The Assault on Reason
visionary analysis of the degradation of our public sphere and its consequences for our democracyNobel Peace Prize winner, bestselling author, activist, and political icon, Al Gore has become one of the most respected and influential public intellectuals in America today. The Assault on Reason takes an unprecedented look at how faith in the power of reason—the idea that citizens can govern themselves through rational debate—is now under assault. The marketplace of ideas, once open to everyone through the printed word, has been corrupted by the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith. By leading us to an understanding of what we can do to restore the rule of reason, Gore has written a farsighted and powerful manifesto for clear thinking.
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- Assault on Reason by Al Gore. Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum (the movie retains only the name and a basic profile of Jason Bourne, almost none of the plot)
- Indeed, they are related. A 2006 book on eating healthier called "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle and Alan Goldhamer helped me see that connection (so, actually going the other way at first). And a later book from 2010 called "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett also expanded that idea beyond food to media and gaming and more. The 2010 essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham also explores those themes. In the 2007 book The Assault on Reason by Al Gore talks about watching television and the orienting response to sudden motion like scene changes.
In short, humans are adapted for a world with a scarcity of salt, refined carbs like sugar, fat, information, sudden motion, and more. But the world most humans live in now has an abundance of those things -- and our previously-adaptive evolved inclinations to stock up on salt/sugar/fat (especially when stressed) or to pay attention to the unusual (a cause of stress) are now working against our physical and mental health in this new environment. Thanks for the reference to a potential anti-addiction substance. Definitely something that deserves more research.
My sig -- informed by the writings of people like Mumford, Einstein, Fuller, Hogan, Le Guinn, Banks, Adams, Pet, and many others -- is making the leap to how that evolutionary-mismatch theme applies to our use of all sorts of technology.
Here is a deeper exploration of that in relation to militarism (and also commercial competition to some extent): https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."
Conversely, reflecting on this more just now, are we are perhaps evolutionarily adapted to take for granted some things like social connections, being in natural green spaces, getting sunlight, getting enough sleep, or getting physical exercise? These are all things that are in increasingly short supply in the modern world for many people -- but which there may never have been much evolutionary pressure previously to seek out, since they were previously always available.
For example, in the past humans were pretty much always in face-to-face interactions with others of their tribe, so there was no big need to seek that out especially if it meant ignoring the next then-rare new shiny thing. Johann Hari and others write about this loss of regular human face-to-face connection as a major cause of depression.
Stephen Ilardi expands on that in his work, which brings together many of these themes and tries to help people address them to move to better health.
From: https://tlc.ku.edu/ "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
GPT-4o, by apparently providing "her" movie-like engaging interactions with an AI avatar that seeks to please the user (while possibly exploiting them) is yet another example of our evolutionary tendencies potentially being used to our detriment. And when our social lives are filled-to-overflowing with "junk" social relationships with AIs, will most people have the inclinations to seek out other real humans if it involves doing perhaps increasingly-uncomfortable-from-disuse actions (like leaving the home or putting down the smartphone)? Not quite the same, but consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
Related points by others:
"AI and Trust" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.... "In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI."
"The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI - Maggie Appleton" https://youtu.be/VXkDaDDJjoA?t=2098 (in the section on the lack of human relationship potential when interacting with generated content)
- One thing I like to do when I see an article like this is look up:
1. Where it's published 2. Who published it 3. Which think thank did it 4. Who's paying for it
Econlib is "The Library of Economics and Liberty". These days "Liberty" has a very clear right-wing association. Cool, let's dig further.
This website is owned by Liberty Fund Inc., self-described as "a private educational foundation established to foster thought and discussion of enduring issues pertaining to liberty". There's out think thank. Let's find out who's involved with it.
From Wikipedia: "Liberty Fund was set forth in an unpublished memo written by Goodrich "to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals"
Found the libertarian in the room! They even mention Alexis de Tocqueville in the article! Let's keep going.
"In his book The Assault on Reason, former U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore wrote that between 2002 and 2004, 97% of the attendees at Liberty Fund training seminars for judges were Republican administration appointees. Gore suggests that such conferences and seminars are one of the reasons that judges who regularly attend such conferences "are generally responsible for writing the most radical pro-corporate, antienvironmental, and activist decisions"."
There you go. File under junk.
- What we're seeing is essentially the Death of the Free Flow of Information on the Internet;coming concomitant with a pervasive social slide towards Elitism when the whole point of the original revolution was to break down the siloes of power aggregated into gatekeeper hands.
In the Assault on Reason, AL Gore talked about the ability to craft systems that could enable people to create and engage with content in meaningful ways. No doubt viewing YouTube as an antidote to taking people out of a passive TV watching role and towards an active, civically engaged citizen.
The problem is, when anybody can say anything, Everyone will say Everything. YouTube's Really Dumb Idea here is to "mitigate the problem by eliminating discussion." We see how well that worked for the Catholic Church and sexual abuse allegations, the Silent Generation and LGBTQIA rights, etc.
Right after the web exploded in the early 2000s and we were all chanting "Information Wants to Be Free", a large number of us enthusiastically believed in Democracy and Reason. We believed in rational argumentation, with point, counter-point, analysis of biases and nuances, leading towards an ultimately acceptable conclusion.
Instead we got Flat Earth, Anti-vax, and Donald Trump. It's not hard to see why the enthusiasm is failing.
The problem is, it's not The Big Dumb Idiot Public's Fault. It's Ours, as technologists building these platforms.
A +/- button and free-text fields in 2021 is exactly the same technology we were using to talk in 2001, now with far more robots and malicious actors adding noise.
An Obvious Question that has been around since the advent of these technologies, that is in fact inherent in information itself, is "how do we identify Signal from Noise?"
Treating all Anti-Vax view, and even Donald Trump's banned accounts, as just "Noise" are bad precedents.
Rather, we should be leveraging Machine Learning and all the obtrusive user data we're gathering from ad farms to Actually Do Useful Things For Humanity like:
* identifying a user's background and their "conceptual distance" from the topic at hand. Aside from pointing someone to an arcane Wikipedia article likely last edited by an expert into incomprehensible oblivion, how can we determine a "learning path" series of links that can take someone from "completely ignorant" to "common knowledge educated?"
People love anonymity on the internet, but there are times when they don't, as well. (see Facebook's success)
On a random Hot Topic thread in a non-anonymous platform (FB, Twitter), the commenter's background could be probabilistically calculated to inform readers about how likely they are to know what the fuck they're talking about. I. E. If a random computer scientist blowjob like me is mouthing off about how inefficient the vaccine process has been and someone with a PhD in Molecular Biology from a reputable institution that's actively working in a lab developing in a proximal space replies to my comments with counters, that level of expertise needs to be highlighted.
"water flows uphill" and things that are just counter-factual can be detected and auto-flagged.Actively elevating the discourse by both teaching people And giving easy tools to identify sources, evaluate their credibility, learn the argument space by highlighting the authorities and hubs of different views related to a topic, and ultimately lead to better discussions is Hard... But an infinitely better direction than draconian choices/policies that directly undermine trust in public discourse --which is a core tenet of democracy--.
- I agree information overload is a huge problem these days. I'd be curious for a list of the professions you had in mind (perhaps you mean librarians http://disciplineoforganizing.org/ or professionals working in the "Seven Tribes" of Intelligence https://phibetaiota.net/about/ or like Doug Engelbart worked towards with Augment/CoDIAK/OHS http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html )? Maybe Musk does need to adopt better intelligence augmentation tools for the challenges he faces? But if so, he is not alone.
Here are my own 2010 suggestion for helping deal with information overload: https://web.archive.org/web/20130514103318/http://pcast.idea... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
Another version of that proposal: https://web.archive.org/web/20160206184804/https://www.newsc...
Some thoughts by me on applying that to health sensemaking: https://web.archive.org/web/20161104203536/https://www.newsc... https://github.com/pdfernhout/health-decision-support-tools https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1897006&cid=34459370 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openvirgle/QukA-eEPX... https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sense...
Anyway, still plugging along on all that in some of my spare time.
Another aspect of the challenge is having a mind tuned for a scarcity of something like information being having difficulty coping with an abundance of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published ... in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today’s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets"
"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
"The Pleasure Trap" http://web.archive.org/web/20160418155513/http://www.drfuhrm... "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response "In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore posited that watching television affects the orienting response, an effect similar to vicarious traumatization."
And how this overload is even harder on young children, as described by Victoria L. Dunckley, M.D.: https://drdunckley.com/reset-your-childs-brain/ "Because electronic screen media is unnaturally intense in terms of sensory, cognitive, and psychological input–designed to keep the user engaged–it tends to overstimulate nervous system. The brain interprets all this stimulating input as a form of stress. ... Over time, these changes lead to chronic stress, resulting in blood flow shifting from the more developed part of the brain (frontal lobe) to the more primitive parts of the brain. Because the frontal lobe governs emotional regulation, attention, creativity, and social behavior, any of these areas can become impaired. Chronic stress also raises cortisol levels, which complicates frontal lobe functioning even further. High cortisol impairs the hippocampus (needed for memory), disturbs sleep, and eventually causes atrophy (shrinkage) of the brain. ..."
More and more we need a browser-like tool to protect us from the web and (anti-)social media. These would be tools that are designed to work within human limitations. They would help people deal with being sprayed in the face with a firehose of information designed by highly-paid specialists to trick us and exploit our basic reflexes for someone else's gain (e.g. filtering out or summarizing news tickers or videos with scene changes every few seconds that exploit the orienting response, or summarizing those clickbait headlines tuned to exploit our primal drives, and so on).
Something like uMatrix is just the beginning. It shows where browser vendor's loyalties are (even Mozilla's) that such tools do not come built in. Very recently there is the Brave browser with some ad blocking and also Google turned on a limited default adblocker within Chrome -- but those are small steps and don't address the bigger picture of information overload even when not looking at obvious ads.
People need a whole suite of related FOSS tools for dealing with the web, email, social media, and so on -- to help filter and organize it for ourselves according to our own priorities and respecting our human limitations.
I comment from my bias as a software toolmaker though. Alternatively, a high level of self-discipline and healthy routine can also help manage information overload. And the professionals you reference probably can supply some of that (e.g. Alan Lakein's 1973 classic on setting priorities "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life").
