I've been watching Twitter melt down due to numerous events and from my tropical perch with some passion fruit soda I've got some thoughts on the epistemology of it all. Follow me for a bit. Epistemology is how do we know what we know. This could be do you get your info from 1/n
Twitter, newspapers, journal articles, TV or whatever else. I think there are a couple of under explored aspects of this takes place after we receive the information in the sense of how do we categorize the information we receive and how do we react or treat that information 2/n
With me so far? How do we receive information and how we treat the information we receive is the focus. What I've come to see is that in many cases, there is far too little facts or data gathered but lots and lots of opinions spun out from events. Take a simple example. 3/n
When the EU issued its tool kit on 5G, all the headlines read EU fails to block Huawei in rebuff to Trump. None of them mentioned EU doesn't even have that authority because it was opinionating from an event lacking facts. I want to emphasize because this is not a political 4/n
Statement that conservatives/GOP can be equally guilty of this that was just an easy example I used. So first, we are not getting as much information as we think we are. A lot of this stems from the fact that there is vastly more content than actual facts or change of facts 5/n
Consequently, part of what we suffer from is perceived information overload when we really suffer from opinion overload. What is then interesting is how we treat or act upon that information. I see two specific things. The human mind is designed to prefer certainty to 6/n
Uncertainty even if uncertainty is the more defensible outcome. This means people who are quite sure of their opinions are very attractive even if we should realistically have high degrees of uncertainty. Additionally, people gain notoriety for making bold claims 7/n
Saying things like we do not have enough reliable data to make clear claims about coronavirus, its spread, and mortality rates to say with certainty whether it is a novel epidemic or has similar risk level as the flu doesn't attract clicks even though that is a pretty 8/n
defensible and reasonable statement. We want certainty. We want bold claims. Couple this with the flood of information and it is very hard to disentangle. Finally, many events are incredibly complex and like complex systems do not have one reason. If we look at charges of 9/n
racism, in reality racism does happen but can be very difficult to attribute causality. Two people do the same thing. Can one of them be racist and one not? Yes. They do different actions can one, both, or neither be racist? Yes. When Chinese are scared of other Chinese is 10/n
over corona is that racism? By definition no. If a white person does something similar over corona is that racism? could be but not necessarily. Our minds crave certainty, bold statements, and clear attribution. The reality of the world however, is just strikingly different. 11/n
The world is messy, uncertain, unknown why things happen, and needs many more statements with lots of humility about what things happen. As crazy things happen, understand, there are a lot of things we don't understand and lots of people believing they are the next prophet.
