Echo chambers: a defence

It’s become fashionable to decry “safe spaces” and echo chambers and to call instead for cognitive diversity. Instinctively, I agree: cognitive diversity is one counterweight to the tightly bounded knowledge and rationality that afflict us all.

In this context, then, I’m pleased to see a recent paper (pdf) by Ole Jann and Christoph Schottmuller which defends echo chambers.

To see their point, consider what happens when a rightist says a government can’t raise much money merely by taxing the rich. Leftists reply: “you’re just a shill for the rich. Who fnds you?” A useful message is therefore ignored. Imagine then we are segregated into echo chambers of left and right, and a leftist says the same thing to a leftish audience. Because s/he cannot be dismissed as a shill, the same message is taken seriously. Worthwhile information thus enters leftist thinking.

There are many examples of this. If CNBC says something disobliging about Trump, it’s “fake news”, but if (ex hypothesi!) Fox were to do so, it’d have credence with Trump voters. And whereas Jacob Rees Mogg’s diatribes against the EU are ignored by Remainers, criticism of the EU (some of which is warranted) would be taken seriously if uttered by Remainers.

In these ways, echo chambers can actually promote worthwhile discourse by filtering out comments that’d not be taken seriously because they are discredited by association with our opponents, whilst giving proper credence to similar comments coming from like-minded people.

Jann and Schottmuller say:

Segregation into small, homogeneous groups can be a rational choice that maximizes the amount of information available to an individual. In fact, homophilic segregation can be efficient and even Pareto-optimal for society

There’s another way this can be true. If we know we’re speaking among friends, we can be more candid. “Safe spaces” can free like-minded people to express sentiments they would otherwise repress if they feared they’d be exploited by their opponents. The model here is perhaps the Chatham House rule, which allows speech to be reported outside as long as it isn’t credited to a particular person. This frees people to speak more freely than they otherwise would. “Safe spaces may provide opportunities to communicate that would otherwise not exist” say Jann and Schottmuller.

Now, there are caveats here. All this takes for granted that there is sharp polarization. It would be better if there weren’t and that we could speak freely and credibly across divisions. Given that we cannot, however, echo chambers might be a way to improve communication and to get messages across that would otherwise be ignored.

Also, this requires that there be some degree of diversity within the chambers. If people were to endlessly split and create new echo chambers after every slight disagreement – as the People’s Front of Judea and some Trotskyites have done – then information is lost anyway.

The issue here is crucially important. In a polarized world, how can we best promote credible and high quality political communication? I’m not sure if Jann and Schottmuller are right that echo chambers really are the answer – although I welcome their challenging of my priors. But theirs is a much more useful intervention than partisan mythologizing about threats to free speech.

Comments

[Polltroll]

Echo chambers may give people access to the maximum quantity of information, but if that information is largely the same few themes repeated ad nauseam (which is why they're called echo chambers) then maybe it's preferable to sacrifice quantity for variety. I do appreciate that we may all be more open to uncomfortable messages when they come from those whose judgement we trust, but conversely I wonder whether people would even voice these opinions in an echo chamber where they would be unpopular. I, for one, am only comfortable expressing what I know would be an unpopular political opinion (or even a straight-up fact) when hiding behind a pseudonym (as now).

[Lord]

Echo chambers are what opposition hears when they listen to views far different from their own, unable to grasp the diversity and nuance being discussed. It all sounds the same to them. That is opposed to actual echo chambers where our dear leader and the select merely repeat the same lines over and over to changing audiences, without discussion at all.

[Anon]

I think the danger is not so much that the bubbles split as that wrongthinkers are cast out of whichever bubble they're in, or silenced under threat of outcasting.

For myself - posting (e.g. on Twitter) under my real name, which I've masked for the sake of this comment - I'm closely allied with

Corbynites
anti-Zionist Jews
gender-critical feminists
critics of counter-terrorist policing
critics of Continuity Remain
critics of Public Health England

One or two of these things are not like the others; the people who 'like' and RT my thoughts on Corbyn, Prevent and the People's Vote campaign go rather quiet (at best) when I tweet in support of Woman's Place UK or against 'plain packaging' and the 14-unit limit. But I don't think I'm going to end up talking to three other people in a bijou libertarian-feminist-Marxist filter bubble; it seems far more likely that I'll carry on inhabiting multiple different bubbles, but feel under increasing pressure to watch my words, and restrict certain topics to audiences where they'll be welcome.

[Ted]

Do you really buy the BBC's argument? The fact that the numbers are so low might suggest that they're asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. Has anyone really suggested that book bans are an issue? It's much more about an issue of cognitive diversity.

I suspect that most "no platforming" is done at the student union level, so asking the university is pointless.

The article does -at least - acknowledge that they don't account for the chilling effect of internal politics.

[Robert Mitchell]

That Popular Front of Judea guy is me!

[Alex]

I think the filter bubble concept should be binned. I don't see people withdrawing into a cocoon of consensus, but rather, gleefully seeking out anything that outrages them. It's not a bubble, it's more like a giant radiotelescope dish antenna pulling in every last faintest squeak of outrage from the other side of the universe.

[Nick Drew]

How 'safe' are these echo-chambers / bubbles anyway? Even supposedly secure stuff from WhatsApp groups gets published, and if it is grist to the other side's mill, highlighted and vilified.