How to Form Weak Opinions // Variant Perception #1
Narrative distortion, cognitive dissonance, and lazy thinking.
Scrolling twitter is like walking down some fantasy street in New York City.
On this street everyone leaves their front door open and lets you walk right in to see what’s going on. Some people are arguing with their televisions yelling at the news. Other people are hosting dinner parties sharing their latest business insight.
It’s the kitchen sink of the human online experience, and a window into global expression and culture. There’s much to be learned by observing the behavior of the twitter mob and the tribal warfare that occurs on the platform.
Who’s shouting at who, who’s the latest pariah getting cast out, what’s the meme of the day in each subculture (there are tons), what’s the tone of response to different current events.
It really is the 21st century town square. And in this town square you can find plenty of rabbit holes to dive into. Ones that confirm biases, others that challenge, and more that pique curiosity.
The other day I stumbled across a battle between the pro-fossil fuel camp and the zero carbon purists (these are my names), likely inspired by the energy crisis happening right now in Europe.
I came across a thread by Alex Epstein on “20 Myths about Fossil Fuels Refuted”. Epstein’s thread went over, from his point of view, 20 ways in which the fossil fuel industry has been wrongly demonized. A point of view that I thought was exterminated from the grand narrative. This got me interested, so I decided to dig into this Epstein character to learn more.
I found a debate Epstein had with Andrew Dessler. Dessler is portrayed as the opposite of Epstein. He’s a major mouthpiece for the zero carbon movement, wind and solar power, and imminent climate disaster.
The debate itself has some interesting points. Dessler tells Epstein to show him the studies to back up his claims. Epstein claims that Dessler’s data is misleading. There’s no resolution or clear winner (my POV is they’re arguing about separate topics so there can never be a winner or a resolution).
However, my interest is not who is right and who is wrong. What’s actually most interesting to me is that both Dessler and Epstein emphatically believe they are correct and have the data to prove it.
This is a great parallel for the confusion and dissonance that occurs in the modern media and cultural communication of complex topics. We constantly grapple with the existence of multiple, related, and sometimes contrary truths.
Both people appear smart, have valid credentials, and have done extensive research. Yet, they come to different and opposing viewpoints. Both points of view have elements of truth, bias, and blind spots. There’s no simple, singular truth because of the deep complexity in this superset of issues.
“Climate change” cannot be looked at as just one issue. It’s a confluence of thousands of different issues all rolled up into one that requires the expertise of not just climate scientists but experts from hundreds of industries and sciences, including experts on fossil-fuels (our still dominant source of reliable, affordable energy).
Zero carbon is the dominant narrative we see in the climate space today. We must get to net zero emissions by 2050 or we face imminent disaster. There’s countless research cited by climate scientists using climate models (models that predict changes to weather and temperature) to support this.
However, regardless of what information has been presented and agreed upon by certain experts and how it makes us feel (angry, enraged, hopeless, depressed…), the reduction of a complex issue to a simple sentence creates more problems than it solves.
The lack of nuance creates dissonance between science, fact, reality, and narrative. The end result being the oversimplification of complex ideas into sexy soundbites which then infect the common consciousness of understanding.
This exact scenario is the same being repeated across many hot button issues we face in the 21st century. There exist multiple “truths” backed up by valid data and evidence from disparate fields of expertise. For us regular folk (me included) it’s maddening. It feels my ability to become informed is constrained into a few choices, none incredibly appealing:
Spend hours and hours reviewing primary sources, checking the source’s bias, listening to podcasts with experts, and reading blog posts with sources
This choice requires the most amount of time and effort but creates the least emotionally manipulative impact and highest quality information to form opinions.
Find a couple trusted sources and get my information and opinions from them. I accept the information I receive is biased and recognize my opinions get influenced by this.
This choice is the easiest but leaves open the likelihood of being manipulated by the source's simplification of complex ideas (which must occur when writing or filming content to share and gain an audience) as well as their content and opinion bias (which will change and morph over time as popularity of the source grows).
Give up on being informed and try to find trusted friends to outsource your thinking to.
This choice is probably the healthiest one for most people’s overall mental health and the worst choice for forming strong opinions.
There’s more complexity and nuance than ever, yet in order for ideas to be widely communicated they must get reduced down to their simplest form.
The most effective marketing copy is written at an elementary school reading level. Donald Trump took the country by storm because he effectively communicates in this same way.
Simple, memorable, viral.
Yet nuance, what we need most, cannot proliferate in today’s media environment. The ideas that get widely spread are not by design the most accurate, they’re the most viral.
Which creates this awful reflexive loop of ignorance:
Complicated, nuanced ideas get published where only a small, highly-specialized group of people know and understand the implications within their greater context
Word of these ideas is passed to the media
Media translates these complex ideas into simple, easy to digest, and if they’re really good at their job, highly viral headlines and articles
Masses read the articles and inform their opinions based on this simplification.
Culture of social media selects for the idea with the highest R0 value
That simplification becomes dominant, influencing public sentiment
Public sentiment puts pressure on public policy (and creates great campaign slogans…)
Policy gets created to satisfy the loudest, most-viral of simplifications
Bam. That’s one of the unvirtuous cycles of narrative distortion in today’s world. I could write (and maybe will) a whole other article on intentional manipulation of information aka disinformation.
Myopic simplification creates the polarity of “truth” that we see in today’s world. It also weakens our institutional foundations. If our institutions create policy around platitudes we get situations like the trucker protests in Canada, the farmer protests in the Netherlands, and revolution in Sri Lanka.
Or we get a British restauranter influencing food security…
The seed of these protests germinated from policy that aimed more to appease the “right” narrative rather than consider a measured, deliberate, balance between what’s best for today, tomorrow and decades in the future.
I don’t share any of this to take a side. Instead, I’m attempting to sift through my own opinion-making process and source selection in order to help myself create stronger opinions. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we absorb information from our surroundings that impact our thoughts and opinions.
We see a headline like this:
And we FEEL something. That feeling strengthens an opinion, regardless of whether what caused the feeling is true or not. In the case of the tweet above, that image is misleading as it doesn’t show the main Loire river but an "arm” that typically dries out like this, but the impact that image had on many viewers’ emotions (including me) is very real, just check the comments.
Complicated, complex, and distorted narratives dominate the media today. It doesn’t matter if it’s the “mainstream” media or an individual on twitter. To remain informed in this highly-polarized environment you cannot accept the narrative at face value, no matter what side you desire to be correct.
The truth is, there exists multiple truths. AND, each differing opinion not only deserves to exist, but gives us important information on the current state of the world and its level of integrated understanding. It doesn’t matter if the opinions of others upset you. Casting the opinion out as ignorant, misleading, or wrong only creates more polarity and division, even if it is wrong!
Instead, ask yourself what you can learn about the state of the world from different opinions. What can we learn from people like Epstein who are coming from a different perspective when it comes to the dominant climate narrative? What are the shortcomings in the current understanding and forms of communication employed?
Don’t forget, we’re all just blind people describing an elephant.
We’re limited by our biases and so is everyone else. Nobody is a subject matter expert in everything, and the biggest problems we face in today’s world are composed of thousands of subsets that require different specialties.
To reduce any of these problems down to a slogan or sentence creates more polarization and tribalism, not less.
Beware net-zero, pro-life, antivax, antiracist, pro-science, climate justice or any other reductive platitude.
-Jared