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The Echo Chamber Is the Enemy of Democracy

44 points by raleighm 8y ago

microcolonel 8y ago
The American right and center are willing to break bread with the left, those on the left have bullied eachother out of doing the same.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
let's talk about it here
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
There is a larger point here about being human that's not related to tech or democracy. 1. We do not know what is good for us. We only know what we like and don't like. (We know this because we can look back in our own lives to times in which we did what we liked and it was not as good as if we had did something else, sometimes disastrously so.) 2. Many times we have to be annoyed by ideas and other concepts we don't like for a while until we realize that there is some bit of great value here for us. The logical conclusion to points 1 and 2 is this: there is some degree of being annoyed that is a normal and healthy part of living. Too much aggravation? Probably not. But you can definitely have too little. Too little aggravation would be far, far worse than too much, in fact. So goods and services that seek to reduce/eliminate everything we don't like are not actually acting in our best interests, whether they're some social media tech or a new brand of opioid. A bit of this kind of thing at the appropriate time is great. Too much is disastrous.
- saudioger 8y ago
  "Everything in moderation, including moderation"
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  I don’t know if too little aggravation is worse than too much. Admittedly I’m thinking of the edge case of legitimately harassing or abusive behavior, where your very understanding of reality is questioned with the explicit purpose to make you too insecure to engage in conversation with any confidence. I’m unsure what too little aggravation looks like, since even echo chambers result in self-aggravation to some extent?
- dboreham 8y ago
  Another larger point to consider is that what we perceive as "just politics" is a (big) business to the participants: politicians, parties, pressure groups, media organizations, journalists. These folks exploit basic human traits (outrage, fear, tribalism ...) for monetary gain. Put another way : the trolls aren't trolling because they're deranged (sometimes, ok..) but because that's their business. Long watch but quite relevant and interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg4IqrIpuQU&t=2440s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg4IqrIpuQU&t=2440s
sandworm101 8y ago
>> Which ideas, if any, are beyond the pale? Is it a mistake to “normalize” some speakers? When? Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  Assuming the students have been appropriately educated, wouldn't they just laugh at the speakers talking about lizard people? Why would they need to be protected from that kind of nonsense?
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    >> wouldn't they just laugh I laughed. Back in 1998 I attended a lecture that I though was about evidence of aliens messing with our DNA. What I got was intelligent design as proof that the bible was literally correct. Most laughed, but many did not. Students believe what they are told. Not all of them all of the time, but a significant percentage will believe anything they hear so long as it reinforces their world view.
  - lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
    Educated or not, framing is an important part of any arguement. Time and attention is limited so who is allowed to speak in a venue and how long they're given is an implicit endorsement. There's an appeal to authority there in all future arguments ("well I spoke here, what have you done") and regardless of how much education you have refuting a false claim is always an order or magnitude harder than making one. It's not so much protecting people, is ensuring their mental energies can be put toward productive measures rather than swimming through falsehoods for the sake of it.
  - qbrass 8y ago
    Those students will spread the idea as a joke until it reaches a bunch of people who take it seriously and start to organize.
WalterGR 8y ago
I want to speak specifically to two paragraphs from the article, taken together. Disturbingly, most of the controversies involve people whose views are to the right of center. ... Nor did Buckley think that all ideas deserve a forum. He did not host defenders of astrology, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism or Soviet-style Communism. Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism? If the worst views he can conjure from the left are a right-wing scare story and astrology, whereas the worst on the right are murderous ideologies, then I think the first paragraph kinda explains itself.
- tunesmith 8y ago
  There needs to be a pithy phrase for this kind of debate. Kind of like "form over function". Except here it's the desire to focus on the "form" of an argument, over the actual content of the argument. Similar to both-sides-ism. "Is the earth round? Views differ." Some kind of pithy phrase, when repeated, will exhort people to look at the content of the argument rather than just the structure.
  - WalterGR 8y ago
    Some kind of pithy phrase, when repeated, will exhort people to look at the content of the argument rather than just the structure. I understand what you’re saying, but if this unequal silencing is so obviously a real phenomenon and isn’t simply a reflection of the views being espoused - then it should be easy for the author to come up with examples. And it’s not just this author. It’s every author I’ve read commenting on this ‘phenomenon.’ They always say that it’s right-wing voices being silenced, but never suggest what left-wing voices should be silenced that aren’t. So I invite anyone to suggest the left-leaning equivalents of Nazism and white-supremacy. (And by equivalents I don’t just mean viewpoints, I mean comparable levels of influence. Some random bloke on the web claiming to be left-leaning and saying that their race is superior to whites isn’t the equivalent of white-supremacy as a movement.)
- jerf 8y ago
  "Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism?" It would depend on exactly how precisely you define "Soviet-style Communism". If you mean, matching the exact same structure and the exact same beliefs and the exact same propaganda and national narrative, no, of course not. If you mean "people advocating for the State to be the one and only source of authority over everything economic, social, and cultural", then, yes, absolutely there are people on the left advocating for this. Quite a few explicitly, and even more people who do not quite entirely realize they are advocating for it, but when asked any specific question about who should have some given authority, the answer is always the State, even if they hypothetically believe that there must be some question for which that is not the answer.
maldusiecle 8y ago
Pretty weak argument. Once you admit that certain views deserve to be taken off the able (astrology, the KKK, Nazis, and "Soviet-style communism," unclear whether Mao-style communism is permissible), you need to have principles about where the line is. I know a lot of people who would absolutely describe Bannon as similar to Nazis or Soviets, who feel very strongly that his "white nationalist" views are likely to lead to a genocide. It's pretty widely know that the last subject of these "free speech" uproars, Milo Yiannapolous, flirted pretty openly with Nazi-style beliefs--and that Bannon was the one who gave him a platform in the first place. If you disagree with Bannon being put in that category, you have a responsibility to at the very least explain why he's not there. Otherwise you're just cultivating willful ignorance, deliberately refusing to engage with others' arguments. Creating your own echo chamber, one could say.
trowawee 8y ago
Weird to write this article without citing any actual numbers. Here, let's help with that: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/political-correctness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/po.... Some key takeaways: - There just aren't many instances where people are actually being uninvited or censored on an absolute scale. - It's actually spread across the ideological spectrum, not solely limited to conservative speakers. - A tiny handful of conservative speakers are responsible for a significant number of these events, and in fact it appears that to some degree the point of inviting them is trolling, intended to draw protest and press attention, rather than a genuine attempt to present. Personally, I think major news organizations offering their imprimatur to self-proclaimed fascists who advocate for limiting or destroying democratic governance might be more harmful to democracy than colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me. I also think it's useful to consider Sarte's quote about the utility of "debating" anti-Semites: > Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. and how that same pattern plays out frequently in the high-profile interviews and debates with people like Bannon and Spencer.
- 2trill2spill 8y ago
  It's hard to take your source seriously when they say in reference to conservative speakers on campus "In other words, they’re trolling." Apparently the free speech project being cited by the source you posted is quite biased on the subject.
  - skrowl 8y ago
    All you had to do is see that it was on vox.com to know it's biased. vox.com is pretty well known to be very left-leaning.
dfxm12 8y ago
The first is that echo chambers are a terrible disservice to readers, to listeners, to students and to democracy. The second is that with respect to political issues, a degree of humility is essential. It's weird that this is the point of the opinion piece in this context. We're talking about a guy who built his fame on selling sensationalism to his own echo chamber and never showed one iota of humility. I agree we could all use a little bit more humility, but we're not going to get there by hearing from someone whose talking points are not based on fact, but on appealing to emotion. If you want someone with an opposing viewpoint at the festival, find someone more sincere. To borrow an example from the article, even if you disagree with Noam Chomsky, you can still trace back his opinion to the facts that informed it. You didn't see Buckley debating people on Firing Line who completely fabricated stories.
bilbo0s 8y ago
I think people are conflating ideas here. Democracy is a political system. You can have a democracy coexist with as many "echo chambers" as you please. (In fact, in a healthy democracy, you would have "echo chambers"). The reality is that "echo chambers" created the conditions that allowed Trump to be elected. But, he was ELECTED. The democratic process worked fine. What I'm trying to, gently, point out, is that "echo chambers" not giving you the democratic results you want, is not the same as "echo chambers" being an "enemy" of democracy. Everyone can say whatever they please. Everyone can listen to, or indeed, ignore, whatever they please. Simultaneously, along a completely different and orthogonal axis, everyone can vote however they please. Now obviously in such an environment, if there really is complete freedom of choice and freedom of association, "echo chambers" will develop. This doesn't show a lack of freedom, rather it shows an abundance of freedom. Any person is free to position themselves wherever they please in the space defined by that democratic environment. Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of association etc, these are some of the most important features of a democracy. So "echo chambers" don't represent a threat to democracy. Quite the contrary, their existence actually indicates the presence of healthy environment in terms of democratic freedoms. Now of course people won't like this, because it allows the ill informed to remain ill informed as long as they choose. But that goes back to freedoms. As horrible as this is going to sound, it's the democratic right of the ill informed, to remain ill informed.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  The US already puts limits on who can vote (have to be a citizen, have to be 18+, can't be a felon), would it be so terrible if we also had a test to see if you actually knew what was going on? It would have to be worded carefully, e.g "what does THINK_TANK believe will happen to the economy under Trumps tax plan" (as opposed to "what is likely to happen under Trumps tax plan", so there would be no political disagreements) and it would of course have to be applied equally to everybody (no grandfathering). But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Who would write the questions? Who would determine who is/isn't fit to vote? 1. If it's the ruling party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions. 2. If it's the opposition party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions. 3. If it's a combination of the two, then no questions would get written in time. 4. If it's a third party, then who vets/selects them, and who can be a part of it? GOTO 1 > But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed? That's incredibly dangerous. Who decides who is 'informed' and not? I bet most (all?) voters think they are informed.
jancsika 8y ago
> But he was more than willing to provide a forum for people whose leftist ideas he despised, a group that included Noam Chomsky, Muhammad Ali, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsburg and John Kenneth Galbraith. That's revisionist history. Buckley allowed Noam Chomsky on his show once, sure. But I'd hardly call him "more than willing" to let Chomsky get his ideas across. He was constantly interrupting him. At the end of the interview Buckley even went so far as pressing a button to go to commercial in order to keep from having to answer one of Chomsky's questions. "Providing a forum" would be what Amy Goodman did by allowing the 9-11 truthers to debate the Popular Science guys on Democracy Now. That's the standard, and Buckley's interview of Chomsky on Firing Line doesn't live up to that standard.

44 points by raleighm 8y ago

The American right and center are willing to break bread with the left, those on the left have bullied eachother out of doing the same.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

let's talk about it here

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

There is a larger point here about being human that's not related to tech or democracy. 1. We do not know what is good for us. We only know what we like and don't like. (We know this because we can look back in our own lives to times in which we did what we liked and it was not as good as if we had did something else, sometimes disastrously so.) 2. Many times we have to be annoyed by ideas and other concepts we don't like for a while until we realize that there is some bit of great value here for us. The logical conclusion to points 1 and 2 is this: there is some degree of being annoyed that is a normal and healthy part of living. Too much aggravation? Probably not. But you can definitely have too little. Too little aggravation would be far, far worse than too much, in fact. So goods and services that seek to reduce/eliminate everything we don't like are not actually acting in our best interests, whether they're some social media tech or a new brand of opioid. A bit of this kind of thing at the appropriate time is great. Too much is disastrous.

saudioger 8y ago
"Everything in moderation, including moderation"
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
I don’t know if too little aggravation is worse than too much. Admittedly I’m thinking of the edge case of legitimately harassing or abusive behavior, where your very understanding of reality is questioned with the explicit purpose to make you too insecure to engage in conversation with any confidence. I’m unsure what too little aggravation looks like, since even echo chambers result in self-aggravation to some extent?
dboreham 8y ago
Another larger point to consider is that what we perceive as "just politics" is a (big) business to the participants: politicians, parties, pressure groups, media organizations, journalists. These folks exploit basic human traits (outrage, fear, tribalism ...) for monetary gain. Put another way : the trolls aren't trolling because they're deranged (sometimes, ok..) but because that's their business. Long watch but quite relevant and interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg4IqrIpuQU&t=2440s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg4IqrIpuQU&t=2440s

sandworm101 8y ago

>> Which ideas, if any, are beyond the pale? Is it a mistake to “normalize” some speakers? When? Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.

epicureanideal 8y ago
Assuming the students have been appropriately educated, wouldn't they just laugh at the speakers talking about lizard people? Why would they need to be protected from that kind of nonsense?
- sandworm101 8y ago
  >> wouldn't they just laugh I laughed. Back in 1998 I attended a lecture that I though was about evidence of aliens messing with our DNA. What I got was intelligent design as proof that the bible was literally correct. Most laughed, but many did not. Students believe what they are told. Not all of them all of the time, but a significant percentage will believe anything they hear so long as it reinforces their world view.
- lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
  Educated or not, framing is an important part of any arguement. Time and attention is limited so who is allowed to speak in a venue and how long they're given is an implicit endorsement. There's an appeal to authority there in all future arguments ("well I spoke here, what have you done") and regardless of how much education you have refuting a false claim is always an order or magnitude harder than making one. It's not so much protecting people, is ensuring their mental energies can be put toward productive measures rather than swimming through falsehoods for the sake of it.
- qbrass 8y ago
  Those students will spread the idea as a joke until it reaches a bunch of people who take it seriously and start to organize.

WalterGR 8y ago

I want to speak specifically to two paragraphs from the article, taken together. Disturbingly, most of the controversies involve people whose views are to the right of center. ... Nor did Buckley think that all ideas deserve a forum. He did not host defenders of astrology, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism or Soviet-style Communism. Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism? If the worst views he can conjure from the left are a right-wing scare story and astrology, whereas the worst on the right are murderous ideologies, then I think the first paragraph kinda explains itself.

tunesmith 8y ago
There needs to be a pithy phrase for this kind of debate. Kind of like "form over function". Except here it's the desire to focus on the "form" of an argument, over the actual content of the argument. Similar to both-sides-ism. "Is the earth round? Views differ." Some kind of pithy phrase, when repeated, will exhort people to look at the content of the argument rather than just the structure.
- WalterGR 8y ago
  Some kind of pithy phrase, when repeated, will exhort people to look at the content of the argument rather than just the structure. I understand what you’re saying, but if this unequal silencing is so obviously a real phenomenon and isn’t simply a reflection of the views being espoused - then it should be easy for the author to come up with examples. And it’s not just this author. It’s every author I’ve read commenting on this ‘phenomenon.’ They always say that it’s right-wing voices being silenced, but never suggest what left-wing voices should be silenced that aren’t. So I invite anyone to suggest the left-leaning equivalents of Nazism and white-supremacy. (And by equivalents I don’t just mean viewpoints, I mean comparable levels of influence. Some random bloke on the web claiming to be left-leaning and saying that their race is superior to whites isn’t the equivalent of white-supremacy as a movement.)
jerf 8y ago
"Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism?" It would depend on exactly how precisely you define "Soviet-style Communism". If you mean, matching the exact same structure and the exact same beliefs and the exact same propaganda and national narrative, no, of course not. If you mean "people advocating for the State to be the one and only source of authority over everything economic, social, and cultural", then, yes, absolutely there are people on the left advocating for this. Quite a few explicitly, and even more people who do not quite entirely realize they are advocating for it, but when asked any specific question about who should have some given authority, the answer is always the State, even if they hypothetically believe that there must be some question for which that is not the answer.

maldusiecle 8y ago

Pretty weak argument. Once you admit that certain views deserve to be taken off the able (astrology, the KKK, Nazis, and "Soviet-style communism," unclear whether Mao-style communism is permissible), you need to have principles about where the line is. I know a lot of people who would absolutely describe Bannon as similar to Nazis or Soviets, who feel very strongly that his "white nationalist" views are likely to lead to a genocide. It's pretty widely know that the last subject of these "free speech" uproars, Milo Yiannapolous, flirted pretty openly with Nazi-style beliefs--and that Bannon was the one who gave him a platform in the first place. If you disagree with Bannon being put in that category, you have a responsibility to at the very least explain why he's not there. Otherwise you're just cultivating willful ignorance, deliberately refusing to engage with others' arguments. Creating your own echo chamber, one could say.

trowawee 8y ago

Weird to write this article without citing any actual numbers. Here, let's help with that: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/political-correctness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/po.... Some key takeaways: - There just aren't many instances where people are actually being uninvited or censored on an absolute scale. - It's actually spread across the ideological spectrum, not solely limited to conservative speakers. - A tiny handful of conservative speakers are responsible for a significant number of these events, and in fact it appears that to some degree the point of inviting them is trolling, intended to draw protest and press attention, rather than a genuine attempt to present. Personally, I think major news organizations offering their imprimatur to self-proclaimed fascists who advocate for limiting or destroying democratic governance might be more harmful to democracy than colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me. I also think it's useful to consider Sarte's quote about the utility of "debating" anti-Semites: > Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. and how that same pattern plays out frequently in the high-profile interviews and debates with people like Bannon and Spencer.

2trill2spill 8y ago
It's hard to take your source seriously when they say in reference to conservative speakers on campus "In other words, they’re trolling." Apparently the free speech project being cited by the source you posted is quite biased on the subject.
- skrowl 8y ago
  All you had to do is see that it was on vox.com to know it's biased. vox.com is pretty well known to be very left-leaning.

dfxm12 8y ago

The first is that echo chambers are a terrible disservice to readers, to listeners, to students and to democracy. The second is that with respect to political issues, a degree of humility is essential. It's weird that this is the point of the opinion piece in this context. We're talking about a guy who built his fame on selling sensationalism to his own echo chamber and never showed one iota of humility. I agree we could all use a little bit more humility, but we're not going to get there by hearing from someone whose talking points are not based on fact, but on appealing to emotion. If you want someone with an opposing viewpoint at the festival, find someone more sincere. To borrow an example from the article, even if you disagree with Noam Chomsky, you can still trace back his opinion to the facts that informed it. You didn't see Buckley debating people on Firing Line who completely fabricated stories.

bilbo0s 8y ago

I think people are conflating ideas here. Democracy is a political system. You can have a democracy coexist with as many "echo chambers" as you please. (In fact, in a healthy democracy, you would have "echo chambers"). The reality is that "echo chambers" created the conditions that allowed Trump to be elected. But, he was ELECTED. The democratic process worked fine. What I'm trying to, gently, point out, is that "echo chambers" not giving you the democratic results you want, is not the same as "echo chambers" being an "enemy" of democracy. Everyone can say whatever they please. Everyone can listen to, or indeed, ignore, whatever they please. Simultaneously, along a completely different and orthogonal axis, everyone can vote however they please. Now obviously in such an environment, if there really is complete freedom of choice and freedom of association, "echo chambers" will develop. This doesn't show a lack of freedom, rather it shows an abundance of freedom. Any person is free to position themselves wherever they please in the space defined by that democratic environment. Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of association etc, these are some of the most important features of a democracy. So "echo chambers" don't represent a threat to democracy. Quite the contrary, their existence actually indicates the presence of healthy environment in terms of democratic freedoms. Now of course people won't like this, because it allows the ill informed to remain ill informed as long as they choose. But that goes back to freedoms. As horrible as this is going to sound, it's the democratic right of the ill informed, to remain ill informed.

tomjen3 8y ago
The US already puts limits on who can vote (have to be a citizen, have to be 18+, can't be a felon), would it be so terrible if we also had a test to see if you actually knew what was going on? It would have to be worded carefully, e.g "what does THINK_TANK believe will happen to the economy under Trumps tax plan" (as opposed to "what is likely to happen under Trumps tax plan", so there would be no political disagreements) and it would of course have to be applied equally to everybody (no grandfathering). But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Who would write the questions? Who would determine who is/isn't fit to vote? 1. If it's the ruling party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions. 2. If it's the opposition party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions. 3. If it's a combination of the two, then no questions would get written in time. 4. If it's a third party, then who vets/selects them, and who can be a part of it? GOTO 1 > But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed? That's incredibly dangerous. Who decides who is 'informed' and not? I bet most (all?) voters think they are informed.

jancsika 8y ago

> But he was more than willing to provide a forum for people whose leftist ideas he despised, a group that included Noam Chomsky, Muhammad Ali, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsburg and John Kenneth Galbraith. That's revisionist history. Buckley allowed Noam Chomsky on his show once, sure. But I'd hardly call him "more than willing" to let Chomsky get his ideas across. He was constantly interrupting him. At the end of the interview Buckley even went so far as pressing a button to go to commercial in order to keep from having to answer one of Chomsky's questions. "Providing a forum" would be what Amy Goodman did by allowing the 9-11 truthers to debate the Popular Science guys on Democracy Now. That's the standard, and Buckley's interview of Chomsky on Firing Line doesn't live up to that standard.