Coding and the Human Phenotype: Manipulated Perception? Fakery, Authenticity, and the Birth of NFTs

00:00:00 foreign good afternoon everyone I'm Gerald Horowitz I'm the associate director of Helix Center and I apologize for the delay in our getting started one of our

00:00:32 participants due to a family emergency is unable to make this talk on misinformation coding and misinformation and the birth of nfts um and I'll say a word or two about what we're thinking this topic will be about but where the participants are going to be the ones who really help decide and you'll decide among yourselves whether they're telling you the truth or not let me say something first about Laura Edelson who's not here unfortunately but I'll give a brief description she is a

00:01:05 post-doctorate researcher at NYU with the cyber security for democracy project which he co-directs with Damon McCoy there she leads the observatory and the Observer projects which aim to increase public transparency of digital advertising particularly during elections we have here with us today Susanna Martinez Conde is that the way to say it yeah good she is an award-winning neuroscientist author and the professor

00:01:35 and a professor at the State University of New York down State Health Sciences University she is the founder and executive director of the annual best illusion of the Year contest which inspired her most recent book champions of Illusion published by Ferrara Strauss and dro her first book The International bestseller slate of hands slate of mine what the Neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions was a was published by Holt

00:02:06 and won the Prisma prize for best science book of the Year Martinez Conde is one of the Premier science communicators in the United States and has made television appearances when the National Geographics channels redesigned my brain Discovery Channels Head Games The Daily Planet PBS's Nova Star Talk CBS Sunday Morning and the world according to Jeff Goldblum gallblum Andy guess is an assistant professor of

00:02:38 politics and public affairs at Princeton University his research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political communication public opinion and political Behavior via a combination of experimental methods large data sets machine learning and Innovative measurement he studies how people choose process spread and respond to information about politics recent work investigates the extent to which online Americans news habits are polarized the popular Echo chamber

00:03:10 hypothesis patterns in the consumption and spread of online misinformation and the effectiveness of efforts to counteract misperceptions encountered on social media yotem up here is that did I get to yeah good he's saying good enough thank you uh is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Buffalo his work combines computational methods for text mining Neta network analysis experiments

00:03:41 and surveys to study media content and effects in the areas of political science and health communication Dr up here authored and co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed academic papers published in journals such as the American Journal of public health health security tobacco regulatory science risk analysis plus one Journal of communication communication research public understanding of science journal of Public Health and health communication Communications methods and

00:04:12 measures and more so with that we're going to get started after I take my seat okay so I I I'm interested in getting things underway and I invite any of the three of you to jump in and um Express at least some sort of ideas about what you're seeing what every one of us I think is seeing in our culture about misinformation polarization

00:04:43 Etc and obviously because the conference is on coding we're interested in sort of how digitalization of information may have been maybe playing a role in this so who wants to start uh okay I'll offer a like a sort of starting idea and you can feel free to sort of um revise that or throw it away later but just to get things started um you know I think part of what's happening or what has been happening is that um we have you know incredible

00:05:14 um digital communication technologies that have enabled many people who previously you know were not able to express themselves at the sort of ease and scale that they can now and this created a lot of opportunities for different people different perspectives and different groups um to you know Express themselves in society and also to you know engage with society and participate in society in new ways that I think have sort of cut against the usual kinds of inequalities um however uh what that's what that also

00:05:45 means another way of saying that is that sort of traditional Gatekeepers including Gatekeepers of information have lost their kind of received power and so uh kind of a flip side of that potentially is that you know Gatekeepers who you know exist to kind of maintain hierarchies but also to you know vet information for better for worse have lost some other traditional power and so one of the big questions today is sort of who who or what including Technologies um is replacing these kind of standard

00:06:17 Gatekeepers that have been in place for you know let's say 100 years and how do we as Society sort of adapt to this new reality neuroscientific perspective um it our brains are not wired to multitask it's uh it's the opposite we are wired to pay attention to one thing and one thing only and suppress everything out what happens is that um

00:06:48 when we are pulled in our directions we cannot really pay attention to more than one thing at once and and uh and arrive to any type of quality judgment or performance this is something that happens in magic shows actually magicians uh get us to multitask in a magic show they split our attention and that's how they get away with magical murder what happens these days is that with all these uh digital content and social media this is really

00:07:20 pushing our capabilities to pay attention to the Limit and so we are it's very taxing to be able to determine what actual data what's misinformation because everything seems to have the same priority and we are not uh focusing and analyzing in any depth for any length of time I mean one of the um big questions that I think are on my mind recently is are

00:07:54 we really in a new era of Boss truth I mean because you you hear it everywhere right that we move to a different time in human history but it's not clear to me uh based on the empirical work that we've been conducting um and based on uh reviews of previous errors that really crossed a rubricon to a different time in terms of relationship between humans and Truth or humans and information um I'm wondering in recent uh years why

00:08:24 why is everybody so preoccupied with misinformation now um it wasn't like that 10 years ago right uh when I when I started I'm I'm relatively these guys knew in the area but when I started in 2010 to look into misinformation was kind of a niche Topic in in social sciences I wonder if something really changed in the way we communicate with one another or some external events happen that kind

00:08:54 of pushed us to look for explanations in other words are we sitting here because something really changed in how we use Media or are we sitting here because we're still trying to explain to ourselves the 2016 election yeah what is going on well this reminds me now there are I think there's sort of two general classes of uh commentators on what's going on with us so the one class says oh my God this is completely different we're really in trouble and then I'm sure you've all seen other articles that

00:09:25 suggested oh no you know back in 1820 there was just as much politization maybe there was more people were fist fighting in the in the capital building Etc uh if if it's true that there was an earlier period where people where there was more of this sort of fomentation of polarization um can we see anything in common then from now is it is it possible to draw a line between those two um processes

00:09:56 yeah I mean yeah no please go ahead yeah the same people that we were a couple of hundred years ago and even much earlier uh and we we are uh actually we have the the capability and even you could save the drive to lie and uh and to deceive the the brain is the great Storyteller and uh we try to make sense of Reality by telling stories about what's

00:10:27 happening to others as well as to ourselves and that we make incorrect connections between cause and effect that has always happened even uh is something as easy as a trying to trick somebody into thinking that we're interested in something that we're not or the other way around we are able as as primates we are able to pay attention to something that we're not looking at for with the intent to

00:10:58 deceive for the prime and studies as well but not every species is able to do it to dissociate what they're looking at from the place that they're actually paying attention to so so we have this uh these mechanisms that are adherent to our brains that uh we we have always lied to one another I think what's different now is the tools that we have uh accessible to us and I think that it used to be much easier if you don't know okay is this true or or this is this is

00:11:31 this a falsehood and you go and you try different sources and you can arrive to the veracity or a particular issue I think much more or in a much more reliable way I mean even today you see an image you see a video or an audio record you cannot really really tell if this is manipulated or not this did not used to be the case I guess misinformation

00:12:02 has always been there it's not a new phenomena the only thing that seems to me is new is more people have access to internet and so on which allows them to express their opinions which before they had no access so if uh let's say you were organizing a coup in a foreign country you gave a story about what was happening that was in the papers and

00:12:32 everybody accepted and nobody said and if you knew information that countered the motives that were expressed you couldn't make it public because there was no Outlet now you have questions about I don't know whatever political issue you immediately put it on the internet and you have an opinion and then other people follow you and of course part of the problem is the more you claim to have some kind of

00:13:03 conspiracy behind it the more excited you make people get and the more you have tension yeah I think I mean one way of kind of restating a part of what you said is that you know propaganda has always been with us it's traditionally been the domain of of Elites and today um you know the ability to produce propaganda like a lot of things has been democratized and so now anyone can sort of make up their own stories and they can have it disseminated you know instantaneously at Great and

00:13:34 unprecedented scale um so that's I mean that's one thing that has changed aspects to it because uh like you said it used to be like a one version of the truth and there was no questioning and that uh I'm thinking uh was something that I've read about is the the flu of 1918 what we call the Spanish Flu well it turns out it did not originate in Spain actually it's still debated where it's actually China right I'm sorry start a new rumor

00:14:07 so but the point is that apparently it is the case that the Spanish newspapers were the ones that were not lying about the numbers other places were suppressing that information so that's how it became to be known as the Spanish flu but uh so there was like a kind of like a worldwide misinformation uh back then uh 100 years ago right there may have been this sort of also this movement going back to the early 19th century where one one of the pieces

00:14:40 of propaganda was that our elected officials were Dependable reliable they were reliable elitists and they were they're going to tell you the truth and that was a useful bit of propaganda to a degree I mean you know I don't want to sound too cynical about it but that was a story and a narrative that many people in the United States accepted true or false but they accepted it but it may have done some good because people said well I can look to this authority to establish the truth or falseness now we have politicians in this article this

00:15:12 morning in the New York Times that shows the number of Republican candidates who deny the results of the 2020 election the majority of them deny the results we're it's interesting fake news was is the claim of the people who've been creating a lot of the fake news right so they're not only producing fake news but they're undermining everyone's faith in any authority to set them straight the term fake news has come to mean something

00:15:43 different than he used to yeah I mean some years ago but it is true I mean it's something that uh it is not just trusting politicians and Trust in governments but it's interesting in scientists actually uh I just um we just published a paper in which uh we we found in an uh International sample that the willingness to um to be vaccinated for for covid-19 the

00:16:13 the parameter that was mostly related to with one's willingness to be vaccinated was trust in scientists and that uh and when this trust in scientists is not there anymore then uh you have people who are thinking well why why should I be vaccinated I can do my own research and I think that that's what we're seeing also that anybody can do their own research anybody can be an expert there is no separation between expert opinion and the opinion that basically anybody could have in any field

00:16:46 I think um I mean you know if there's one thing sort of you know a political scientists in my field of political science it's the one thing that we I think have found time and time again is that trust is this sort of core ingredient in making democracy work and you know it's trust and institutions trust in scientists I would add maybe trust in you know like the the news media you know trust in some sort of like basic quality of sources of information about Society um just trust is sort of like the thing

00:17:17 that that makes things run more smoothly um and when you lose that um things can come apart and so just this conversation is sort of making me ask you know uh on the one hand trust is good like it has a lot of um beneficial properties but you know does trust also come with a cost so what um what are we sort of giving up in order to maintain high levels of trust I think you suggested one which is that you know if we there's sort of on one extreme bind trust so you could blindly trust the

00:17:48 government you could blindly trust what the news tells you right and we've just seen through history that that too can have its pitfalls and so um you know maybe just I I don't really have an answer to to this just to sort of pose it as a dilemma but I might suggest that there are perhaps different sort of equilibria that that might work right so you could have like a high trust equilibrium where um you know there are perhaps like more established Gatekeepers there are sort

00:18:20 of more transparent institutions and sort of people you know people sort of understand how that works and then we're in the process of moving to another equilibrium and we haven't quite figured out what that looks like but it's it's a destabilized destabilizing period yeah and I think that perhaps I mean we're trying I I feel like the conversation that we're having is what can we do to achieve a balance or work what what should we do better so that Society has a diversity of sources of

00:18:50 information but maybe not too much diversity or maybe another everybody's opinion should be way the same I think that perhaps it's uh I don't have an answer but uh if maybe we can uh there are certainly positives in having accessibility having access to to all of these uh kinds of uh forms of information uh even fake news but what we are lacking is education and I think that uh what we some of the

00:19:23 things that we need to do as a society is Empower individuals and that uh in the Educational Systems I I feel like uh even today children are not giving the tools to develop critical thinking to be able to to face and and evaluate all of these uh alternative and competing sources of information so that's a serious lack I wanna I wanna build on something that Andy said I I think it's a healthy thing to be skeptical

00:19:54 um We Are Scientists that's what we do that's our job right I mean our job is to be skeptical to a healthy degree to question knowledge even after it's been established and so on but what we've what we're seeing in recent years is kind of a shift that I see is dangerous from skepticism to cynicism and I think it has a lot to do with this erosion interest in institutions of knowledge that's actually uh predates the the internet and social media

00:20:25 um I mean you can choose a lot of random points to kind of start the discussion of it but I'll choose for now the early 90s where um where conservative talk um uh talk radio shows like Rush limbo and a few years later Fox News um were launching these campaigns uh against the institution of knowledge if it's the mainstream media if it's the scientific Community um basically a populist argument that

00:20:57 Elites are lying to you and they're not working for you um I think this is where you start to see the the the beginning of the process that were in the in the middle of right now um in in the last six years or so I believe that the Trump presidency pushed it even farther by um not so much spreading specific lies but challenging the the epistemology of knowledge I mean what does it even mean

00:21:28 to know something who should we trust and who shouldn't we trust if you look at Trump's making Arguments for example and I'm sorry that I'm making it about Trump but no it's just a bit too tempting but um all those all those sayings that people are saying right I mean Trump says people are saying that the elections were stolen and now we should accept that as a source of knowledge um the whole perception that that there is no reliable source of knowledge that everything is subjective and everything is is uh is an attempt to push an agenda

00:22:00 of sorts um is I think kind of the the cause of where we are right now um in the in our first panel this morning bizaki was mentioning how so many of the facts that we think we know that we ascribe to we don't know firsthand we get them from our parents or from other authorities and we're not we don't have the time to go and validate everyone every one of them if um the world's in a state of chaos and it's making everyone anxious and I think rightfully it's

00:22:31 making many people anxious one thing to say is well one thing to hope for is that you have a great leader who's going to help communicate to you why you need to be stay calm and carry on and uh the other thing that can happen is leaders could say no you're right to be anxious the elites are screwing you and there's a conspiracy going on and you know um and weirdly enough that conspiracy thinking I think puts some of their their minds partially to at ease because

00:23:03 I think well now I have an explanation for why this is going on rather than having anything more meaningful I just want to say one other thing you know I'm a physician and I treat a lot of I'm a psychiatrist and many patients will come to me and complain about their doctors their non-psychiatric doctors you know the primary care doctor or the cardiologist whatever can you believe he didn't do this or say this or do this test or she didn't do this or and I um I'm not and I am skeptical about the quality that some of these patients make yet from time to time

00:23:33 right some of it's excellent but some of it's not so good but I always say to these patients like listen if you want to go with the numbers go towards the doctor and do what they tell you okay because you know it's not perfect but it's better than you staying away and thinking you're going to figure this out on your own right so maybe that's a weak argument in in favor of trusting Authority you say look you're better off just imagining them to be honest and fair to you it's pretty difficult with what's being advertised

00:24:03 these days right so and it is true that we need to develop some sort of algorithms for what you should trust and what you shouldn't because nobody has the time or the resources to question everything and and it seems that uh from um a regular skepticism uh about the particular sets of claims we have arrived the situation in which everything is up for questioning like uh it is different to question I believe

00:24:33 two vaccines cause autism right that has been debunked many times but uh from there we shouldn't you know go on and question whether the Earth maybe is flat and that there's actually a flat Earth Society that I don't know um how serious they are but uh but yeah I think that uh it that goes again uh I think to the issue of like the expertise uh do we even rely or do we even try to recognize that there is an actual thing

00:25:04 as a expertise and who gets to be an expert and who gets to have an opinion that should be valued there's this um there was this movement that's going on now for many years now I think it's with high frequency trading in the stock market right where these transactions are occurring way faster than any human beings can involve and I mentioned that because apparently it does have an impact that the speed of these transactions uh has an impact on

00:25:35 the Dynamics of the on the market so I'm wondering about because this is a talk after all about coding and digitalization and such we are getting a much faster feedback by these social media Outlets that are tailoring the news items we get in a much higher and a much higher rate I wonder what you all think about that as a as a phenomena um I mean I I think I think you're absolutely right that the velocity the sheer velocity of information uh is is

00:26:05 increasing um and you know I think the most common uh response to this that I've seen um is that uh people become overwhelmed and just tuned out uh so like news avoidance is now like a there's like a term for it there's a phenomenon of news avoidance people just turn it off they pay less attention um the flip side of that is people who actually do like want to inject the information into their veins can do so like you know at at the most extreme rate that was never before possible and so you have super engaged people who are

00:26:37 like who want to consume like every little bit of content um in our sort of mainlining uh like Twitter or Tick Tock or or whatever it is um and then you have like everyone else who's sort of not as engaged and you know that creates a whole set of new problems um for example because then you have imagine the feedback you have um you know you have content producers you have information sources that are now catering whether they're fully aware of it or not to these like most hyper engaged consumers whose interests may or

00:27:09 may not reflect those of the rest of um Society so yeah and we don't consume more information equally because we are all subjective to cognitive biases uh you know confirmation bias we hear what we want to hear and there are these uh piece of information that is supported in my prior view I'm going to really go deep into it and I'm going to uh process it in in in high detail with high uh focus and that these other pieces of information

00:27:39 that goes against My Views I'm just going to ignore keep scrolling so and I and I think that the fact that we have so many sources of information coming at us with high speed and uh and high amount this only serves to exacerbate the cognitive biases that we already have because we're overwhelmed all the time and just defaulting to these ingrained ways of thinking so I think it is harder to change Minds today than it

00:28:10 used to be you know in Magic one of the things they'll do is they'll get you to look here and you look there and they're getting you to confirm some false belief quickly right one two three and then then the trick goes that takes place right and that's a little bit of what's going on with this I think right there's there's all this sort of false it's at least emotionally stirs you up we actually just published a paper about what the Psychology and Neuroscience of magic tell us about

00:28:41 misinformation because there are so many parallels I I think the word emotional is is key here because when when you when you talk about polarization and the uh the way the algorithms are maybe pushing us the word um our own views it's important to remember that most people don't care about politics or don't understand politics at all um I feel like what we do see right now is a lot of emotionality a lot of affective polarization right I mean I hate conservatives or I hate liberals I

00:29:12 mean I just can't stand them and what they're and what they represent um this kind of sentiment is more driving people um than than actual understanding of policy or you know deep um ideological views most people don't care about politics at all or and understand very little about it but it seems like more and more we are occupied with feeling about the other side that's what I see I don't think we are more

00:29:43 politically sophisticated now than 10 years ago say again sorry you said it's not so much that we are actually interested but we are more and more kind of preoccupied by it I think we are more and more um identifying emotionally with with one side of the of the cultural divide that we have in this country um and the more we see ourselves as part of of one group and not the other the more we seem to hate the other group

00:30:16 more than we we care about the actual um policies that they are trying to promote I think one example of how it's not always just about politics either I mean the way we might or might not be manipulated one is I'm a infrequent user of Instagram and I don't use Tick Tock but I understand Instagram says hey we have to get more of what tick tock's doing so we're going to show little videos so there's so those ridiculously appealing videos of dogs and cats that I and the next thing I'm going with again

00:30:47 you know before I'm able to break away and that's just plucking in my emotions right there's nothing typically political it was the one with the bulldog with the Trump hat on but aside from that it was though it's just emotionally engaging and they're very good at it I was like Doritos are you they you want to have another one another one and you keep going but the other topic which is again not not really political maybe it is a little bit but it's this article today in the paper about the this new finding about Chaucer I wanted to mention this earlier

00:31:18 today so uh Chaucer has been accused by certain uh literary Experts of being have having raped somebody and in any way being a misogynist and a lot of feminist literary Scholars have been applying feminist analysis to Chaucer as the father of English literature so to speak anyway someone came up with this wonderful it seemed to me wonderful and it may not be because we'd have to be checked but the the interpretation of

00:31:49 this these legal documents May mean that it wasn't the word um is this a special term they use they seem to demonstrate that this was basically a def the the woman was basically defending herself against the accusation she left her previous employer too quickly and was uh was taken to chaucers and both of them were in defense of this lawsuit anyway I'm sorry if this is confusing to you all my

00:32:20 point is it may have changed the world view of many of these people so I'm thinking gee I wonder how some of these feminist Scholars are going to react and I and I and I was really pleased to see that the ones that were quoted in New York Times anyway had a really good and measured response to it you know like well this doesn't mean that everything we do about feminist scholarship is now invalidated whether or not this is you know whatever this however this gets determined but I knew I was thinking to myself people are invested in a particular view you know and they almost

00:32:52 resist the idea of changing like they will disbelieve they're a little bit more skeptical of the new finding let's say because they want to hold on to their view of the way things are and and I I think that's fascinating because the skin is not exactly a political a political case isn't that rational about what you just described how do you mean I mean like I've lived you know I've lived a number of years like I've educated myself about a topic and I've like developed what I consider to be informed views about things if I encounter a piece of information that like maybe challenges

00:33:24 some part of my existing belief structure like sure like uh you know I might be skeptical of it because it contradicts like it contradicts my world view which I've rationally you know constructed of course um but like it would be very strange from a rational perspective if I were to encounter one piece of information that contradicts what I think and then so totally changed my opinion right um but wouldn't you take pride in thinking that you're open-minded to changing your point of view and whether yeah I mean changed it you might say oh sure yes yeah but I think

00:33:58 um uh open-mindedness doesn't necessarily mean that you are just like your opinions are being swayed by every piece of information that you encounter and I think sometimes that's the idea that people have when when um the term sort of open-minded is used and I think I actually think that would be irrational and and totally unworkable if people went around the world just just totally changing their views based on the last piece of information that they encounter this is I'm caricaturing what you what you just said but um we have people here with more expertise who could probably speak to what I'm trying to say but uh I guess you know often these kinds of patterns

00:34:29 where people say like oh you're resisting this information well yeah I mean of course people are resisting information that like challenges their worldview like why would we expect anything otherwise scientists do that all the time I guess I'm thinking there's a value in in believing in your um intellectual uh indifference of the outcome I'm not saying you are going to do that you're a human being and that's natural it is natural but if you say about people oh it's only only natural

00:34:59 you're going to be in a camp that's your that's the camp you're in and if you say well there's a real value in ascribing to some impartiality right and I think that we've lost a little bit of that that there's uh Trump made some comments some time ago that oh of course someone made that decision because they're a democratic judge and um Justice Roberts said nothing aren't Democratic judges and Republican judges now I I think this is fascinating because I I have to say I don't know anyone

00:35:32 in my circle who and most of those people do not like Trump whatsoever I think they all go yeah he's right okay now see to me that comment of Roberts was prescriptive not so much descriptive like it sort of yes we should we should be able to believe in the indifference of our jurists because that's that's really the ideal you say well in a real world it doesn't work that way and you're being a fool you're being naive but you see instead of saying oh good for you for supporting the idea of impartiality you're you're

00:36:04 sort of looked at like you're some kind of night some nape right I think that's unfortunate I mean why not why not believe in impartiality as a as an ideal well I think as long as it's clear that this is aspirational rather than descriptive but that's what it is about certain things and you can't be impartial about it so if they told you the best treatment for depression is to hang yourself you can't

00:36:34 be you can't be impartial about such a thing but I think part of the issue is to be somebody said that's skeptical and have a certain more balanced view is that it helps with anxiety you can see that in your office if you have a couple and one of them doesn't trust the other one the lack of trust becomes a major preoccupation going around and around

00:37:05 next thing you know they're checking each other's cell phones they're doing this so trust is very important and I think what's happening with all this misinformation is that you end up diminishing people's trust and therefore you get the kind of agitation that we've seen especially in this country a couple years ago where everybody is so agitated you have patients who are waking up at two o'clock three o'clock four o'clock in the morning I say patience because that's my source of information but I'm

00:37:35 sure some of my friends were doing that to check the news and so that kind of thing is uh psychologically damaging so there is a limit to how much a misinformation can actually affect people's mental health and I think it does and to develop skepticism about all the information is a positive look and I think you're both getting on something

00:38:07 important in terms of you mentioned something about uh presenting a balanced View and what is a balanced view because uh hanging yourself is not a good treatment for depression and you shouldn't be given the same way as a I don't know some actual forms of therapy but this is something that um the the nurse media has struggled with and that uh in leading to the Trump election uh it used to be in uh in a

00:38:38 newspaper reporting that you present two sides of an issue and that's supposed to be balanced but uh I think that reporters today they have come they're still struggling with this but they're coming to the realization that are just giving equal equal time and equal uh word count to two issues that's not necessarily a balanced view or if you're talking about having a I don't know a TV a TV show with interviews about uh or a panel about the climate climate change

00:39:11 uh you know and you have a climate scientist and a climate denier that's not a balanced view because in one case you have the exception view of a specific issue and in delegates you have somebody who represents uh I don't know thousands of climate Society so it's it's not that's not balanced that would be imbalance but uh I do not think that we have arrived to the right formula for 100 different size of an issue with

00:39:41 appropriate weights well you Tim you mentioned uh the cynicism before and you know for me the issue of cynicism as I was saying my thesis just a moment ago that if people are considered to be somehow stupid or naive to be open to some you know consensus opinion or some Authority and or if they're made

00:40:14 fun of for thinking or believing in impartiality that doesn't breed uh that doesn't breathe trust it just won't you're wrong for being for having any trust in in an impartial decision you're just a fool and I I'm afraid that's a meme in our society right now it's it's keeping us away from forming establishing uh some kind of legitimate sources of Authority for many of these topics and and there seemed to be a change in how we react to evidence

00:40:44 I think evidence is maybe a key word here um on one hand we have uh more and more segments of the population who just reject evidence as irrelevant um and on the other let them take for example you know what the uh the uh January 6 hearings right now there is a I think kind of a feeling that no matter how much evidence the committee will accumulate uh some people will not be persuaded by it right maybe because they distrust the source of the evidence or maybe because they just

00:41:15 don't it doesn't change their mind at the same time where evidence is losing its meaning for many people you now have a new kind of um brand of conspiracism that doesn't rely on any evidence at all I mean I take the take the Q Anon conspiracy for example uh people are willing to believe in in outrageous arguments based on very little uh it's it's different even from the the conspiracy theories of let's say 2001

00:41:46 where truthers around the 9 11 attacks or trying to collect Every Beat of information they could you know they would try to I mean it was of course inaccurate and wrong but at least it was an attempt to kind of find some information that can support their side I remember all the you know the attempts to calculate the the heat levels of the metal and whatnot these days the new conspiracies are just arguments being thrown around um people are willing to at least spread

00:42:17 them without any support whatsoever and at the same time they're willing to reject the scientific community that that is is working around um around facts and evidence right and I think that part of the problem and one of the reasons not necessarily the main reason but one of the reasons that we don't have trust and that misinformation continues impeded is that we have a lack of accountability I don't think that we can have trust without accountability

00:42:47 and uh I think that perhaps there are some uh there's there's um there's a sea change or the beginnings of a sea change I mean we just uh had the uh Alex Jones uh trial for spreading this uh misinformation with the with the with the families of the uh Sandy Sandy Hook victims um but uh but for for a very long time for over a decade he was able to spread these misinformation and uh making a lot

00:43:19 of money out of it without without any consequence I mean just to throw out one other ingredient in this um I mean yeah I'm uh I thought your take on the sort of um objectivity and you know the extent to which sort of whether something is truly objective say in journalism has been challenged um you know I I think the you know what's going on part of what's going on here is that um we have claims by kind of established players so like

00:43:49 journalists um like judges uh who are you know they're they're claiming some sort of objectivity or neutrality um but people you know have they're taking some other evidence like some whether it's their experience or their feeling that there's no accountability or being able to point to outcomes that contradict this this assertion of objectivity and they're saying what you're saying isn't true or you know I don't believe what you're telling us because we have this other evidence that you know you're obviously biased towards this outcome and it's easier than ever

00:44:20 to obtain that independent evidence um that at least challenges these traditional claims to objectivity and and lack of bias and you know one thing that's making that easier is transparency or just you know the ability to actually collect your own your own data and make that available for other people traditionally you know most information that people would use to make these kinds of Assessments was channeled through these kinds of Gatekeepers um but but today you know whether it's through literally laws that

00:44:50 allow people to um just request documents from from government authorities or social media which can take very obscure pieces of information and suddenly put them in before millions of people um suddenly um you know there is other evidence that people can use to challenge these claims to Authority which are based on um you know neutrality or objectivity and um that can't withstand that kind of scrutiny um it you know if people are willing to believe that that the claims are not fully fully based on

00:45:22 um yeah like on a solid foundation um some of the efforts have been to try to police or regulate the messages and social media and then that that's a fraud to some degree fraud right I I think people don't understand how unregulated social media is um part of it is intentional I mean we decided to put social media under Section 230 which means that we read them as a technology industry and not a

00:45:53 media industry right um I don't think people understand how arbitrary the process of moderating information on social media is it's basically still uh you know based on on those companies making um decisions based on their on their financial kind of benefits um they can they are not legally bound to remove misinformation there are no clear rules about what's considered

00:46:23 misinformation or not this is the wild west of information why is misinformation bothering us more now because we have more access to it because what sorry because we have more of it or more access to misinformation why are we so bothered about it I mean we knew it was always there I I think that what's new about misinformation in the digital era is that we we are communicating now in an environment that prioritized the algorithms that you talked about

00:46:55 earlier I think for a long time we were worried that the algorithms are pushing us toward information we already believe in so there was a lot of discussion of filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers and all those ideas but I think these days it seems more evident that the environment that we communicate in prioritizes engagement I mean at the end of the day it's a financial decision the the social media companies like Facebook and Tick Tock and YouTube are free meaning they need

00:47:25 to make money somehow and they do that by keeping us engaged for as long as possible collecting our data uh and tailoring advertisements to us right in order to do that they need to give us information that is going to keep us interested misinformation just fits the bill better than facts um I I think the the information environment that we are working in and almost living in these days just prioritizes misinformation more than before more than the mass media or

00:47:56 mainstream media era that was more bound to to some objective Norms of objectivity and something that I think should bother us is uh about the access and vulnerability that young people have to misinformation this this is no and uh I have three children they're 11 12 and 15 and I noticed especially during the pandemic during Zoom school and uh in my two all these kids over a couple of years older

00:48:27 at the time I guess uh 13 and 11 and uh and I I learned a little bit too late and that we've done our best to remedy it but they have been subjected to a vast amount of misinformation online and we had a number of conversations and uh I had not even been aware of this and that uh you know even with misinformation being kind of my my field in a sense but uh but this was uh basically happening uh in front of me

00:48:57 and I wasn't seeing it and young people they have access but they don't have the tools it's difficult to have the tools as even as informing us as informed adults but uh in some of these simple this misinformation is specifically targeting children and young people and uh yeah I think it's a it's a big problem and it's a no problem well if it's true that it's it's way less regulated than ever in the past would that mean how would it be

00:49:28 regulated now is that something you're in favor of I mean it's I mean gosh I mean if you're talking about I mean if you're talking about things that are targeted to children I mean that seems like a pretty ripe area for regulations that seems like yeah um that seems like that's a pretty pretty uncontroversial statement um so let's start there um yeah um are we skipping are we going to regulation now yeah I mean I was I I was I yeah I was interested in actually

00:49:59 being off something else that you said so I mean you've been talking a little bit about sort of learning basically like training and teaching people how to basically sift through um the the information that they encounter um and there's been a lot of talk about um you know trying to improve educational efforts um both you know in children and even later in life um so I've been very interested for example in things like um digital media literacy you know trying to come up with ways of improving

00:50:29 people's digital literacy skills as a potential solution for um people's susceptibility to misinformation um and so I'm curious if you've like you know ever kind of thought about that or if you've encountered these kinds of issues if you are optimistic about these kinds of approaches for um helping to solve this problem well uh optimistic um I don't think this is the only solution but I think it's an integral part of the of the solution and uh

00:51:02 because um I mean to to to be able to save through all of this information and decide what to give what to discard you first need to be aware of your own vulnerabilities you have to be aware that there are all of these various sources of information I think also there's a lack of awareness of our own just um a neurological susceptibilities as a human beings with the nervous systems that we have how we can fall prey to all

00:51:36 sorts of perceptual cognitive biases I don't think that this is really well understood or accepted you think okay I'm gonna be able to uh I know that there is a misinformation out there but I know myself I know that I can make a good decision and you can convince yourself that you can be a good judge but fundamentally you have to realize that you have to keep questioning yourself because you are vulnerable in ways that are not going to be apparent to you

00:52:07 I I want to go back to regulation for a second it's a really tough topic and and all of us are struggling to to answer those questions uh I think there are two parts or two components that we need to consider uh first is what do we regulate um and the second is who who is supposed to do that so the first one is heart I mean both of them are hard the but the first one is really really hard because the amount of misinformation right now is so big that we cannot regulate all of it right so we need to make a decision on where to to draw the line in the sand

00:52:39 for me for example I mean it's it's still vague but my kind of borderline will be where people are people's lives or or well-being are put at risk right so maybe we wouldn't regulate any Mis uh misstated argument on the internet but if something is for example a conspiracy is putting a complete a full um uh racial group at risk for example maybe that's the place where you want to intervene so first of all we need decide what to regulate and what not I mean

00:53:10 what kind of lies to take down and whatnot the second problem of course is who's going to do it um and and both options are pretty bad uh one option is to let the government do that and we know that in the past governments had abused this power the Chinese government for example right now is regulating Tick-Tock in a way that removes let's say information that's favorable to the Hong Kong and Taiwanese side right

00:53:41 um we can think of other examples from the history when when governments use their power to regulate information to detrimental effects the other option is to let the companies themselves do that and and that once again is problematic do we trust Twitter to decide what's truth and what's false do we trust YouTube to be the arbitraries of Truth the answer is of course not they are uh first and foremost business people their concern is with the bottom line

00:54:11 um of their companies and they are not um they don't have a motivation really to keep the information environment clean now between these two if I had to choose I would still go with the government because at least the government is being elected by the people I mean nobody elected Mark Zuckerberg to have so much power over information politicians are not perfect governments are not perfect but at least they at least we have so as Citizens we have some uh Authority uh over over selecting

00:54:43 them or or you know monitoring their behaviors um so not no solution is perfect but um but I think we need to start talking about governmental regulation it happens in other countries I mean in the United States it sounds like uh like a big deal to ask the government to interfere with information but take Germany or Austria for example uh where it is illegal to let's say deny the Holocaust right I mean there are laws in place um and again how do you decide what to

00:55:15 make into a law where something is becoming uh existential threat to to people's uh safety right so maybe it's time to start seriously thinking about regulation yeah I I wasn't actually necessarily I didn't want you to get the idea that I was in favor of Regulation although I know there aren't that many uh obvious solutions to it I also agree with the idea of educating people more uh to try to become more skeptical I I'm a little bit um pessimistic about educating people

00:55:46 basically because of what your original premise is which is we're really prone to these sorts of uh uh the trickery we just are as human beings you know um and then there's this sort of general idea that there's a you know it's interesting that there's so much skepticism about truth started on the left right there was a lot of critics of of skepticism and and uh the relativism of Truth started on the left and then it's sort of really been

00:56:17 appropriated by the right now um and so we have both camps uh have become relativists which is which is difficult right as people say well I don't think the government on one hand should be the ones who decide what's true or what's not true and then the other people say we should be free to say whatever we want we want the First Amendment rights I mean everything's turned upside down um but maybe the idea might be also to you know first of all I think when folks

00:56:47 say well for example example Holocaust denying is illegal in Germany um I I would I don't know anything about their legal system around that but I imagine if you've been cited for claiming the Holocaust wasn't real you might have some ways to address that legally to try to no I didn't do it it was a work of art or whatever you know something of that nature I would think maybe that'd be something could happen here the other is you can get together these businesses and say look you have to come together with to some consensus of what's legitimate you know let the

00:57:19 companies do it as a group and I'll let them know that otherwise it's going to be the government's going to step in it's interesting that a lot of I mean you're mentioning uh where the groups being oppressed because of false information I think Alex Jones was a good example but one of the things they came up with Alex Jones and I know we've all heard about this in other contexts is that there are people getting threatening phone calls and and you could imagine that that's something you could take keep a record of and and it it could be something used as a trigger

00:57:51 point for there's something has to be done about this this is leading to a lot of threats I don't know what you all think of that isn't possible yeah I mean that's something that would probably be illegal you know offline with a telephone so why would that be legal if you're doing it through Twitter or through through Facebook yeah um yeah I will say I thought I thought the way you frame that was was very very good um I per you know personally in terms of Regulation I feel like we actually had a pretty good workable solution for a while uh the section 230 idea which is we're gonna let we're gonna let there be a flourishing of

00:58:22 different platforms they can all figure out their rules and people can sort of go to the platform whose rules that they like problem is that was not designed for a world in which we have like two huge you know two or three huge platforms that have come to somehow dominate our kind of public sphere or that's what that's what it seems like anyway um it was for a world in which there was like AOL and CompuServe and all these little dial-up services and the stakes just don't seem so High um and so you know the question to me is is there a way to sort of adapt this kind of like middle middle path

00:58:53 um to our present day reality which just does not reflect the real quality in which the original regulations were drawn so it included I'll just say yeah the idea behind section 230 was that if you're a technology company that produces let's say a phone you can't be held responsible for what people say on the phone right but with Facebook and Twitter that's not the case anymore their algorithms are determining which information will be more permanent which which information will be more obscured

00:59:25 right meaning they are beginning to hold not beginning they are holding editorial role over what's being said on their platforms and maybe they're not a technology company anymore maybe they are media companies at this point and if they are we need to regulate them just like we did for cable TV and newspapers and all the media that came before easy yeah I think the question really does come down to the extent to which there is some sort of editorial discretion um it's like literally this is literally what some of the court cases now are hinging on

00:59:56 um so it actually isn't the case that there aren't regulations or laws there actually are regulations or laws they're going to be made by one actor or another whether it's a court right or um or or some sort of de facto rule by a company and so I think I think what we should try to you know figure out is whether the public can sort of play a role in um in you know determining what the rules are going to look like because the rules are going to be Set uh one way or another I had um included the reference nfts which are a little bit have receded a

01:00:26 little bit in the in the media coverage of late but I I saw it as it being an effort I mentioned this to you earlier rotem is like an effort to re-establish uh of authenticity in some way because these are ways in which you know these things are supposedly uh um indelible and not open to dispute and similarly Bitcoin which have a relationship in the cryptocurrencies the idea that okay we don't want to trust the FED anymore with the way our money

01:00:57 is being managed we're going to find this sort of democratized way of making sure money is uh transactions are are I don't want a ledger that's indelible how quickly that sort of what do you think about the fact that how quickly this is sort of it was like a little bit of a fad and it seems to be I don't know if it's been received forever but it has receded a little bit one thing that interests me about nfts um is that we we perceive them as less authentic as you said than than money

01:01:29 but um for me it's kind of ironic because money was always fictional I mean right I mean what is money uh what does it mean that I give you a piece of green paper that that that has no value at all you cannot wear it you cannot turn it into a tent or anything you know it depends on trust it depends on trust right I mean the only reason money works is that I can give you this piece of paper and and both of us know that you can take this piece of paper to h m and buy the shirt with them right um I think the nfts are just another

01:02:00 iteration of the same old idea of imagining a financial system uh and and making up rules to play by but yeah it seems like these days it's kind of collapsing I don't know uh I'm not an expert on ift but it seems that the uh there is no there is no country behind the nft it's uh between the buyer and the seller but with let's say dollar you have the United States Treasury guaranteeing that

01:02:31 was just trusting the others or in the market you know in a way it connects to the previous Point um you started talking a little bit about kind of libertarian models of communication what if we just let people be and and hope that they're going to do the best with it uh we seem to put a lot of hopes into that and and it's true for

01:03:03 nfts but it's also true for social media and discussion um we built this um utopian perception of media environments like the internet where if we just let people be themselves if we don't tell them what to you know what to read or what to think or what to say the best content will always Prevail and and it doesn't seem to hold water it when it comes when when push comes to shove uh it seems like we're not always looking for the best content we're not always trying to uh spread the most accurate information

01:03:35 um so so it's nice to kind of dream about the libertarian world where you can just leave people to their own devices and they're going to do the best it doesn't seem to work right do you think this concern about misinformation is going to diminish over the years since there's so much of it and people will then start thinking well I'm reading all this but it's me for misinformation so that they develop a sense of uh skepticism of a degree that unless they

01:04:08 find real evidence in something they just dismiss it I mean I think arguably it's already diminishing I think it's being replaced with other other concerns so for example I mean you know you hear a lot about um other kinds of consequences of social media like um you know harassment hate speech even things like incivility things that um just also make things unpleasant have a lot of harmful effects but don't necessarily hinge on the question of whether something is factually accurate

01:04:40 or not um and so I guess my prediction would be um we'll be here you know the next time that there's a new big technological shift in mass communication um that you know that raises worries about um whether people will be manipulated in some way we'll hear again about misinformation um but now I think the conversation has sort of moved on a little bit and misinformation is I think a potential harmful effect of social media but there are lots of others and um I think it's perhaps healthy that we

01:05:11 you know we're kind of making some room for some of these other things as well and I think it will be unlikely that people will just anything that I read anything that I see um on on the web I'm going to distress I think it's uh it's going to keep uh it's being curated currently it's going to be even more so that's uh it links to the polarization issue but I think that people will always have some particular sources of information that they trust

01:05:42 implicitly and they'll be seeking that kind of content that they are already predisposed to trust so so I don't think that there will be like a widespread skepticism about any sort of information but perhaps more polarization even so I think um the the idea behind um nfts and cryptocurrencies was an effort to sort of codify a form of authenticity and it fails it just fails

01:06:13 because what people need is more trust and you you like to think well if I if I if I codify it I make it absolutely uh unassailable yes or no that that's not replacing trust between human beings it's really an interesting right I mean that is an interesting point yeah I mean I I agree that that's potentially a cautionary tale but um I'm not sure um I guess I don't know if that's universally the case right so here we have a situation um you know in kind of financial markets

01:06:44 right so maybe like we really need trust um you know to sustain like a healthy uh healthy Market um uh but I see some more things going on with our our previous discussion about um how do you know which sources of information to trust um can we replace that kind of trust with authenticity well I think that's happening too right um if you look at um where I mean when I just talk to my students you know they don't even think about information in terms of trust they think about influencers that they follow you know

01:07:15 they um they think about um you know broadcasters um who um who they find like authentic or real so people are already using authenticity as a sort of a metric for where they should get information um and so it is a question to me as to whether that sort of replacing trust with authenticity but it's that closer effect like do you trust some influencer because they're authentic or they seem authentically you know it's a good question it's a good

01:07:46 question it's a good question um yeah yeah um but I guess like one one way that you could think about this I don't know if this is accurate but you know as trust has sort of declined across the board in a number of spaces people still need some they need something that can just simply solve the problem of like where do I turn shortcuts yeah what shortcuts do I use and um maybe you know maybe I'm just using these words interchangeably or something but it's like there is something about the authenticity of the messenger now

01:08:16 that um that seems different than this kind of traditional notion of the apparent of this apparent yes exactly I'm all in favor of authenticity and I agree with everything you said I'm just saying that thinking you're going to find it by having it digitalized that the us is going to be vouch saved by the author by the digital the code is it's not going to happen if Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies ever take off it's not going to be because they have uh because of the tech their blockchain technology it's going to be because people start to

01:08:47 put trust into it right it's not good because of the technology is what I'm saying well it's like something that inherently can't be hard-coded it's like well if like at the point where you have to sign a contract with someone it's like well you're not relying on trust anymore like you know right so well should we open up the floor to some questions do anyone does anyone you're asking questions why don't you come over here yeah please because one of them picked up on the mic

01:09:21 so I'm curious with so many different views of reality and everything you guys have been talking about how will history be written about our time will it be in parallel tracks will there be a history that is true history of what was real what was fact what was fact-based we never had true history well maybe but it seems like it's more at risk now than possibly it's been before

01:09:53 the blood is also that came out last year about the events in Guatemala and the U.S role in whatever it was that happened in Guatemala well that only uh is something that came up in a more consistent and coherent way with Vargas Lawson's book so where is what is the accurate history of what happened in

01:10:23 Guatemala until that point now I know it's a problem but this seems even more fraught with conflict about what really did have I think um I'm not that I'm a historian but um I have a little bit more faith there's going to be a consensus that will be built over time right now history already historian disagree about you know the way things went and they reinterpret parts of History still to

01:10:53 this day and not always in a highly polarized Democrat versus a republican way but just because there are honest disagreements among historians about how things go I mentioned a story about Chaucer today it's a good example and that may be debated um no I think among academic historians that that's it there there will be enough of a consensus uh about what's what uh actually I I am I am more uh optimistic about the future historians than I am about what's happening today

01:11:24 because I I do think that uh the the access to uh information and to spreading information it's uh there there are so many people today like anybody has a voice and so future historians will have access not just to establish experts governments reporters but uh we don't know how the everyday person used to think about in the in the Middle Ages they didn't have a voice that we have been able to recover today so I

01:11:55 think that future historians will have to shift through content but they will have a lot more to work with than we have today about era's past but that itself is going to pose I mean completely agree with what's been said but that itself is going to pose a huge challenge like it's going to be this challenge of abundance versus right uh but it's a scientist that's a good thing to have too much data yeah no I I agree but just as like a practical matter you know I've tried to reconstruct what people have said on Twitter like last

01:12:25 week and you should try it sometime it's really hard because people are responding to they're responding to other people directly and indirectly people are making sort of vague like uh you know vague references to things that are not always obvious after the fact um you know reconstructing the context I think is going to be increasingly difficult um because it's told like it's told through um like like memes and references that are constantly evolving and it's going to be like trying to decipher like

01:12:56 hieroglyphics in a way so and uh and with that information be preserved in forms that are accessible well yeah I mean just because it's digital doesn't mean it doesn't Decay exactly um yeah well hopefully will be people who are you know academics who are motivated to do that work on the hieroglyphics I I like to think there is you know a lot of people have written about history uh what you know books about historical Pro developments are not always exactly historians either and we could think of some economists who've written pretty

01:13:27 Divergent views Hayek and Keynes and pretty Divergent views about how history is going to economic history but also General history and that we've survived with that you know so I'm I'm I'm reasonably hopeful about that anybody else oh please step up to the mic okay so um since we have since we have some um political scientists here the first thing I want

01:13:57 to ask um this concept it's a little tangential but it comes back uh political science my understanding of science is You observe the world you make theories you test those theories through experiment and then you see if your theories were correct now if we want to guide this in the context of today's topic um uh misinformation and um and algorithms would a political scientist be able to conduct an experiment on this topic and

01:14:31 make predictions and theories and is it is that something they would do or even more generally would do political scientists just make predictions but don't run experiments can you comment on that a little bit uh that's a great question um yeah you're right I mean uh as sort of social scientists um we want to be able to make and test hypotheses which often means you're testing predictions um so certainly you know speaking for

01:15:01 myself and my own research I'm like everything that I try to do fits the framework that you just described when you're talking about misinformation Things become difficult because they're ethical issues involved so you know if I could think of the ideal experiment that I would like to run um it would probably you know it would involve like you know exposing people to a ton of misinformation then see what happens well that's not that doesn't seem ethical to me right and so you can run that you get rats right sorry oh yeah exactly so you can do it on rats um and so uh part of the sort of the the

01:15:32 creative challenge uh of doing this kind of research is trying to trying to you know explore ways of studying these questions in ways that don't require you to be a mad scientist basically and some of that involves natural experiments so you know uh have platforms change the way that they've operated and so does this speak to this particular you know hypothesis about say the effects of misinformation um the other thing is that a lot of the most interesting research that's happening right now both by political scientists but also people in uh psychology and other fields

01:16:03 um and communication is um trying to test the effectiveness of different kinds of solutions for misinformation so take it as a given what can we do um to sort of reduce people's belief and misinformation in ways that you know don't infringe on other kinds of values like free expression um so I think this is all a very active area of of research but I agree that sort of we want to take the sort of scientific in paris's path to to understanding these questions

01:16:34 of some sort experiments with uh well uh not on a certain source of misinformation we actually we do uh we have done a number of experiments with uh misdirection as you might have in uh in a magic show we actually study magic tricks directly as uh to investigate various kinds of cognitive biases so so yeah you you you can do this uh these kinds of things it's a it's a bit less of an ethical

01:17:04 concern where you're investigating magic tricks but you can get that similar kinds of issues I'll just add that um first of all there ain't one approach to to scientific inquiry of political science uh both Andy and me are more quantitative and and I guess uh possible statistic in in nature but some people don't accept that as the only way to understand the world uh in the area of misinformation

01:17:35 specifically I think that that um in both your field of political science and in my field of communication we are getting very good at building micro theories of of misinformation uh which can be tested experimentally in in the lab or in controlled environment what we are not able to do is is to use scientific methods to answer those big questions like how does misinformation influence our society that's something you cannot put into a lab or or you

01:18:05 cannot create two societies that are equal on everything except for the Press presence of misinformation so I think we're spending a lot of our time on the micro level of just understanding the psychological processes and in their regard we are taking a very uh an approach that's very similar to the hard Sciences as much as possible within implementation of humans and subjects well first of all thank you for this wonderful discussion and a few years ago a study uh made at MIT media lab the

01:18:41 question was do fake news spread faster and more than real news or truthful news and the answer was yes so the problem is why and one may think well because of bots and new technology that can multiply the diffusion but the result of the study uh uh tell uh something different apparently uh a fake

01:19:11 news spread faster because of human beings because of the emotional reaction they they evoke so my question is when we are discussing the impact of new technologies uh the temptation to be apocalyptic is already at hand but shouldn't we go back to the human factor because as you said we are basically the same so confirmation bias you said that reassurance

01:19:43 conformism the feeling of being part of a community of people who share the same belief are always the same so I think the human factor probably has to be more investigated than interface there's too much emphasis don't you think there's too much emphasis on the technology thank you um I I do think that uh emotions are a critical uh component that we we know from a neuroscientific perspective Defender and in status of attention that emotions prioritize

01:20:14 attention that's actually uh a lot of the reasons that magicians take advantage of these magicians actually make us laugh at critical points where they need to misdirect us so uh so you can use emotion almost surgically in a magic show also in uh in in social media and in the spread of fake news and we we used to think I mean many years ago the thinking in a science communication was that well

01:20:48 you need to put out the correct information out there and you need to give more detail and you need to communicate it more and so people are going to extract the right conclusion it's just they are arriving to the wrong conclusion because they don't have all the information so let's give more information let's make it more accessible that doesn't fix the problem because you're ignoring the emotional components I can I can I add something I thought yeah I thought that was a great question too um I I also you know as a social

01:21:19 scientist too I think you know humans are always going to be at the center of what I think is important um but as a political scientist I think you know human behavior is structured by institutions um and so kind of another way of saying that um uh how that applies to this topic is that I think um different social media platforms uh have different affordances or different features which can bring out or suppress tendencies that exist in humans and so that's the thing that's really important right there's nothing inherent to um I think there's nothing inherent to

01:21:49 like social media like in the abstract that means that it's going to incentivize um you know engagement with misinformation um but it is baked into some platforms today and that the way that they set up the incentives within the platform and so I think that redesigning um social media how they're designed the kinds of um behaviors that they facilitate for people the kinds of behavior that they encourage from people is something that we should be thinking very seriously about because yeah it's true like humans have a tendency to think of ourselves as

01:22:21 part of a group but that can be that can be emphasized or de-emphasized um and you know what the group is uh right that's not hardwired either and so um these are things that can be brought out through features of social media including things like algorithms um or or not there's a there's been a movement I know and I'll know much about it but I do know that some groups organizations will have people go out together and live a camp out or solve problems right and the whole idea is here they're identifying

01:22:51 with each other yeah but they're cooperating with each other towards certain goals which is different just saying well I'm a liberal or I'm a conservative right and they they're actually targeting some goals and that seems to foster a little bit more of a sense of community yes uh thank you very much for a very stimulating discussion I cannot help but remember that it was a time in human history where the heliocentric system was considered misinformation so

01:23:23 and and and the and the geocentric system was considered Union to be the truth so and people were actually tried you know they were put on the on the fire for challenging the so-called Truth by spreading misinformation okay so uh so my question is is there such a thing as information because if there is misinformation it means that the information is what's true and the misinformation is what's wrong now is there such thing as information and even

01:23:55 if there is what's wrong with challenging Nets and uh so the last thing I'm going to say is is that ins is science is very limited in what objective let's say Truth uh uh uh is like physics I mean uh 90 more than 95 percent of uh medical biomedical published

01:24:26 uh research which we consider science is is not um uh cannot be replicated that tells you how hard establishing what information is at least in the scientific context where you can have objective methodology let alone in the social sciences that's what the problem is so should we err on the side of allowing misinformation because that's the that

01:24:56 makes the dialectic process which allows us to filter and synthesize and refuse and accept that should we allow this information should we are on the side of alarm misinformation or should we err on the side of imposing quote-unquote information which actually may turn out in in maybe the next decade or The Next Century to be false thank you my feeling I think a teacher I think there are different issues at

01:25:28 play here and that uh I think one issue pertains to uh the science Enterprise itself and that it is true that we do have a replicability um a crisis or problem uh more in some areas than in others but uh and and I think that there's a there are fundamental problems with the structure of science how it stands this day the cancer science that gets incentivized the pressure to publish um there there are a lot of problematic

01:26:00 issues and uh and and certainly sometimes it's uh we're playing it a bit too too safe in the in the sense of the uh the research that gets our resources to to be performed um I think that's a different problem from uh misinformation itself and there are in the spread of misinformation I think that by individuals not necessarily

01:26:32 scientists I think that's a different domain from uh is science than the best way it could be done um so so to me those are those are different those are different issues and um yes in in terms of the the other thing I think that's important to keep in mind in terms of the science because uh it was mentioned something about truth and I would say that scientists uh don't try

01:27:02 to get at the truth or uh they should not try together the truth in science is always aspirational and that's why we talk about validating hypothesis not verifying a hypothesis and the hypothesis is correct until it's proven otherwise so as a scientist at least the way that that I was taught to the science and the way that I that I teach my trainees is that you try to eliminate hypotheses that are incorrect and uh and

01:27:33 hopefully you get to narrow down more and more the actual answer but but as a scientist you have to be always in the mind frame that you need to be questioning your own results and uh and there's also others of course but but all the time you're supposed to be revising your framework in light of no evidence yeah I I absolutely love this question uh we can spend two two more hours just just answering this right um you asked what is information forget

01:28:04 about misinformation what's the information and that that bothered every thinker since we learned how to to put our mind into words right I mean that's that's Greek philosophy that's Plato thinking about the people in the cave trying to to figure out if they are really seeing the world or not um I'll I'll kind of get inspiration from all the statues of Freud in this building and and go to another Austrian philosopher of science which is Carl popper right and and I think I'm I'm a

01:28:35 very strong paparian person and I think he reminded us that science is about as you said science is not the search for information it's the it's the systematic rejection of misinformation we would never be able to to prove with certainty that anything that we've seen in studies is true right the best we can do is to reject hypotheses that are wrong we we are able logically to reject some ideas and then at any given moment we need to

01:29:07 take the actions that are uh most suitable to the current state of knowledge that we have at that point take vaccines for example that you talked about before um Can can we say for certain that vaccines have no negative impact of course not we can scientifically we can't we can just reject the the hypothesis that um that people who take the vaccines are more likely than others to have autism for example we can reject this hypothesis but we cannot say for sure

01:29:39 that vaccines will never have a negative influence so so yes science is the is kind of specifics work in this regard we will never get to the truth but I think we are able together in enough consensus on what's wrong to direct policy and and behavior that's more educated if I wanted to make a real quick response to this too um there's uh I think there are different sort of

01:30:11 sorts of misinformation and when the consequence of misinformation could be dangerous of course we we don't we want to figure out a way to get around that a famous director Now sort of Infamous director had this wonderful little bit where he was his neurotic child version of himself was being reprimanded by his mother who said what's it your business if the universe is expanding right so so the idea there's okay you know what if the universe is expanding or not it's we don't need to get to the bottom of that

01:30:41 it's okay with us if you don't accept Authority on that but you know if you go to your doctor and you have a you know God forbid you have a Cancer and the treatment that's going to be offered for you and oftentimes if they're experimental treatments they'll even tell you in advance I can't even say this is going to be good or safe for you but you have to make a decision you know that's where the rubber meets the road you you then I think you're best off putting your trust in the doctor and in return the doctor has to have in his or her mind the idea that I don't want to

01:31:12 let my patient down because this is a almost like a sacred trust that's being placed on me so that means we have to go back and make sure that this this treatment is good and valid sometimes you don't know at any particular point in time but trust is another again comes up as another important feature separating information from misinformation and not always making a clear demarcation right then there cannot be which is part of I think what your question entails yeah thank you yes

01:31:43 please actually that response was very closely related to the question I wanted to ask because um so there's an implication to certain kinds of misinformation and um so that we touched on regular regulation before my questions about are there other kinds of regulatory capacity in sort of societies that exist today or that we can build into our societies because if certain kinds of misinformation might

01:32:14 imply certain kinds of harm to specific people and they're endowed with certain kinds of voices so my question is is it possible to think of how can that create the harm potential harm of misinformation how can that create feedback loops to like a repair capacity is it possible I mean I think this raises I mean I think this is an interesting question that raises you know raises the uh the challenge as to how we sort of build

01:32:46 um sort of uh responsive mechanisms of accountability for any kind of regulatory you know regime that we end up wanting to have so you know what are the rules rules of the road for Content moderation and platform governance and who you know who gets to decide who gets a voice and how these rules are determined I think um there's a strong case to be made that whether this is being channeled through legislatures or some other citizens bodies those bodies should be you know representative of the diversity of

01:33:17 interest in society and very much including people who are the victims uh I mean not only misinformation but you know uh you know harassment and hateful speech that can delegitimize people legitimize groups and make it more difficult to participate as Citizens when we say regulation we usually think of content moderation right removing information that is wrong or adding some disclaimers and so on but recently some Scholars raised some more creative

01:33:47 approaches to regulation and one that I I found really interesting is uh the one suggested by Victor Picard from the University of Pennsylvania he says instead of focusing on on moderation of content let's take taxes from social media companies they make a lot of money from that misinformation right let's take some taxes back and use it to fund high quality journalism you can create a fund and that that kind of you know

01:34:19 Builds on all the money that that being made from our misinformation and build more reliable institutions of knowledge with it so maybe maybe there are more solutions that we're not thinking about but they're more creative than just you know running after the next mistake and trying to correct it all the time well I think that's wonderful it's a great point to High Point end on it's not my idea but it's a great it's a great comment no and I I and and I'm really pleased to hear all the different efforts to sort of come up with some you

01:34:50 know handle some Solution on this uh issue and I want to thank you all three of you for for contributing the way you did thank you thank you