Ignorance Will Outlive Us All

By BreeThompson - 04 Nov 2016

Introduction

Eliminating ignorance obviously requires access to information, and providing this access is a necessary first step for bettering society. People clearly can not be expected to know that which they had no opportunity to learn. However, this access will not necessarily reduce ignorance immediately or even eventually. Reducing ignorance requires people to be open to new information that may contradict their beliefs and more fundamentally to see a value in knowledge acquisition. Currently, the internet contains not only all of human knowledge, but also a substantial number of conspiracy theories, overly subtle satire, and outright lies. Given what we know about confirmation bias, it seems overly optimistic to assume that merely presenting people with all the content that exists, individuals will be able to teach themselves to discern between fact and fiction or train themselves to seek truth instead of comfort. The current state of web engagement shows how easily either of those can fail.

Echo Chambers

Recently, the Wall Street Journal began offering a Facebook feed that demonstrated how political leanings could alter what information is presented in “Blue Feed, Red Feed”. This interactive shows which news sites are most prevalent among partisans— there is very little overlap. This is reflective of a wider trend of polarization causing people to increasingly turn to sources and facts that align with their beliefs and surround themselves with people who believe (and behave?) similarly. A Pew study reveals that almost half (48%) of all respondents accessed political news from Facebook, and that individuals who are the most partisan have the most friends who share their views. Furthermore, half of all voters live in a county that was won in a landslide, a number that has increased since 1992. If these trends are representative, access— which has increased to 87% in 2014 from 14% in 1995— appears to increase a person’s ability to isolate themselves and not confront the information that would reduce their ignorance— without even realizing it. If not, then perhaps certain ideologues are an irreducible bastion of ignorance. In either case, ignorance persists.

Consider an extreme version of this: the alt-right. Up until this year, it seemed that the alt-right was primarily an internet phenomenon, growing on message boards, thriving in the comments, and generating propaganda/memes. Now it has burst forth fully formed armed with an arsenal of misinformation exalted as fact. While I grant that many if not most of those who ascribe to their beliefs are luxuriating in willful ignorance, I imagine that at least some (perhaps just one) of them is simply in too deep to escape the pull confirmation bias and human nature generally. Nonetheless, if access to the internet can foster this sort of pseudo-intellectual movement that is easily and quickly refuted by even a basic ability to compare sources and weigh their credibility can thrive and create barriers to correct information for themselves and unlucky, naive wanderers, then access is indifferent to knowledge.

Opium Dens

Apart from political echo chambers, various reports suggest that adult users of the internet spend between a fifth and a quarter of their time on social media. Half of the top 10 websites in the United States are social media platforms. Not only are people seeking out false facts, but they are also seeking out pure entertainment and doing each instead of contributing to our knowledge through discovery and contributing to society by acquiring the knowledge that already exists. However, it is hard to blame them, if we truly are walking around with all current knowledge in our pockets, there is little incentive to move that information up to our brains especially when Netflix and Hulu create original content. Almost 70% of people waste time at work. The facts are there when we need them regardless of whether an individual takes the time to learn it or whether they look it up in their moment of need. That is, in a manner of speaking, access to the internet is in itself “knowledge acquisition.” Access alone will not provide the necessary motivation to learn something before it is immediately necessary.

Conclusion

The average American internet user as well as those who are more extreme have access to the whole of human knowledge, and yet choose to read, share, and defend posts that confirm their beliefs about what the facts are or choose to avoid dealing with facts altogether and consume “content” instead. Perhaps this is merely a result of taking the awesome capabilities of the internet for granted. However, coming to regard the possession of everything humanity has ever known as mundane and seeing internal knowledge as obsolete seems a natural progression. Therefore, the behavior on display should demonstrate that access does not necessarily yield an ignorance free populace and serve as a cautionary tale against setting our sights to low. It may be the case that access alone is enough to stoke the desire for knowledge in enough people for enough time that ignorance is said to be eradicated, but as combatting ignorance requires constant vigilance and dogged devotion, it seems unlikely that access alone will be enough to destroy it. Access itself is progress neutral.

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Certainly some people use “the Internet” in the ways that you’ve described (seeking out false facts to confirm their own beliefs, and consuming content), but that doesn’t mean that giving other people access to the same wealth of information that we have access to won’t lead to an “ignorance free society”. I think that the idea of an ignorance free society is more about ensuring that no one is “ignorant” because of their circumstances (poverty & lack of access to information) and less about making sure that no one is willfully ignorant. There will always be people who choose to remain willfully ignorant, but they probably should not be our focus. We should be more concerned with the people who want to learn, people with untapped potential, who are barred from realizing that potential because they have no access to the things they want to study. I think that this is perhaps what Eben meant when he wrote about "a world in which every Einstein is allowed to learn physics, regardless of whether she is rich or poor". Also, on the issue of content, surely some of the people who consume “pure entertainment”, will also occasionally decide to access some of the more educational resources available through net access. (Most college students in the U.S. are good examples of this…). Even if, after providing everyone with access to the net, some people choose to exclusively consume entertaining or smutty content, I wouldn’t call this “progress neutral”, because even if 90% of people behaved this way, it would still be worth it to give the remaining 10% access to the things that they wanted to learn about. Finally, there is a sort of paternalistic element here that I’m hesitant to address… but as people who have benefitted immensely from having net access it seems a bit disturbing to me that we find it morally acceptable to deny a large portion of the human race access to the sum of human knowledge accessible to us through the use of technology. This is particularly disturbing when you consider that access could be given to them at little to no cost to us. It almost seems as if we are trying to intentionally keep millions of people ignorant, which sort of reminds me of this ... but I digress.

-- WhitneyLee - 24 Nov 2016

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