On ego and understanding
(And let's not talk about 'sensemaking' any more)
Aside: there's a thing around the current rash of discussions about finding shared meaning that kind of turns me off. It's the use of 'sensemaking' as a description of the field. Most of my favourite commentators and thinkers use it. Although it's a perfectly ok word to describe an activity that most of us do, consciously or unconsciously, a lot of the time I just don't like it. A lot of language that I internally flinch at is like this. It works, but really only for a smallish sample of people. Imagine asking your neighbours 'how do you approach sensemaking'. There you go. It makes you sound like an arse. So I'm going to use other combinations of words, like agreement, shared understanding, common interpretation and so on to talk about this. Or just understanding. The same goes for phrases like fake news and hyper partisan content. I'm going to call it information chaos. Whether I'll stick with that, who knows. But it currently works for me. So I'm thinking a lot about how to understand things amid information chaos. Hope that is easily understood and a bit less exclusive sounding.
[Image by Ulrike Mai]
Anyway, here's a tiny thesis.
Everyone talks a lot about echo chambers, epistemic bubbles, groupthink, group signalling and so on when they opine about the apparent information crisis we all notice.
Then they propose answers that involve addressing echo chambers, epistemic bubbles etc.
I think that those things are real and cause problems. But they are a kind of 2nd layer in terms of causes of all the information craziness and confusion we face all the time. They are an effect, rather than a cause.
The cause is ego. By ego I mean our self-referential idea of who we are. I’m not a psychologist. It’s just how I’m using the word ego.
My thesis is that there can be no answer to information chaos without reasonable levels of individual self-awareness. Such as awareness around why we think what we think. What makes certain positions attractive to us and what it is about ourselves and those positions that make us want to identify ourselves with them.
This ties in with something I realised after flirting a lot with 'fact-checking' as a worthwhile activity. Suddenly it dawned on me that 'fact checking' is largely a waste of effort when it takes about 30 seconds on Google to learn about resistance to argument, correction and facts.
[In fact, I think that fact-checking is often itself a kind of ego-centred conceit. But that’s for another time.]
What I decided was that fact-checking missed the most important point; that 'disinformation' (ie a verifiably false claim about reality1) is a demand side problem and that most experts were coming at it as a supply side problem.
If only we can supply better information, those pesky believers in falsehoods will believe that instead. That's how I see the fact-checking approach.
I wrote a bit about it here - https://mikehind.medium.com/the-debunking-solution-is-fake-news-59565f60ca71
At this point I'm much more interested in ego as a driver of how we understand things about the world.
Depending on how you view the problem of information chaos and its effects on people my conclusion is possibly quite depressing.
It's that the answer to it cannot be enforced in a top-down kind of way. It can only emerge from the bottom up. Which means from each of us as individuals. Through a process that begins with understanding ourselves.
Understanding yourself, without being hijacked by ego, is one of the hardest things I've found to do. I'm working on it all the time. And falling off the wagon all the time.
More on this soon...ish
For clarity here I’m talking about things like when a video clip from a civil war somewhere in Africa is shared widely and portrayed as a scene from a peaceful European city. ie really obviously false information.