Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Social media and the solitudes of left and right

I have seen a lot of discussion about Jonathan Haidt’s recent article in The Atlantic about how social media has broken US politics. It contains some important criticisms of the progressive left, as well as the authoritarian right — particularly about their demand that all speech and thought should conform to their ideological agenda.

On all sides there is a withdrawal from pluralism, the belief and practice that a diversity of political opinions is normal and desirable:

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.

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The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

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The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain.

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The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.

As the world gets more destabilized, there is a trend of us all getting pushed into deeper solitudes, unable to even perceive how our own views and presuppositions relate to those of our fellow citizens. The article makes some suggestions for mechanisms to counter that, but it’s hard to imagine them (if they could even be implemented) counteracting the forces pushing us toward a politics of outrage.

Growing campus fossil fuel divestment bibliography

As I have been writing drafts of my PhD dissertation, I am working in Microsoft Word for the sake of interoperability with committee members, with the intention of submitting the dissertation in LaTeX format after the defence. My footnotes are just unique identifiers to sources listed in my developing public bibliography.

In it’s way it must be one of the most comprehensive cross-indexings of academic and journalistic writing on fossil fuel divestment campaigns at universities and related matters.

It’s the sort of document it’s fascinating to imagine looking at as some sort of human-computer hybrid or hyperintelligent AI which could take it all in and cross-reference with no restrictions on the number of items it can hold in memory and compare at the same time.

The bibliography is also a valuable document because of how link rot is making many of the sources unavailable as websites are taken down and reorganized. Because of all the specialized information I have been able to collect about the movement, I have been able to find Wayback Machine archives for dozens of sources that are no longer accessible at their original locations or the URLs cited in other documents.

Podcasts and audiobooks

Because the spoken word content on Spotify is so-so most of the time (aside from podcasts like Ologies and the Spycast), I have been trying Audible to provide better quality listening material during walks.

So far I have finished James Donovan’s book “Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel” about the espionage trials and eventual prisoner exchange of a KGB colonel living as an illegal in New York (also depicted in the excellent film Bridge of Spies) and Lyndsay Faye’s “Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson” which I learned about from an interview with the author on the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere podcast and then finished in two days.

Donovan’s book was quite interesting, if read a bit mechanically. Faye’s book is a great pastiche, interestingly written with both deep knowledge of the canon and a willingness to innovate, and very well read in this edition.

Over several weeks I have listened to the first half of “Anna Karenina” read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which is superb. She brings a great saucy enthusiasm to the text and language, and it’s easy to imagine that one is being read to by her character from the film Secretary.

Finally, in the hope of better understanding American conservatism in order to better strategize about climate change, I have been listening to Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” I’m still working through the 1960s, which is still fairly little-known history to me. The book is a bit challenging both because a lot of the names and events are unfamiliar and because the narrator is a bit monotone in a way that tends to enhance the difficulty of paying attention.

I found that such narration was commonplace in the books and spoken word content on Spotify, so generally I have been very happy about how Audible has shifted my listening toward fully accomplished published works with enduring social importance, rather than just the (sometimes excellent) present-focused podcast and news content.

Knowing how to look something up isn’t comparable to knowing it

There’s a voguish argument that in an era of easy information availability there is less cause to have any substantial body of knowledge memorized. I have seen articles arguing that the crucial cognitive skills for young people today are the ability to find what they are looking for, given access to the internet.

I think there is a huge and obvious shortcoming with this perspective. Knowing that I can look up the Wikipedia article on the Lutheran Revolution, for example, is just a one way mental link that stops there. If you know nothing about the history of Catholicism, or of religious conflict in Europe, or of the precepts of Christianity then knowing where to find someone else’s writing about the Reformation doesn’t give you any meaningful understanding of what it was or why it mattered. Someone asked a narrow question about the event will be able to find it through an online search, but without internalized knowledge they won’t be able to see the implications and connections to other phenomena. Knowing that you can look up thermodynamics or Carnot efficiency doesn’t give you the ability to apply those concepts when thinking about an application like heating or cooling or the efficiency of an engine.

The ongoing COVID pandemic is demonstrating the extent of scientific and medical ignorance even within rich industrialized societies. That manifests in people falsely believing that they can make health choices for themselves with no consideration of others, and of course in the enormous amount of nonsense that is circulating about vaccines. It’s strange to observe how society has become technological to an unprecedented degree — with technology literally making life as humanity is experiencing it possible — and yet culturally an interest in and knowledge about science is treated as an optional personal curiosity, like fly fishing or following a soccer team. Broadly speaking, I hold the view that to understand anything well requires knowing at least the basics about many other issues (nobody can sensibly evaluate public health policy without knowing the rudiments of medicine, statistics, and epidemiology for example). That concept of knowledge as an interconnected web demonstrates how the ability to pluck out a narrow fact with the help of technology may not translate into much real understanding.

It’s oversimplistic to apply a ‘deficit model’ to what people know about an issue like COVID or climate change, assuming that there is an empty void where knowledge ought to be and that filling it is the solution. For issues tied up in politics, and thus in questions about what people will be free to do, the desire to undertake particular behaviours can create the motivation to believe what’s necessary to keep doing them. Just as someone operating under motivated reasoning can never be swayed by facts or arguments, more education alone won’t combat the problem of people choosing to believe factually what supports their behaviours or ideological positions.

100 years ago, someone could have been appropriately laughed at for saying they know about Pitt the Elder or the Peloponnesian War because they know they can go to a library and find books about them. The instant availability of information online doesn’t really change that.

Networked citizen science ecology

Promoted by a recent Economist article on biodiversity and Alie Ward’s podcast on foresting ecology, I am trying out the iNaturalist app.

My outdoor pursuits mostly consist of walking at a steady pace for exercise, so plant and wildlife observations aren’t my priority. Nonetheless, it’s neat to be able to take a break anywhere in the city and use the map in the app to see what people have documented in the neighbourhood.

Link rot and citations in authoritative publications

Researching social movements — where relevant information is often on social media, or the websites of NGOs, universities, or corporations that reorganize them frequently — link rot is an acute problem. Increasingly, the default way to let a reader see the source you’re referencing is to provide an internet hyperlink, and yet there is no assurance that a link on a site which you don’t control will continue to work.

Jonathan Zittrain has an instructive article in The Atlantic about many of the dimensions of the problem. Strikingly, he cites a study by Kendra Albert and Larry Lessig that half the links cited in court opinions since 1996 no longer work, along with 75% of the links in the Harvard Law Review.

Beyond the Wayback Machine, which I already use extensively both to find material which is no longer online and to preserve links to live content that may be useful in the future, Zittrain suggests several other initiatives to help with the problem, including Perma and Robustify.

Related:

Starlink in the Canadian north

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation promises to provide low-latency high-bandwidth internet to anyone on the planet.

In November or so, the company announced a beta release in Canada. Some northern communities are already being connected, notably Pikangikum in northwestern Ontario with the charitable assistance of FSET Information Technology and Service.

With my brother Mica starting to teach at the Chief Jimmy Bruneau School in Behchoko, about 125 km down the highway from Yellowknife, we both wondered whether the satellite internet package might be useful for them.

So far, I have found three explanations for why Starlink isn’t available in the region yet:

  1. SpaceX doesn’t yet have the necessary satellites to support access from that latitude
  2. SpaceX needs ground stations in areas where there will be customers
  3. Starlink needs to negotiate with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) for use of the Ka radio band

I have reached out to bureaucrats and people in ministers’ offices to try to get authoritative information on what the issue is.

This post — based around this map — shows a station in Kaparuk, Alaska. I sent a message to the map’s creator for verification, since I can’t see how satellites going from pole to pole could cover Alaska but not the Canadian territories. This post shows a Starlink ground station in St. John’s Newfoundland.

If you have any relevant information please contact me. If you are also looking into getting a Starlink connection in northern Canada I don’t have any further information for now but I will provide updates when I do.

UBC warns of the dangers of international online learning

I cannot recall hearing about a warning like this before:

Some UBC courses might cover topics that are censored or considered illegal by non-Canadian government… This may include, but is not limited to, human rights, representative government, defamation, obscenity, gender or sexuality, and historical or current geopolitical controversies… Students should be mindful that when they partake in class discussions or communicate to the members of the class, that for some students living abroad, sensitive material might result in repercussions.

It has been sad to watch the hopeful vision of an unfettered global internet linking together humanity collide with the interests and increasing willingness to intervene of governments. I don’t think it’s plausible, but it would be great if the next-generation satellite internet providers like StarLink would be willing to provide access to everyone underneath their constellation without government censorship and firewalls.

Related:

Cyber defences create their own risks

In addition to aforementioned rules about internet and computer security (1, 2, 3, 4) it’s worth mentioning that security measures can create their own vulnerabilities.

That’s true in terms of human systems. For instance, granting high-level powers to system administrators creates risks that they will exploit them deliberately or have their credentials stolen, or simply used after being left unguarded.

It’s can also be true for technical means. For instance, people often misunderstand TOR and believe that it makes everything about their web browsing anonymous. Really, it just routes the traffic several times within an encrypted network to disguise the origin before using an exit node to communicate with the target server, potentially with no encryption. Since people may be more likely to use TOR for sensitive or illicit purposes, those exit nodes are likely a target for both freelancers and governments.

Some recent stories have alleged that the virtual private networks (VPNs) which people use to protect themselves from an untrusted local network can create risks as well:

Earlier, people alleged that Facebook was using its Onavo VPN to snoop on users.