“We are a nation divided.” This assertion about the condition of British politics is now stated with such conviction few dare challenge it. But should they? This week, the digital think-tank WebRoots Democracy invited the neuroscientist, Kris De Meyer, the machine learning specialist, Rula Awad and me to Newspeak House in east London to discuss whether we are more polarised than ever before.

From the outset, I’ll confess I’ve got very strong opinions on the subject. This is because I truly value diversity of opinions and lifestyles in any one community, and I’ve gone on a long and personal journey to understand the concept of ‘echo chambers’ and how our information environment is changing.

In the first half of this decade the core concept was often advanced but not broadly accepted.  To generalise from the academic literature on the subject: the essential argument is that echo chambers limit an individual’s access to different kinds of information.

This constrained access leads, in turn, to polarisation, and polarisation is bad for democracy. Cass Sunstein, the first to coin the phrase, worried about whether individuals would be able to function as citizens if all they received was highly-personalised news. Our bespoke information environments would be so different that there would be no shared public space in which we could all come together and seek democratically-negotiated solutions to society’s most pressing problems.

In 2011, Eli Pariser took a different view. His concern was for our individual liberty and freedom of thought. If search engines and social algorithms could generate vastly different answers to the same question when asked by people with dissimilar algorithmic profiles, then how could we know that the decisions we made as a consequences were objective?

Although both wrote best-selling books, it took the earth-shaking election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in 2016 for the concept of echo chambers to be catapulted into the mainstream. These events were not just shocking to the pundits who failed to predict them, but also, in many cases, for the politicians who had actually campaigned for the (unexpectedly) victorious side.

As the political and media class clutched at straws, many instant theories were put forward to explain the unanticipated results. The prevalence of echo chambers provided an obvious conceptual fit. It was thought that Trump’s supporters and Brexit voters had lurked in such a powerful and persuasive digital silos that they couldn’t have voted rationally. The implication was: if only they had listened to the other side, then things would have been different.

My experience working in polarisation and echo chambers

I took a slightly different tack. I learned a long time ago – and continue to learn – that you can rarely change other people, but that you can change yourself. So, whilst I was fielding phone calls from technologists, activists and journalists who sought to understand how they could break the seal of other people’s filter bubbles, I instead tried to puncture my own. How could I discover and understand the views of other people who inhabited completely different social settings, with completely different beliefs and experiences?

Thus the Echo Chamber Club was born, and I began actively to seek out views that I wouldn’t ordinarily environment in my immediate work and friendship group. I looked for perspectives in favour of Brexit, against immigration, and in favour of Putin. I challenged my own views on the economy, on democracy and international relations. I learned how you could be pro-life and a feminist, I began to support safe spaces, and I realised that homogeneity was not restricted to political groups: the assumption, for instance, that Hulu’s production The Handmaid’s Tale was somehow a parable of Trump’s America – chronological nonsense, since the series was commissioned long before his election – had become an unchallenged orthodoxy across mainstream platforms.

In many cases this work was emotionally very difficult. But it could also be incredibly illuminating. I learned I had to read difficult books and articles up to three times before I actually engaged with what the writer was saying. My first interpretation would often be polluted by my pre-existing suppositions. I had to grapple with strange words and new contexts. And I had to dig deep into my own belief system to understand why other groups felt so frustrated with my worldview. I realised that simply reading one article about someone else’s viewpoint is nothing like enough if you are seeking something approaching intellectual empathy. You have to speak their language, walk in their shoes, and become versed in a completely new system of beliefs truly to appraise it.

Today, the conversation has shifted from this initial emphasis upon echo chambers. But there is still huge concern about polarisation and a general presumption that it is mutilating our democracy.

It’s important to note that polarisation, at least in academic circles, does not refer to how we disagree with each other. It does not refer to whether we scream at the other side, or manage, somehow, to coexist peacefully. Instead, it just measures the extent of the disagreement. In the first image we see a community where there is an established consensus on a particular issue, or set of issues. In the second we see polarisation.

The event

Kris De Meyer is a neuroscientist who specialises in how we make decisions, and how these decisions lead to polarisation. “Our psychology hasn’t changed in the past two, nor 20, nor even the past thousand years” he argues. One of psychology’s most arresting findings is that our actions can change our beliefs – rather than, as one might automatically suppose, the other way round.

Imagine a voter who was undecided two months before the 2016 Brexit referendum, and – after weighing up the pros and cons – tentatively chose to vote Remain. Vacillating up until polling day, she would subsequently convince herself with growing confidence that her choice had been right. We tend to justify our past decisions retroactively and consequently become more entrenched in a position that may often have been initially reached with considerable uncertainty. De Meyer argues that the tendency in many democratic contests to offer binary options – In or Out, this party or that one – is a recipe for polarisation since it forces people to make clear-cut decisions which they later feel ever-more determined to justify. 

He notes that conforming to the mores of our community is a natural consequence of the way in which our brains work. Children as young as three months old often show signs of favouring those that share their preferences and are helpful to them. We enjoy being around people who hold similar opinions, even if – as is the case with many liberals – those opinions have their foundational assumption in the belief that we are independent as individuals.

Strikingly, Rula Awad, a machine learning expert who has studied division extensively, says that  “there is little evidence to show we are becoming more polarised”. She contends that although there has been a slight increase in political division in recent years, this pattern seems to show a fairly cyclical swing away from an old consensus – which pretty much in line with historical precedent. Even more intriguingly, Awad argues that “the evidence shows that the internet and social media exposes us to more varied perspectives than we would have encountered in a pre-digital age” [my italics].

Let’s get back to first principles: why are we so upset about polarisation at all? It’s because we assume it will destabilise the democratic process and threaten civic cohesion. A government legislates in the interests of a specific group or group; there will correspondingly be a significant number of people who are opposed to that action. These people may soon feel disenfranchised and might even be tempted to take violent action. Ergo: all the sinews of the body politic must be stretched to prevent polarisation.

This is not my view. If polarisation – defined as significant disagreement – is so deeply threatening, in and of itself, then the supposedly higher cause of achieving a workable consensus should logically oblige one side to concede to the other. But neither side, of course, would be willing to do that. And why should they?

The philosophical flaw in the argument is the supreme value assigned to consensus and unity. But why should we think this way? I value innovative and fresh ideas, the challenge of new convictions and propositions. In any society, however consensual, there are always people who, for whatever reason, oppose the status quo. I don’t believe that because these minorities are too small to pose a substantial threat to stability, that they should be ignored.

We should care about our emotive feeling towards the other side, not polarisation per se

My point is that we are looking in the wrong place. The problem is not polarisation per se; it is our animosity towards the other side, which is not the same thing at all. The Pew Centre has shown that US Democrats are increasingly fearful of, angry with and frustrated  by Republicans. The same is true of Republicans’ feelings towards Democrats. These are strong and potentially violent emotions, visible right now in the highly contentious campaigns for the mid-term elections on November 6.

If polarisation refers only to the extent of disagreement, my question is this: can we not confront that division – welcome it even, as a source of intellectual evolution – but find ways of controlling the aggressive feelings that often accompany it? How do we nurture a civic and social environment in which we feel psychologically safe, and yet can still voice seriously divergent opinions?

In the recent past, political rhetoric has tended to privilege the quest for convergence. In the 1997 Labour manifesto Tony Blair declared: “I want a Britain that is one nation, with shared values and purpose”. His guru, Anthony Giddens, wrote in 1994 that we need “a public arena in which controversial issues… can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue”. Nothing wrong with dialogue, of course. But the highest value was always assigned to consensus – as if it were intrinsically irrational to take issue with the ideas holding together the canvas of New Labour’s ‘Big Tent’.

This approach has not worked. It’s all very well to encourage consensus in small groups – in situations where the shape of a good outcome is fairly manifest. A jury strives to decide whether a particular person is guilty; Parliament votes on a specific piece of legislation. Note, however, that in both of these cases a lot of pre-emptive work has been done to ensure that all participants agree on the manner in which a decision should be reached. The rules of the game are agreed. The objective is to reach an agreement – or at least a respected majority opinion – on what conclusion should be drawn from the facts and arguments under deliberation.

But – like it or not – this approach simply does not translate to the broader public sphere. You cannot expect an entire population to behave like the House of Commons or a board meeting: this is an elementary category mistake.

Instead, we need to broaden the range of forums in which different views can be freely expressed. Instead of narrowing the debate to a soft common ground, we should encourage and enable different groups to set their agendas, to talk openly about the issues that are important to them and to seek new meanings in open dialogue. We should be able to express emotion without embarrassment.

Instead of flinching from disagreement we should acknowledge it as the lifeblood of democracy. Far from fearing strong opinions, we should be helping our fellow citizens to disagree with one another in the public sphere – in a civilized way, of course – so different ideas can flourish, minorities are able to express themselves and none feel excluded from the table.

It is a fool’s errand to try to minimise or paper over division, especially in a complex society. Indeed it is positively dangerous: it is precisely when opinion is suppressed or driven to the margins that emotion surges in ways that can become very scary. The great civic task is not to end polarisation, but to make it work.

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I’ve been running the Echo Chamber Club for nearly two years now. When I started, I wanted to help find articles and points of view that didn’t naturally land on my friends’ news feeds. We wanted to learn why you’d vote Brexit, and why you’d vote for Trump.

The first newsletter was rudimentary. It was a collection of 4 pro-Brexit articles. The concept was fairly easy to understand. However, as I started digging into new topics I found a collection of articles wasn’t the best way of communicating a new point of view. You can’t really put perspectives in a box. Different groups had different ways of explaining their world-view. They considered different facts to be important and described their experiences and opinions in dissimilar ways. From writing an article about the alt-right, it was clear that just offering collections of news articles was not going to be enough to communicate a completely different philosophy to those that abhor it. I began to include introductions in the newsletters too. These included what the agenda in the ‘metropolitan liberal and progressive press’ had been, and then touched on a different way of framing the same issue, or perhaps one that had escaped my subscribers’ news entirely.

It is only looking back on the success of the newsletter that I realise it is this interpretation that is the critical part of ‘seeing the world through the eyes of others’. Despite having the appearance of a language you understand, diving into an article with a different perspective is like jumping into advanced Arabic as an English reader. However, it has the appearance of a language you understand. This idea of a shared language is an illusion. We are experiencing a crisis of meaning. The mutual understanding of the referents of words are lost.

There are countless journalists, writers and academics who are worried about the internet’s influence on democracy. We believe in the art of deliberation, but we fear that our conversations are hijacked or gamed online. The right-wing press fear that freedom of speech is curtailed. The left-wing press worries about the rise of populism, disinformation and nefarious influence on elections. But the solutions each side poses tend to be antagonistic. We view those with existentially different world-views in our democracy as the enemy and not as people who we can progress with. We want to kill other opinions that contradict our own, we don’t welcome them with open arms. We inherently don’t trust the deliberative system. We don’t believe that the best point of view will win in a deliberative democracy.

So, we are stuck. On the one hand, we recognise that ‘echo chambers’ have a damaging effect on society. On the other hand, we don’t want to debate dangerous ideas that we believe may undermine our democratic institutions nor pose a threat to our personal wellbeing.

Does deliberation work?

How do we move forward? Like many of you I’ve spoken with, I don’t believe that a new piece of software will fix this problem. I believe there is a fundamental problem with the way that we perceive democracy. No longer should we think of democracy as an institution which offers us the power to deliberate on topics and then come to a rational consensus as to what the best policies are. This idea is damaging. All too often we see policies put in place which we don’t consider to be rational. We’re all losing faith in the system.

Instead of this Habermasian approach to democracy (by which I mean deliberative democracy), we should instead think of our democracies as being agonist in nature. This means that we accept that any ideas of rationality and objectivity are called such because of a dominant ideology. There will never be a state in which we achieve democratic consensus. Instead, different ideological groups are battling it out to become the most dominant ideology. With this approach, we can make a shift to understand that the people who have different opinions from us are adversaries and not enemies. We will not be polarised, because we do not view others as ‘evil’, but rather as the competition.

There are a number of criticisms of agonism and deliberation which I don’t have time to go into in this blog post. My point is to say that it may be the ideas around deliberation which are at the heart of the problem, which should be addressed at the same time as practical ideas around content moderation, censorship and internet design.

We’re beginning to achieve what previous generations could only dream of; an injection of completely new ideas into the demos. However, with this comes chaos. Despite many groups looking for truth, there are so many different interpretations of history and the social sciences that there can be many different value systems that hold true. We need a new idea of democracy to ensure that we can all live happily together, side-by-side.

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Before I started at the Oxford Internet Institute in September 2017, I wrote a definition of echo chambers.

“An echo chamber is a community with little variance in opinion. It is a place where there is no desire, or a means, to access a different point of view.”

I spoke at a conference and invited feedback on this definition. Did it fit with what others had in mind when they thought of what an echo chamber was? This had two responses. One was positive. This definition is platform neutral so it works for both online and offline homophily. It situates an echo chamber as a community, and not as the inherent characteristic of an individual. By mentioning ‘the means’, alongside ‘desire’, it shows that echo chambers can be solved with education and design changes to internet platforms and protocols. It also is explanatory of echo chambers in the past – either in Nazi Germany or in the Dark Ages.

The second response was interesting. A couple of people came up to me after the conference and remarked that things that I wouldn’t call echo chambers clearly were. It made me realise the nuance of the phrase. Many people have completely different understandings of what an echo chamber is.

My independent work on echo chambers at the OII is starting to take off. I have an excellent supervisor and I want to chart how my opinions are changing on the topic as I read more and discuss with my supervisor and other members of the faculty.

So here is my first post on the topic and my initial thoughts before I really get stuck in.

Echo chamber as a metaphor

The first is to note that in both the academic literature and journalistic articles, an echo chamber should be treated as a metaphor. It is not (yet) a theory. The first book on ‘echo chambers’ was a literary novel by Gabriel Josipovici written in 1980. The first mention of a non-fiction echo chamber was in 2001 in Sunstein’s Republic.com. In this book, Sunstein refers to echo chambers as a metaphor to describe citizens just reading a personalised newspaper called the ‘Daily Me’. Sunstein’s work has influenced a lot of further commentary and debate on internet ethics. However, you wouldn’t say that Sunstein has developed a succinct ‘echo chamber theory’. Instead, you’d say he uses it sporadically as a metaphor to describe different parts of his work.

The first book on ‘echo chambers’ was a literary novel by Gabriel Josipovici written in 1980.

Eli Pariser’s ‘The Filter Bubble’ details how personalised algorithms lead us to see drastically different Google results and Facebook feeds. This is true. He then theorised some unfavourable outcomes given uber-personalisation. This book had a real effect on me when I first read it. I produced two special reports for The Times on ‘Customer Loyalty’ in 2013 and in 2014. Each of these reports sung the praises of personalisation in commerce. It was the first time I woke up to what could be happening online.

About a year ago my own understanding of what echo chambers are started to deviate from the Pariser and Sunstein literature. I exchanged emails with a think-tank about the difference between a filter bubble and an echo chamber – we agreed that echo chambers are self-constructed and filter bubbles are linked to tech. This is more of a semantic difference – it feels right that this should be the line of differentiation. So in a sense it is also metaphorical. But it’s one that’s stuck through most of my thoughts and writings on the topic.

From reading many academic articles and books this year that try to ‘confirm’ or ‘debunk’ echo chambers, it’s clear individuals take slightly different interpretations of what an echo chamber is. For example, one could define echo chambers as ‘access to ANY information with a different point of view’, or ‘reading anything with a different point of view’, or ‘interacting with anything with a different point of view’. Most look at whether an individual is firmly in an echo chamber or not, and not whether you have a greater propensity to be in an echo chamber than others. You can see how these subtle differences lead to a lot of confusion. If you were being unkind, you could say that some chose which definition would suit them according to what they already thought about the topic.

Initial ideas

I haven’t yet embarked on a systematic literature review so the following should be viewed as my thoughts having spent 4 months going through the compulsory reading lists here. This is how I think an echo chamber should be theorized right now – however, I’m fully expecting my feelings to change.

The community part of an echo chamber must remain in the definition. An individual will have access to many different points of view in their on and offline communities. This could be through the different groups they are part of. To give a personal example; I have a grandfather in Yorkshire who is broadly against immigration. My grandparents in Cornwall voted for Brexit. I am a feminist, but many of my male friends (at least in June 2017) were not taking part in any of the conversations I was having with my female friends about feminism. I am part of the centre-left metropolitan elite. I occasionally go to football matches down in Portsmouth. I have friends that I speak with about politics, and I have friends who I speak with about hair products. These all fit with the idea of an echo chamber being a place with a little variance in opinion. When I go to Portsmouth I mainly talk about how great Portsmouth Football Club is – there is no variance in opinion there. You hopefully see what I’m getting at.

For some reason, it is very difficult for me to speak with a person in another echo chamber about another topic. I was struck in October 2017 about how little words I had to describe feminism to a man who was not talking about feminism. It’s jilted, it’s difficult and it’s messy. We don’t have the same experiences here. It’s very easy to go back to topics that we like to talk about. Similarly for my grandparents who support Brexit. We do ANYTHING to avoid talking about Brexit at the dinner table.

Language and echo chambers

For this reason, I think that language will have a strong part to play in an echo chamber theory. We may have access to different points of view – but although we may be speaking English, our understanding and definitions of words will be completely different. Take the word racism – there is a huge variance in opinion about what that means. The same could be said about the word ‘consent’, or ‘inequality’, or even ‘pink’. We literally speak different languages. I think I’ll have to do some work to understand whether philosophically and psychologically we can reduce linguistics to behaviour and visa versa.

This is also nice because it fits with social science theories of ‘polysemy’. It is well documented that when two people read the same tweet, or hear the same speech, we may get an entirely different meaning from the same words. What I’d like to test is whether belonging to a similar echo chamber will mean that two people get the same polysemy from phenomena.

Polarisation and echo chambers

This takes us to the idea of polarization and fragmentation. It’s very easy to think that another person is an idiot if you are speaking different languages without realizing it. I started to theorise about different levels of misunderstanding there could be.

• An event occurs which is factually indisputable e.g. two planes crash into the World Trade Towers, the Golden Globes take place, the Handmaids Tale is screened on TV. The discussion then fragments – different echo chambers take different stories as primary.
• An opinion piece which is meant for one echo chamber finds its way into another. The document is analysed and perhaps the meaning is misinterpreted and misunderstood by each echo chamber. E.g. the Google manifesto, the case of Justine Sacco, Kate Maltby and Damian Green.

In each of these, there are positive and negative outcomes – I’m simply trying to be descriptive with the above examples.

You’ll find that there will be a dominant conversation in each of your echo chambers. You’ll have different identities in each of them. There may be one that you consider takes a larger part of your life than another.

Homophily theory

Homophily theory dates back to the 19^th century. Homophily is defined as the tendency for individuals to align themselves with communities that look like them. This could be according to race, sexuality, gender, age, education and so on. Secondary to this is their common values. It is my idea that up until the advent of the internet, we tended to homophilise according to what we look like, whereas now we’re more likely to homophilise according to our values.

There is a lot of work to be done over the next few months. I need to become familiar with network theory, spiral of silence theory, selective exposure theory, byproduct exposure, as well as polarization and opinion formation theory. In the meantime, I wanted to put these ideas up here in case any of you had any feedback?

Please do comment below or send me your thoughts – editor@echochamber.club or @alicelthwaite.

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Rationalising the Irrational

There are a number of prominent conspiracy theories which influence Western politics. High profile supporters like Alex Jones, the face of Infowars, seem to flagrantly abandon facts in pursuit of his narrative. This attitude threatens the fabric of a post-enlightenment society. It obstructs progress towards knowledge and truth.

We believe these conspiracy theorists base their knowledge on myth and emotion. So I wanted to find out if there was a coherent epistemology of conspiracy theorists, that seeks to show why belief in (good) conspiracy theories can be rational. I remember having a conversation with my father a couple of years ago when we discovered that my cousin’s daughter is a conspiracy theorist. She believed that we were hiding the biscuits from her, essentially that the authorities were conspiring to hide something from her. She was right.

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It seems this is a new field in academic philosophy – with papers only dating back 18 years or so. There is other ongoing research in sociology and psychology too. However, for this I’ll concentrate on theories of knowledge. Here’s why it may be rational to believe a conspiracy theory.

The rational conspiracy theorist?

The philosophy of conspiracy theories

“We have some grounds to be suspicious of the utterances of the members of our influential institutions. Thus, when conspiracies are alleged about them (or when authorities are in disagreement about whether some conspiratorial claim is true), some will claim that the right thing to do is to go and look at the individual arguments and their evidence. However, … it is not that easy. Sometimes the evidence we are presented with is either distorted or fabricated, and often our judgements about the evidence are informed by who we take to be the right kind of authority to arbitrate on the matter. For example, many of the arguments and evidence for claims of conspiracy require significant theoretical knowledge before you can go and make sense of them, like the various 9/11 conspiracy theories that alleged the Twin Towers collapsed in a way that resembled a controlled demolition…

In this respect, trust really is our only arbiter on subjects on which we know very little (or nothing at all), and this once again raises the awkward question: ‘Just how much do we trust the influential institutions in our society?”

Excerpt from Matthew R.X. Dentith’s book ‘The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories’

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Critical Citizens or Paranoid Nutcases?

“One of the central questions that will need to be answered here if we hope to find out why conspirational thought is recently gaining such support and to find out how to respond to it, is the following: what mindset leads to the belief in conspiracy theories?”

“So far we know that conspiracy theories are explanations of a certain kind that explain something. What makes these explanations now conspiracy theories is that they invoke secretly conspiring agents as a salient cause in the explanation…”

“But because the definition is that broad, we also know immediately that conspiracy theories in this sense can be rationally believed. In fact all of us believe several conspiracy theories.”

“But that means that a lot more work needs to be done, both on the side of philosophy and on the side of sociology and psychology, to understand what goes wrong with conspiracy theories.”

“My suspicion is, though, that … familiar pitfalls of bad reasoning and bad epistemological practice will only partly explain the phenomenon of the rise of conspirational thought, at least for Western Europe.”

“The picture of the lazy, gullible, ignorant conspiracy theorists seems inappropriate for many cases. [i.e. that they believe whatever they see]  … They are sceptics, they look at the information they receive via mainstream channels more critically than others and are enlightened and better informed than the average citizen. Indeed, the strategies they use in choosing the theory to believe are often consistent with recommended criteria for good explanations, choose the theory that can explain more aspects, choose a theory that is supported by more evidence, choose a theory that doesn’t postulate a great number of unlikely events…”

Read more by Daniel Cohnitz in his paper (freely available)

In their own words

Why are those searching for truth labelled conspiracy theorists?

“Conspiracy theories often arise from evidence. Once the government releases an explanation of a particular event, conspiracy theories develop because evidence exists that disproves or calls their explanations into question. There is nothing insane or dubious about questioning the government’s explanation, unless of course, sanity is defined as believing everything the government tells you. Being that the government lies to us regularly, believing everything the government tells you falls under utter stupidity, not sanity.”

Read more by Bill Linder in Digital Journal

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To wrap up…

Modern philosophy hasn’t yet landed on a robust distinction between an unwarranted conspiracy theory, and one with some merit.

When it comes to conspiracy theories, disinformation and fake news, we’re treading a difficult path. On the one hand, we feel democracy is suffering given the lack of accepted truths and beliefs in a given community. On the other, progression requires someone to challenge the status quo to uncover a hidden truth, or deliver justice.

The rise of conspiracy theories correlates with the rise of the internet. We are able to self-publish, which means piecing together different pieces of information which is in contrast to ‘official’ stories, is much easier to do. I believe this is a good thing – but perhaps we are in a bit of ‘culture shock’ adjusting to life in the internet age.

The post Could A Conspiracy Theorist Be Rational? appeared first on The Echo Chamber Club.

Economics and the Environment

The dominant story in the global news this week was Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Although this may have only been front page news for a day in Western countries, the coverage in Middle Eastern outlets is extensive. This has had a huge effect on the people in the region.

I started out my research looking at my favourite publication which is based in the Middle East – Mada Masr. It was created by former journalists of Egypt Independent when the editorial department was shut down during the military coup of 2013. It helps me to gauge which local issues are important in the region, which contrasts with how the Middle East is portrayed in Western press.

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Although I was looking for alternative news stories about Jerusalem, I actually found articles about the ongoing dispute between Egypt & Ethiopia concerning the building of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in the Nile. This has repercussions for the environment and the local communities. I was also curious about how other local environmental concerns were being communicated around the world, and I also found some articles about cleaning up Fukushima – the nuclear explosion that happened in Japan in 2011.

These environmental stories are local and therefore don’t reach our news unless we look for them. But they provide great insight in how other cultures view their environment. Hopefully you get something out of them.

Water vs Power

Egypt-Ethiopia tensions over new dam rise again

“Ethiopia is pushing on with construction of its massive new dam, despite growing objections from Egypt.

Egypt has long held the majority rights to the Nile and relies almost entirely on the river for its water needs.

“Construction has never stopped, and will never stop, until the project is completed […] We are not concerned by what Egypt thinks – Ethiopia is committed to benefiting from its water resources without causing harm to anyone,” Ethiopia’s Minister of Irrigation, Water and Electricity, Seleshi Bekele, said.

Once completed, The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric power plant and will help solve a national energy crisis in Ethiopia.”

Read more by Mohammed Vall in Al-Jazeera

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Egyptian media pundits still debate the validity of Ethiopia’s dam, ignoring wider issues of water scarcity

“But instead of assessing the country’s water consumption, thinking of ways to limit waste and securing alternative sources of clean water, Egyptian officials have been busy pushing for further studies on the dam, which is already 63 percent complete.

Egypt understandably wants to maintain some degree of economic advantage over its African neighbours, but further negotiations over its historically large water share and the GERD may also mean officials need to be prepared to discuss a long list of incompetencies and issues they are either not willing to debate, or don’t have solutions to, such as: population growth, pollution, inefficient irrigation and the lack of proper treatment plants countrywide. Government officials need to consider the dam issue not just as one of resources, but as a matter of managing those resources.”

Read more by Heba El-Sherif in Mada Masr

Fairly harnessing common resources

“The dam is … taking into account international laws and equitable utilization of common resources. True to its name the grand dam epitomizes Ethiopia’s Renaissance. Ethiopia wants to make a leap from agriculture-led economy to an industry-driven one. As such it needs it badly. Here it is important to note that the per capita income of Ethiopians is 800 USD while that of Egypt is 3514 USD.

…

Ethiopians today have embarked on a historic chapter that narrates bequeathing poverty-unshackled country to the coming generation. That is why Ethiopians have placed focus on GERD to discharge historic responsibilities. Till the dam sees the day’s light, Ethiopians will work day and night.”

Read more in the Ethiopian Herald via AllAfrica.com

Post-nuclear disaster

Risky stalemate as science battles human fears at Fukushima

“The amount of radioactive water at Fukushima is still growing, by 150 tons a day and the country desperately needs to figure out what to do with it.

Packaged fish sold at supermarkets carry official “safe” stickers. … To pass, the fish must meet what is believed to be the world’s most stringent requirement: the radioactive cesium level has to be less than half that allowed under Japan’s national standard and one-twelfth of the US or EU limit, said Yoshiharu Nemoto, a senior researcher at the Onahama testing station.

That message isn’t reaching consumers. A survey by Japan’s Consumer Agency in October found that nearly half of Japanese people weren’t aware of the tests, and that consumers are more likely to focus on alarming information about possible health impacts in extreme cases, rather than facts about radiation and safety standards.”

Read more by Mari Yamaguchi in Associated Press

Levels of radiation in food post-Fukushima disaster

“Japanese Mothers Find High Levels of Radiation in Food Post-Fukushima Disaster

The “Mothers’ Radiation Lab” in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture is staffed by local mothers who test foods, water, soil and other local materials for nuclear radiation.

In the aftermath of the 9.1-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear power plant in Fukushima to leak radioactive materials, a group of Japanese mothers work to ensure local food is safe to eat. Despite lacking a scientific background or university education, they are passionate about keeping the public informed.”

Watch on Link TV
(6 minutes, well worth a watch)

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Message from the Editor

A quick reminder that we also offer Whatsapp notifications – to sign up please visit here.

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Internet Regulation

This week I’d like to focus on an area that gets little attention from the mainstream press, and isn’t often debated in our echo chamber. However, it’s one that affects us all, worldwide. We’re taking a paddle in the deep ocean of internet protocols and regulation.

In the physical world we don’t get to choose our environment. We don’t get to choose whether gravity it exists – we simply get to find out about its rules. When it comes to the internet, we are crafting the architecture ourselves. It’s incredibly empowering, but it means that every choice is political. At the moment we’re leaving it just to the engineers – but these things have real impact on everyone.

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The issue with communication of internet regulation is simple. It’s just boring. For years tech journos have been trying to make regulation relevant.  But even conversations about privacy have broadly fallen on deaf ears. What hope is there for more obscure internet regulation – like the protocols that send information from a remote server to your device. However, IPv6 is struggling to take off in developing countries. A move to DOI could push the internet towards ideologies favoured by Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. Finally, leaving the Internet Engineering Task Force to create protocol unwatched could mean architectural decisions are predominantly made by an organisation with an extreme macho culture.

Here are a couple of debates in the internet regulation world. Go on. Get involved.

TCP/IP vs DOI

We can stop hacking and trolls, but it would ruin the internet

“Cyberterrorism fears are through the roof. Ransomware is wreaking havoc on corporations, hospitals and individuals. Printers can be hacked to take down the world’s largest websites. Put simply, the internet is a mess.

You’re probably familiar with all this hand-wringing. What you might not know is that a solution has been around for decades, and in principle we could apply it tomorrow.”

“[However, that other solution] could become an “authoritarian internet power grab“. [It could] lead to “real-time surveillance and tracking of each device and individual connected to the web”. Just as a medical record would be subdivided, you too could become a “super identifier” whose various devices and internet activities all link back to you.”

“So yes, we could fix the internet, and do away with all the crooks, trolls and general troublemakers. But perhaps these malcontents are the price we pay for a free and open online society.”

Read more by Sally Adee and Carl Miller in the New Scientist

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The Authoritarian Internet Power Grab

“A new navigational and addressing technology, Digital Object Architecture (DOA), could enable the real-time surveillance and tracking of each device and individual connected to the web. Some governments are advocating that DOA be the singular and mandatory addressing system for the Internet of Things. They also want this system to be centrally controlled by the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union, which has contractual rights to the underlying intellectual property.”

Read more by Gordon M. Goldstein in the Hudson Institute

The Internet Engineering Task Force

Memo Decries ‘American, White, Male’ Culture at Internet Engineering Task Force

It’s no secret that women aren’t exactly welcomed with open arms in tech spaces. But a recent memo sent around the Internet Engineering Task Force—the open community that develops internet standards—calls out a culture of hostile behaviour and lacking diversity in arrestingly specific terms.

It reports that excuses are made for parties at fault and that people who do speak out about harassment or hostility can be met with gaslighting: “Further, anyone expressing concern about the behavior is typically admonished to be less sensitive; that is, a recipient of an attack who then complains is often criticized or dismissed.”

It’s not just open hostility that’s a problem; the memo nods to an informal experiment conducted by a women’s group within the IETF called Systers in 2012 that revealed behind-the-scenes biases against women specifically in the organisation. They put forward a large number of female candidates for management positions, but despite the disproportionate number, no women were selected.

Read more by Victoria Turk in Vice

IPv6

Famously, in 1943, Thomas Watson, president of IBM said “there is a world market for maybe 5 computers”. In 2017, 8.4 billion ‘things’ are connected to the internet. Each device needs an IP address so information can be sent to them. However, the world has begun to run out of IP addresses. As a result, IPv6 has been in the works to replace the predecessor, IPv4, since the late 90s. This is still proving an issue – particularly for those in developing countries.

Challenges for regions where where deployment is not taking off

“But still mostly in the developing world IPv6 deployment rate is far behind. As part of the 2016 IPv6 BPF initiative we have also tried to find the deployment challenges in the developing nations. It has been observed from the survey that still there are lacks of motivations, few technical challenges remains and lastly in most of the countries no real initiatives from the governments to promote or encourage IPv6 deployment to fulfill the need of connecting the unconnected.”

Read more in the Internet Governance Forum

Per country IPv6 Adoption

• [Green] Regions where IPv6 is more widely deployed (the darker the green, the greater the deployment) and users experience infrequent issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.
• [Orange] Regions where IPv6 is more widely deployed but users still experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.
• [Red] Regions where IPv6 is not widely deployed and users experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.

See stats from Google here

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To wrap up…

I found the best site to follow tech regulation is The Register. There’s little narrative of debates going on in the mainstream media, which is possibly why this newsletter was so hard to curate.

It’s also the reason why these debates seem to centre so much around one particular type of thinking. The majority of people who are governing the internet are white, male and from America, and so these issues are reflected in the one-track discussion. We are literally building a new digital world – the implications of which will affect everyone’s politics. There needs to be more diversity. I would love to see some more mainstream articles that articulate the debates going on governing bodies like ICANN, IETF, ITU and others.

Also – I am on the look out for people to help me curate newsletters for the ECC. If you’d like to work with me then please use the contact page to get in touch.

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Groupthink and No Diversity

In the UK this week the sexual harassment claims continued on both social media and on the news – however now the claims are spreading from the entertainment industry to Whitehall. We covered this topic last week – so please do take a look if you’re interested. However, with the caveat that I’m not sure if the feminist echo chamber does directly correlate with the audience of this newsletter. From my experience, the women I interact with tend to discuss harassment more than many men on a daily basis.

Last week, Chris Heaton-Harris MP, wrote to the Vice Chancellors of many universities asking for copies of the syllabus, lectures and the professors who teach European Affairs. There was a lot of push back from universities – the Guardian headline stated they deplored the ‘McCarthyism’ of the request. It was an authoritarian attack on free speech. Many news outlets and social accounts in this echo chamber broadly agreed.

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A similar but ideologically different news story also was heavily shared this month. David Lammy MP, requested ethnicity data from Oxbridge in 2016 as to how many black students were admitted to various colleges. He finally got the data in Oct 2017 which showed how few places were given to black and minority students. There was a different reaction in our echo chamber – this was scorned.

For this newsletter I’d like to focus on the Chris Heaton-Harris story. What were the other interpretations of what he says? Where is the evidence of ‘ideological groupthink’? Why might this be a bad thing?

Chris Heaton-Harris

Tory whip ‘wanted names of Brexit lecturers for book research’

“Jo Johnson, the universities minister, said Mr Heaton-Harris was acting on a long-standing personal interest in how British attitudes towards Europe had changed.”

“I’ve spoken to him [and he] was pursuing inquiries of his own which may in time, I think, lead to a book on these questions. It was more of an academic inquiry rather than an attempt to constrain the freedom which academics rightly have,” Mr Johnson told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.”

Read more in The Times

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Tory MP requests details of universities’ Brexit teaching amid claims students are being brainwashed by Remainers

Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, said Mr Heaton-Harris was perfectly within his rights to ask for the information.

He said: “The problem is that everybody knows that universities are not opening the minds of their students they are just indoctrinating them with the left wing political propaganda of the professors and lecturers.

“Everybody knows that is what is happening. I speak to lots of students and they all say that what you get is one way traffic of left wing indoctrination with lecturers forcing their opinions on their students.

Read more in The Telegraph

Studies demonstrating Groupthink

New Study Indicates Existence of Eight Conservative Social Psychologists

However you measure it, and for all samples measured so far, social psychology leans heavily to the left and has very few people right of center. Von Hippel and Buss’s new data confirms the story that a few of us told in a recent paper (Duarte, Crawford, Stern, Haidt, Jussim & Tetlock, 2015) in which we created the graph below, which shows just how fast psychology has been moving to the left since the 1990s. The ratio of Democrats to Republicans (diamonds) and liberals to conservatives (circles) was roughly 3 to 1 for most of the 20th century. But it skyrockets beginning in the 1990s as the Greatest Generation retires and the Baby Boomers take over.

Read more by Jonathan Haidt in Heterodox Academy

New report reveals dangerous effects of sizeable left wing skew within UK Universities

• Strong left-liberal skew in British academia, which has risen since 1960s
• Left-liberals make up around 75% of academics; conservatives only 12%
• 90% of British Universities censored free speech on campus last year
• IQ not the explanation, with top 5% of IQ roughly split between left and right
• Excessive ideological homogeneity risks bias in scholarship, which may prompt governments to defund research
• University gatekeepers must seek ideological diversity or lose trust of public and government

Read more in the Adam Smith Institute

Analysis

Fighting Groupthink at Universities

“You want diversity in any intellectual organization – that’s how good ideas arise. They have to do battle with less good ideas. If everybody accepts roughly the same paradigms for inquiry and there are certain expectations about what counts as a good result for your research, that’s not very good for diversity and it’s not very good for intellectual improvement.

[The problem with homogeneity is] it discourages people from getting into the profession because they feel they will be discriminated against… What you want in any profession … you want bright undergraduates as being something they would be interested in getting into. If the barrier to entry is very high and there is some requirement that you have to tailor your views to fit the views of your colleagues then [they’ll do something else].”

Watch Louis Menand on Bigthink.com

Why British academics are guilty of groupthink [Brexit focus]

“But perhaps it is no surprise that academics working in profoundly undemocratic, process-driven, hyper-bureaucratic institutions feel such a strong affinity with the EU. One explanation lies in the extent to which the idea of academic research as the pure pursuit of knowledge has been systematically undermined in recent decades.

Academics are now groomed from their early careers to comply with a whole series of diktats and an assessment of the quality and worthiness of their research. Since it has become second nature to subordinate one’s professional judgement to process-driven conformity, academics can seamlessly merge their own interests with the EU’s labyrinthine funding structures and bureaucratic world view.”

Read more by Paul A Taylor in the Conversation

N.B. Comment section is very interesting

Political groupthink is bad for our universities

“Traditionally, elites were conservative, even if professors were always the most radical of elites. But their relative economic position has deteriorated. And political opinion is defined today less by economic interests than by social issues. The well-educated are generally more socially liberal than the traditional working class base of parties of the left, among whom Mr Trump and Nigel Farage win significant support…

All communities are subject to groupthink, and in the academic world the rise of peer review and the importance of grant funding have reinforced it. The word “diversity” is today used endlessly on campuses. But it is too often associated with reduced tolerance of the diversity of thought and opinion that should be the defining characteristic of the university.”

Read more by John Kay in the FT

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To wrap up…

Here’s a couple of interesting bits I found when researching this topic. When you search for ‘groupthink universities’ – broadly a right-wing interpretation comes up. When you search for ‘diversity in universities’ – broadly a left-wing interpretation of this problem is displayed. Why is it that these groups can’t communicate and work together? Why are there different languages for fairly similar problems?

Finally – the comments sections under the groupthink pieces are incredibly illuminating. Issues are taken with the use of individual words, the methods of gathering statistics are deplored. The Adam Smith Institute study may well rest on poor statistics – but why aren’t academics actually researching this problem themselves? If the studies are poor, then it shouldn’t take too long (and too much funding) to survey professors in a way that befits current social science practice and gets to the root of the problem? Surely this research would also be able to uncover discrimination against other groups too?

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