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...