unbridled clarity

Sometimes I suddenly notice contradictions between items of common knowledge. If the contradiction is just superficial then it might be presenting an opportunity rather than a problem; harmonizing the items can produce deeper insights. Right now I'm specifically thinking of two generalizations that show up regularly in Skeptic discussions about changes in people's beliefs.

First, solely providing data, no matter how high-quality it is, can be futile due to a backfire effect. The recipient's original viewpoint may further solidify as they use it to invalidate or minimize the data. Especially if they're feeling either threatened or determined to "win", they will frame and contort bare facts to declaw them. The lesson is that more information isn't always a cure-all for faulty thinking.

Second, the rise in casual availability of the internet supposedly lowers the likelihood that anyone can manage to avoid encountering the numerous challenges to their beliefs. Through the screens of their computing devices of all sizes, everyone is said to be firmly plugged into larger society's modern judgments about reality. Around-the-clock exposure ensures that these are given every chance to overturn the stale deceits offered by the traditions of subcultures. So the popular suspicion is that internet usage correlates to decreases in inaccurate beliefs.

At first reading, these two generalizations don't mesh. If additional information consistently leads to nothing beyond a backfire effect, then the internet's greater access to information doesn't help; conversely, if greater access to information via the internet is so decisive, then the backfire effect isn't counteracting it. The straightforward solution to the dilemma is to suggest that each influence is active in different people to different extents. Some have a backfire effect that fully outweighs the information they receive from the internet, while some don't. But why?

I'd say that the factor that separates the two groups is a commitment to "unbridled clarity". Of course, clarity is important for more than philosophical nitpicking. It's an essential concern in many varied situations: communication, planning, mathematics, recipes, law, journalism, education, science, to name a few. This is why the methods of pursuing it are equally familiar: unequivocal definitions, fixed reference points, statements that obey and result from logical rules, comparisons and contrasts, repeatable instructions, standard measurements, to name a few. It's relevant any time that the question "What are you really talking about?" must furnish a single narrow answer...and the answer cannot serve its purpose if it's slippery or shapeless.

If clarity were vigorously applied and not shunned, i.e. unbridled, then it would resist the backfire effect. Ultimately, its methods increase the clarity of one idea by emphatically binding it to ideas which have clarity to spare. A side effect is that the fate of the clarified idea is inescapably bound to the fates of those other ideas. Information that blatantly clashes with them implies clashing with the clarified idea too. When the light of clarity reveals that an idea is bound to observable consequence X, divergent outcome Y would dictate that the idea has a flaw. It needs to be discarded or thoroughly reworked.

Alternatively, the far less rational reaction would be to stubbornly "un-clarify" the discredited idea to salvage it. All that's involved is breaking its former bonds of conspicuous meaningfulness, which turned out to make it too much of a target. In other words, to cease asserting anything definite is to eliminate the risk of being proven incorrect. This is the route of bridled (restrained) clarity. It's a close companion of the backfire effect. Clarity is demoted and muzzled as part of the self-serving backfire effect of smudging the idea's edges, twisting its inner content to bypass pitfalls, and protecting it with caveats.

In the absence of enough clarity, even a torrent of information from the internet can run into a backfire effect. It's difficult to find successful rebuttals for ideas that either mean little in practice or can be made to mean whatever one spontaneously decides. Ideas with murky relationships to reality tend to be immune to contrary details. It should be unsurprising that beliefs of bolder clarity are frequently scorned as "naive" or "simplistic" by seasoned believers who are well-acquainted with the advantages of meager or wholly invisible expectations.

I'm inclined to place a lot of blame on intentional or accidental core lack of clarity about beliefs. But I admit there are other good explanations for why the internet's plentiful information could fail to sway believers. The less encouraging possibility is that, despite all the internet has to offer, they're gorging on the detrimental bytes instead. They're absorbing misleading or fabricated "statistics", erroneous reasoning in support of their current leanings, poor attempts at humor that miss and obscure the main point, manipulative rumors to flatter their base assumptions...

giving authenticity a spin

I'm guessing that no toy top has led to more furious arguments than the one in the final scene of Inception. The movie previously revealed that its eventual toppling, or alternatively its perpetual spinning, was a signal that the context is reality or a dream. Before this scene, the characters have spent a lengthy amount of time jumping between separate dream worlds. In the end, has the character in the scene emerged back to reality or hasn't he? The mischievous movie-makers purposely edited it to raise the unanswered question.

My interest isn't in resolving that debate, which grew old several years ago. But I appreciate the parallel with the flawed manner in which some people declare the difference between their "real" viewpoints and others' merely illusory viewpoints. They're the true realists and those others are faux realists. They're living in the world as it is, unlike the people who are trapped in an imaginary world. They're comparable to the dream infiltrators who made a successful return journey—or someone who never went in. They've escaped the fictions that continue to fool captive minds. All of their thoughts are now dependable messengers that convey pure reality. They're the most fortunate: they're plugged directly into the rock-bottom Truth.

I'm going to call this simplistic description naive realism. It seems to me that there are more appropriate ways of considering my state of knowledge. And the starting point is to recognize the relevance of the question represented by Inception's last scene. Many, hopefully a large proportion, of my trusted ideas about things have a status closer to real than fantasy. Yet simultaneously, I need to remember the undeniable fact that human ideas have often not met this standard. It's plausible that my consciousness is a mixture of real and fantasy ideas. Essentially, I'm in the ambiguous final movie scene. The top is spinning, but it also seems to have the slightest wobble developing. The consequence is that I can't assume that I'm inhabiting a perfectly real set of ideas.

Nevertheless, the opposite cynical assumption is a mistake too. A probably incomplete escape from fantasy doesn't justify broadly painting every idea as made-up rubbish. The major human predisposition to concoct and spread nonsense doesn't imply that we can only think total nonsense moment by moment. One person or group's errors don't lead to the conclusion that all people or groups are always equally in error. The depressing premise that everybody knows nothing is far, far too drastic. I, for one, detest it.

I'd say that the more honest approach is to stop asserting that someone's whole frame of mind is more real than another's. My preference is to first acknowledge that ideas are the necessary mediators and scaffolding that make sense of raw existence. But then acknowledge that these ideas can, and need to be, checked somehow for authenticity. It's not that one side has exclusive access to unvarnished reality and the other side is drowning in counterfeit tales. Both sides must use ideas—concepts, big-picture patterns, theories—to comprehend things and experiences. So the more practical response is for them to try to sift the authentic ideas from the inauthentic as they're able. The better question to identify their differences is how they defend the notion that their ideas are actual echoes of reality.

The actions that correspond to authenticity come in a wide variety. What or who is the idea's source? What was the source's source? Is the idea consistent with other ideas? Is the idea firmly stated, or is it constantly changing shape whenever convenient? Are the expected outcomes of its realness affecting people's observations or activities? Does it seem incredible, and if so then is it backed by highly credible support to compensate? Would the idea be discarded if it failed, or is it suspiciously preserved no matter how much it fails? Is it ever even tested?

Once again the movie top is a loose metaphor for these confirming details. A top that doesn't quit isn't meeting the conditions for authentic objects similar to it. Of course, by not showing what the top does, part of the intent of the final movie scene is to ask the secondary question of whether people should care. I hope so. It's tougher and riskier to screen ideas for authenticity, but the long-term rewards are worth it.