result for each detector was always a series of seemingly random ups and downs. But when the two detectors’ results were compared, the ups and downs matched in ways that neither “classical physics” nor Einstein’s laws could explain. Something weird was afoot in the universe. Entanglement seemed to be real.

in 2002, Dr. Clauser admitted that he himself had expected quantum mechanics to be wrong and Einstein to be right. “Obviously, we got the ‘wrong’ result. I had no choice but to report what we saw, you know, ‘Here’s the result.’ But it contradicts what I believed in my gut has to be true.” He added, “I hoped we would overthrow quantum mechanics. Everyone else thought, ‘John, you’re totally nuts.’”

the correlations only showed up after the measurements of the individual particles, when the physicists compared their results after the fact. Entanglement seemed real, but it could not be used to communicate information faster than the speed of light.

In 1982, Dr. Aspect and his team at the University of Paris tried to outfox Dr. Clauser’s loophole by switching the direction along which the photons’ polarizations were measured every 10 nanoseconds, while the photons were already in the air and too fast for them to communicate with each other. He too, was expecting Einstein to be right.

Quantum predictions held true, but there were still more possible loopholes in the Bell experiment that Dr. Clauser had identified

For example, the polarization directions in Dr. Aspect’s experiment had been changed in a regular and thus theoretically predictable fashion that could be sensed by the photons or detectors.

Anton Zeilinger

added even more randomness to the Bell experiment, using random number generators to change the direction of the polarization measurements while the entangled particles were in flight.

Once again, quantum mechanics beat Einstein by an overwhelming margin, closing the “locality” loophole.

as scientists have done more experiments with entangled particles, entanglement is accepted as one of main features of quantum mechanics and is being put to work in cryptology, quantum computing and an upcoming “quantum internet

One of its first successes in cryptology is messages sent using entangled pairs, which can send cryptographic keys in a secure manner — any eavesdropping will destroy the entanglement, alerting the receiver that something is wrong.

, with quantum mechanics, just because we can use it, doesn’t mean our ape brains understand it. The pioneering quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said that anyone who didn’t think quantum mechanics was outrageous hadn’t understood what was being said.

In his interview with A.I.P., Dr. Clauser said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics, and I’m not even sure I really know how to use it all that well. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that I still don’t understand it.”

Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses, and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model.

Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, blob-like monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.

@TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

“I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the A.I. world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of A.I. language models, how they acquire new capabilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if A.I. is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

If it’s an A.I. safety researcher talking about the Shoggoth, maybe that person is passionate about preventing A.I. systems from displaying their true, Shoggoth-like nature.

A great many people are dismissive of suggestions that any of these systems are “really” thinking, because they’re “just” doing something banal (like making statistical predictions about the next word in a sentence). What they fail to appreciate is that there is every reason to suspect that human cognition is “just” doing those exact same things. It matters not that birds flap their wings but airliners don’t. Both fly. And these machines think. And, just as airliners fly faster and higher and farther than birds while carrying far more weight, these machines are already outthinking the majority of humans at the majority of tasks. Further, that machines aren’t perfect thinkers is about as relevant as the fact that air travel isn’t instantaneous. Now consider: we’re well past the Wright flyer level of thinking machine, past the early biplanes, somewhere about the first commercial airline level. Not quite the DC-10, I think. Can you imagine what the AI equivalent of a 777 will be like? Fasten your seatbelts.

@thomas h. You make my point perfectly. You’re observing that the way a plane flies — by using a turbine to generate thrust from combusting kerosene, for example — is nothing like the way that a bird flies, which is by using the energy from eating plant seeds to contract the muscles in its wings to make them flap. You are absolutely correct in that observation, but it’s also almost utterly irrelevant. And it ignores that, to a first approximation, there’s no difference in the physics you would use to describe a hawk riding a thermal and an airliner gliding (essentially) unpowered in its final descent to the runway. Further, you do yourself a grave disservice in being dismissive of the abilities of thinking machines, in exactly the same way that early skeptics have been dismissive of every new technology in all of human history. Writing would make people dumb; automobiles lacked the intelligence of horses; no computer could possibly beat a chess grandmaster because it can’t comprehend strategy; and on and on and on. Humans aren’t nearly as special as we fool ourselves into believing. If you want to have any hope of acting responsibly in the age of intelligent machines, you’ll have to accept that, like it or not, and whether or not it fits with your preconceived notions of what thinking is and how it is or should be done … machines can and do think, many of them better than you in a great many ways. b&

@BLA. You are incorrect. Everything has nature. Its nature is manifested in making humans react. Sure, no humans, no nature, but here we are. The writer and various sources are not attributing nature to AI so much as admitting that they don’t know what this nature might be, and there are reasons to be scared of it. More concerning to me is the idea that this field is resorting to geek culture reference points to explain and comprehend itself. It’s not so much the algorithm has no soul, but that the souls of the humans making it possible are stupendously and tragically underdeveloped.

When even tech companies are saying AI is moving too fast, and the articles land on page 1 of the NYT (there's an old reference), I think the greedy will not think twice about exploiting this technology, with no ethical considerations, at all.

@nome sane? The problem is it isn't data as we understand it. We know what the datasets are -- they were used to train the AI's. But once trained, the AI is thinking for itself, with results that have surprised everybody.

The unique feature of a shoggoth is it can become whatever is needed for a particular job. There's no actual shape so it's not a bad metaphor, if an imperfect image. Shoghoths also turned upon and destroyed their creators, so the cautionary metaphor is in there, too. A shame more Asimov wasn't baked into AI. But then the conflict about how to handle AI in relation to people was key to those stories, too.

The researchers used facial-recognition software to map out specific points on a person’s face, then applied machine-learning algorithms to the facial points to obtain empirical measures for three key face impressions—trustworthiness, dominance and attractiveness.  

They examined the association of these impressions with the accuracy of analysts’ quarterly forecasts, drawn from the Institutional Brokers Estimate System

Analyst accuracy was determined by comparing each analyst’s prediction error—the difference between their prediction and the actual earnings—with that of all analysts for that same company and quarter.

For an average stock valued at $100, Prof. Teoh says, analysts ranked as looking most trustworthy were 25 cents more accurate in earnings-per-share forecasts than the analysts who were ranked as looking least trustworthy

Similarly, most-dominant-looking analysts were 52 cents more accurate in their EPS forecast than least-dominant-looking analysts.

The relation between a dominant face and accuracy, meanwhile, was significant before and after the regulation was enacted, the analysts say. This suggests that dominant-looking male analysts are always able to obtain information,

While forecasts of female analysts regardless of facial characteristics were on average more accurate than those of their male counterparts, the forecasts of women who were seen as more-dominant-looking were significantly less accurate than their male counterparts.  

Says Prof. Todorov: “Women who look dominant are more likely to be viewed negatively because it goes against the cultural stereotype.

In November 2020, the AI group DeepMind announced it had developed a program called AlphaFold that could rapidly predict this information using an algorithm. Since then, it has been crunching through the genetic codes of every organism that has had its genome sequenced, and predicting the structures of the hundreds of millions of proteins they collectively contain.

Last year, DeepMind published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans – on an open database. Now it has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200m proteins.

“Essentially, you can think of it as covering the entire protein universe. It includes predictive structures for plants, bacteria, animals, and many other organisms, opening up huge new opportunities for AlphaFold to have an impact on important issues, such as sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases,”

In May, researchers led by Prof Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford announced they had used AlphaFold’s models to help determine the structure of a key malaria parasite protein, and work out where antibodies that could block transmission of the parasite were likely to bind.

“Previously, we’d been using a technique called protein crystallography to work out what this molecule looks like, but because it’s quite dynamic and moves around, we just couldn’t get to grips with it,” Higgins said. “When we took the AlphaFold models and combined them with this experimental evidence, suddenly it all made sense. This insight will now be used to design improved vaccines which induce the most potent transmission-blocking antibodies.”

AlphaFold’s models are also being used by scientists at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Enzyme Innovation, to identify enzymes from the natural world that could be tweaked to digest and recycle plastics. “It took us quite a long time to go through this massive database of structures, but opened this whole array of new three-dimensional shapes we’d never seen before that could actually break down plastics,” said Prof John McGeehan, who is leading the work. “There’s a complete paradigm shift. We can really accelerate where we go from here

“AlphaFold protein structure predictions are already being used in a myriad of ways. I expect that this latest update will trigger an avalanche of new and exciting discoveries in the months and years ahead, and this is all thanks to the fact that the data are available openly for all to use.”

start with epistemic bubbles

That omission might be purposeful

But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.

an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy.

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.

The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.

Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly

They have been in the limelight lately, most famously in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017).

The general gist: we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. Our Facebook feed consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, the majority of whom share our own political and cultural views

various algorithms behind the scenes, such as those inside Google search, invisibly personalise our searches, making it more likely that we’ll see only what we want to see. These processes all impose filters on information.

Such filters aren’t necessarily bad. The world is overstuffed with information, and one can’t sort through it all by oneself: filters need to be outsourced.

That’s why we all depend on extended social networks to deliver us knowledge

any such informational network needs the right sort of broadness and variety to work

Each individual person in my network might be superbly reliable about her particular informational patch but, as an aggregate structure, my network lacks what Sanford Goldberg in his book Relying on Others (2010) calls ‘coverage-reliability’. It doesn’t deliver to me a sufficiently broad and representative coverage of all the relevant information.

Epistemic bubbles also threaten us with a second danger: excessive self-confidence.

An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission

Suppose that I believe that the Paleo diet is the greatest diet of all time. I assemble a Facebook group called ‘Great Health Facts!’ and fill it only with people who already believe that Paleo is the best diet. The fact that everybody in that group agrees with me about Paleo shouldn’t increase my confidence level one bit. They’re not mere copies – they actually might have reached their conclusions independently – but their agreement can be entirely explained by my method of selection.

Luckily, though, epistemic bubbles are easily shattered. We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed.

echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.

amieson and Cappella’s book is the first empirical study into how echo chambers function

echo chambers work by systematically alienating their members from all outside epistemic sources.

Their research centres on Rush Limbaugh, a wildly successful conservative firebrand in the United States, along with Fox News and related media

His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view.

outsiders are not simply mistaken – they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers. The resulting worldview is one of deeply opposed force, an all-or-nothing war between good and evil

The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination

cult indoctrination involves new cult members being brought to distrust all non-cult members. This provides a social buffer against any attempts to extract the indoctrinated person from the cult.

The echo chamber doesn’t need any bad connectivity to function. Limbaugh’s followers have full access to outside sources of information

As Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015), modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every member of that chain

Their worldview can survive exposure to those outside voices because their belief system has prepared them for such intellectual onslaught.

exposure to contrary views could actually reinforce their views. Limbaugh might offer his followers a conspiracy theory: anybody who criticises him is doing it at the behest of a secret cabal of evil elites, which has already seized control of the mainstream media.

Perversely, exposure to outsiders with contrary views can thus increase echo-chamber members’ confidence in their insider sources, and hence their attachment to their worldview.

‘evidential pre-emption’. What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief.

One might be tempted to think that the solution is just more intellectual autonomy. Echo chambers arise because we trust others too much, so the solution is to start thinking for ourselves.

that kind of radical intellectual autonomy is a pipe dream. If the philosophical study of knowledge has taught us anything in the past half-century, it is that we are irredeemably dependent on each other in almost every domain of knowledge

Limbaugh’s followers regularly read – but do not accept – mainstream and liberal news sources. They are isolated, not by selective exposure, but by changes in who they accept as authorities, experts and trusted sources.

we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable. Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on that vulnerability, taking advantage of our epistemic condition and social dependency.

I am quite confident that there are plenty of echo chambers on the political Left. More importantly, nothing about echo chambers restricts them to the arena of politics

The world of anti-vaccination is clearly an echo chamber, and it is one that crosses political lines. I’ve also encountered echo chambers on topics as broad as diet (Paleo!), exercise technique (CrossFit!), breastfeeding, some academic intellectual traditions, and many, many more

Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.

much of the recent analysis has lumped epistemic bubbles together with echo chambers into a single, unified phenomenon. But it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the two.

Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily

Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things. Their belief systems provide structural integrity, resilience and active responses to outside attacks

the two phenomena can also exist independently. And of the events we’re most worried about, it’s the echo-chamber effects that are really causing most of the trouble.

new data does, in fact, seem to show that people on Facebook actually do see posts from the other side, or that people often visit websites with opposite political affiliation.

their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust.

Many people have claimed that we have entered an era of ‘post-truth’.

Not only do some political figures seem to speak with a blatant disregard for the facts, but their supporters seem utterly unswayed by evidence. It seems, to some, that truth no longer matters.

This is an explanation in terms of total irrationality. To accept it, you must believe that a great number of people have lost all interest in evidence or investigation, and have fallen away from the ways of reason.

echo chambers offers a less damning and far more modest explanation. The apparent ‘post-truth’ attitude can be explained as the result of the manipulations of trust wrought by echo chambers.

We don’t have to attribute a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the post-truth attitude. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities.

An echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth; it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.

in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world

none of this weighs against the existence of echo chambers. We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.

Notice how different what’s going on here is from, say, Orwellian doublespeak, a deliberately ambiguous, euphemism-filled language designed to hide the intent of the speaker.

echo chambers don’t trade in vague, ambiguous pseudo-speech. We should expect that echo chambers would deliver crisp, clear, unambiguous claims about who is trustworthy and who is not

clearly articulated conspiracy theories, and crisply worded accusations of an outside world rife with untrustworthiness and corruption.

Once an echo chamber starts to grip a person, its mechanisms will reinforce themselves.

In an epistemically healthy life, the variety of our informational sources will put an upper limit to how much we’re willing to trust any single person. Everybody’s fallible; a healthy informational network tends to discover people’s mistakes and point them out. This puts an upper ceiling on how much you can trust even your most beloved leader

nside an echo chamber, that upper ceiling disappears.

Being caught in an echo chamber is not always the result of laziness or bad faith. Imagine, for instance, that somebody has been raised and educated entirely inside an echo chamber

when the child finally comes into contact with the larger world – say, as a teenager – the echo chamber’s worldview is firmly in place. That teenager will distrust all sources outside her echo chamber, and she will have gotten there by following normal procedures for trust and learning.

It certainly seems like our teenager is behaving reasonably. She could be going about her intellectual life in perfectly good faith. She might be intellectually voracious, seeking out new sources, investigating them, and evaluating them using what she already knows.

The worry is that she’s intellectually trapped. Her earnest attempts at intellectual investigation are led astray by her upbringing and the social structure in which she is embedded.

Echo chambers might function like addiction, under certain accounts. It might be irrational to become addicted, but all it takes is a momentary lapse – once you’re addicted, your internal landscape is sufficiently rearranged such that it’s rational to continue with your addiction

Similarly, all it takes to enter an echo chamber is a momentary lapse of intellectual vigilance. Once you’re in, the echo chamber’s belief systems function as a trap, making future acts of intellectual vigilance only reinforce the echo chamber’s worldview.

There is at least one possible escape route, however. Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. An echo chamber can bring our teenager to discredit outside beliefs precisely because she encountered the echo chamber’s claims first. Imagine a counterpart to our teenager who was raised outside of the echo chamber and exposed to a wide range of beliefs. Our free-range counterpart would, when she encounters that same echo chamber, likely see its many flaws

Those caught in an echo chamber are giving far too much weight to the evidence they encounter first, just because it’s first. Rationally, they should reconsider their beliefs without that arbitrary preference. But how does one enforce such informational a-historicity?

The escape route is a modified version of René Descartes’s infamous method.

Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). He had come to realise that many of the beliefs he had acquired in his early life were false. But early beliefs lead to all sorts of other beliefs, and any early falsehoods he’d accepted had surely infected the rest of his belief system.

The only solution, thought Descartes, was to throw all his beliefs away and start over again from scratch.

He could start over, trusting nothing and no one except those things that he could be entirely certain of, and stamping out those sneaky falsehoods once and for all. Let’s call this the Cartesian epistemic reboot.

Notice how close Descartes’s problem is to our hapless teenager’s, and how useful the solution might be. Our teenager, like Descartes, has problematic beliefs acquired in early childhood. These beliefs have infected outwards, infesting that teenager’s whole belief system. Our teenager, too, needs to throw everything away, and start over again.

Let’s call the modernised version of Descartes’s methodology the social-epistemic reboot.

when she starts from scratch, we won’t demand that she trust only what she’s absolutely certain of, nor will we demand that she go it alone

For the social reboot, she can proceed, after throwing everything away, in an utterly mundane way – trusting her senses, trusting others. But she must begin afresh socially – she must reconsider all possible sources of information with a presumptively equanimous eye. She must take the posture of a cognitive newborn, open and equally trusting to all outside sources

we’re not asking people to change their basic methods for learning about the world. They are permitted to trust, and trust freely. But after the social reboot, that trust will not be narrowly confined and deeply conditioned by the particular people they happened to be raised by.

Such a profound deep-cleanse of one’s whole belief system seems to be what’s actually required to escape. Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers

Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust.

It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.

we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.

Stories of actual escapes from echo chambers often turn on particular encounters – moments when the echo-chambered individual starts to trust somebody on the outside.

Black’s is case in point. By high school, he was already something of a star on neo-Nazi media, with his own radio talk-show. He went on to college, openly neo-Nazi, and was shunned by almost every other student in his community college. But then Matthew Stevenson, a Jewish fellow undergraduate, started inviting Black to Stevenson’s Shabbat dinners. In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval – a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled

Similarly, accounts of people leaving echo-chambered homophobia rarely involve them encountering some institutionally reported fact. Rather, they tend to revolve around personal encounters – a child, a family member, a close friend coming out.

hese encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust.

We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field – we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept

goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.

f one can demonstrate goodwill to an echo-chambered member – as Stevenson did with Black – then perhaps one can start to pierce that echo chamber.

the path I’m describing is a winding, narrow and fragile one. There is no guarantee that such trust can be established, and no clear path to its being established systematically.

what we’ve found here isn’t an escape route at all. It depends on the intervention of another. This path is not even one an echo-chamber member can trigger on her own; it is only a whisper-thin hope for rescue from the outside.