

Confimation bias in dense networks: Or why Obama is the anti-christ - ChaitanyaSai
http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2009/08/confimation-bias-in-dense-networks-or-why-obama-will-continue-to-be-the-antichrist.html

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davi
I was at a family gathering of my in-laws last weekend. A bunch of older men,
aged 50-75, were sitting around the table with beers and scotches, and talking
about the decline of the newspaper, what it meant, etc. One had an iPhone and
read the New York Times using their iPhone app. It was interesting to see the
web reaching these men, who came of age in the pre-PC era.

My contribution to the conversation was exactly this idea: that the subtler
problem with web-based news was how easy it becomes for like-minded kooks to
come together and confirm each others' realities. In some cases, this is a
good thing -- like how D&D players or startup founders can find each other and
form communities. But in the case of semi-delusional, 911-was-an-inside-job,
birther, we-didn't-go-to-the-moon types, or even Rush Limbaugh's misinformed
dittoheads, what we have is a _fragmentation of reality_ , in which each
subculture occupies a different narrative about what is happening in the
world. It's like a Philip K. Dick novel.

After I disgorged my profound insight, the 75-year-old told me it has always
been that way. :)

But it does seem plausible that the web is accelerating and amplifying the
tendency.

~~~
pg
Oh, very clearly, and not just recently, either. I think the ability of people
to connect peer-to-peer via the Internet is one of the forces driving the rise
of evangelical Christianity in the US. Those forces were always there, but
they were deliberately suppressed back when the media was dominated by a few
big companies.

I remember once watching an NFL football game on TV, probably in the 90s,
where at some point a group of players spontaneously knelt in prayer. They
switched cameras off them instantly. It occurred to me that this probably
happened quite a lot during games, and that the network probably had a
deliberate policy of not showing it.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing
to say. Even more interesting is the assertion that somehow the media used to
deliberately suppress this.

Football and prayer has gone together (as with other sports in America) since
their inception. Same goes for politics. I remember reading a guy who studies
political speeches. He said that only recently has it become commonplace _not_
to mention god or some kind of faith in a political speech. Up until now,
state of the union addresses, senatorial speeches, stump speeches, etc. well
full of religious imagery. (Still quite a bit of it)

None of this was ever "suppressed"

 _I_ wonder how much of this is not only clustering and selection bias by
various groups, but also quite a bit of "us versus them" going on. I'm sure in
some evangelical group somewhere they're probably lamenting how the internet
is causing the rise of atheists and how, up until now, the media was helping
keep a lid on these kooks.

~~~
gruseom
_Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing
to say._

It doesn't "seem" like you really mean "interesting", but there's nothing
controversial here. From the most recent survey of American religious
identification:

"Another notable finding is the _rise_ in the preference to self-identify as
'Born Again' or 'Evangelical'" (emphasis added)

[http://www.americanreligionsurvey-
aris.org/reports/ARIS_Repo...](http://www.americanreligionsurvey-
aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf) (pdf)

There's also the fact that evangelicals just came off an unprecedented 8-year
run of political power, surely the apex of their influence in US history to
date. So they've been rising in at least two senses.

On the other point, I don't know about the influence of the internet, but it's
pretty clear that until some time in the late 90s, or perhaps with the advent
of GWB, evangelicals were almost exclusively treated as an unseemly species of
white trash by the media and mainstream US culture. It isn't far-fetched to
say that expressions of that faith were suppressed. In fact, it used to bother
me that they were treated with such knee-jerk contempt. (It now bothers me
less, after observing what they did with their newfound influence.)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Great report -- thanks.

Sorry if the word "interesting" sounded suspicious to you. I made a
concentrated effort to try to find an adjective that was non-pejorative. PG's
comment DID interest me, so that's the one I used.

Speaking of terms, we must have some problem with definitions here. The report
you cite actually makes the opposite point than you desire: _The U. S.
population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of
every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008._ If you
count whatever they define as just evangelicals, it IS growing, but that's
just a default category and a very,very small slice for people unaffiliated
with other major branches -- and it's surely not the folks you mean. Not if
you're bringing up GWB (who wouldn't fit there)

GWB, once you get the demonization out of your system, is certainly no example
of evangelical political power. He's just another religious person who became
president. there's a long line of them: Jimmy Carter taught Sunday School in a
Baptist church (and still teaches there). Reagan was supported by the Moral
Majority. Kennedy was a practicing Catholic. Indeed, every president that's
ever sent troops into battle has heavily used religious rhetoric as part of
that, no matter what their religious personal beliefs. And it's all been
televised and covered copiously by the media.

Evangelicals, if they're the ones in your study, are like .8 percent of the
population. That's hardly a base to exercise an "unprecedented 8-year run of
political power"

~~~
gruseom
Oh dear. Are we having a religious _and_ political argument? We'll both get
banned!

1\. When they say "evangelicals" they don't mean 0.8%. They mean "people who
self-identify as born-again or evangelical" and it says right on the first
page (under "Highlights") that this is 34% of the US. The confusion arises
because they use the term in a much more specialized sense in two places. But
if you look through all the uses of "evangelical" in the study, as I did,
there's no doubt that everywhere else they're referring to the 34% definition.

2\. GWB obviously fits in this 34%. Kennedy and Reagan obviously would not.
Carter is an interesting hybrid.

3\. Yes, atheists are rising as well. But this isn't any "opposite point" to
what I "desire". Two things can be rising at the same time. (Indeed, my
comment originally mentioned how the US is becoming more religiously
polarized, with atheists and evangelicals growing and mainline Protestantism
dwindling. But I deleted it for brevity.)

4\. There are many examples of evangelicals exercising political power under
GWB. Think of all the appointments that were made of people from evangelical
law schools (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling>). I'm sure they
did not exercise as much political power _as they would have liked_. But GWB
went far further in this direction than ever before. That is all.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I think we're hidden deep enough it's okay.

Let's agree to postpone this discussion for a better time and place. I've got
problems with the term "evangelical law school" You _do_ realize that almost
every old college on the east coast was originally some sort of Christian
institution, right? Which means there had to have been loads of folks trained
at religious institutions in the past.

I started to do some research on this, but BDS is currently so bad it made the
process painful. Better to wait a while.

~~~
wheels
There's a bit of a difference between east coast schools being historically
Christian institutions that have gradually shifted towards secularism over a
few centuries and colleges that were founded in the last 30 years by
politically active televangelists.

------
warfangle
Interesting article, but the google trends he uses are quite noisy. It might
have been better if he could have gotten trends from one (or several) of the
many meyers-brigg test sites out there.

Google trends only track how "interesting" a topic is... not how many people
have a given trait. So the second half the post is fairly bunk.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
Google trends are noisy, but there is still a pretty strong signal in there
([http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-
presen...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-
google-trends.html)). And almost surely that signal is gathered from a far
larger audience than the MBTI sites. That said, it would be interesting to
correlate their numbers with the google trends.

------
chrischen
We should hook up politicians to MRI during debates to see which one is
bullshitting.

~~~
chadgeidel
(snark) If you think the MRI's would show different results, you haven't been
following politics long enough.

~~~
chrischen
... which one, or both

------
icey
This article would be just as interesting without the linkbait title.

~~~
fburnaby
I had concluded just the opposite.

~~~
icey
You feel that the linkbait title somehow improves the article?

