The network of nonsense

I've long been fascinated with communication network theory -- the model that maps out the rules behind the spread of information (and its ugly cousin, disinformation).  Back in my day (you'll have to imagine me saying this in a creaky old-geezer voice) both moved a lot more slowly; communities devoted to conspiracies, for example, had to rely on such clunky modes of transmission as newsletters, magazines, and word-of-mouth.

Now?  The internet, and especially social media, have become rapid-transit networks for bullshit.  The phenomenon of a certain idea, video, meme, or link "going viral" has meant that virtually overnight, it can go from being essentially unknown to basically everyone who is online seeing it.  There was nothing even close to comparable forty years ago.

Communications network theory looks at connectedness between different communities and individuals, the role of nodes (people or groups who are multiply-connected to many other people and groups), and "tastemakers" -- individuals whose promotion of something virtually guarantees it gaining widespread notice.  The mathematics of this model is, unfortunately, over my head, but the concepts are fascinating.  Consider the paper that came out this week in the journal Social Media and Society, "From 'Nasa Lies' to 'Reptilian Eyes': Mapping Communication About 10 Conspiracy Theories, Their Communities, and Main Propagators on Twitter," by Daniela Mahl, Jing Zeng, and Mike Schäfer of the University of Zürich.

In this study, they looked at the communities that have grown up around ten different conspiracy theories:

1. Agenda 21, which claims that the United Nations has a plan to strip nations of their sovereignty and launch a one-world government
2. The anti-vaccination movement
3. The Flat Earthers
4. Chemtrails -- the idea we're being dosed with psychotropic chemicals via jet exhaust contrails
5. Climate change deniers
6. Directed energy weapons -- high-intensity beams are being used to kill people and start natural disasters like major forest fires
7. The Illuminati
8. Pizzagate -- the claim that the Democrats are running some kind of nationwide human trafficking/pedophilia ring
9. The Reptilians -- many major world leaders are reptilian aliens in disguise, and you can sometimes catch a glimpse of their real appearance in video clips
10. "9/11 was an inside job"

They also looked at connections to two non-conspiracy communities -- pro-vaccination and anti-flat-Earth.

The researchers analyzed thousands of different accounts and tens of thousands of tweets to see what kind of overlap there was between these twelve online communities, as based on hashtag use, retweets, and so on.

What they found was that the communities studied formed eight tightly-networked clusters.  Here's a diagram of their results:

There are a couple of interesting features of this.

First, that six of the communities are so entangled that they form two multiply-connected clusters, the chemtrail/Illuminati/Reptilians cluster, and the Pizzagate/9/11/climate change denial clusters.  Both make sense considering who is pushing each of them -- the first by such conspiracy loons as David Icke, and the second by far-right media like Fox, OAN, and Newsmax.

Note, however, that even if three of the other conspiracy theories -- the anti-vaxxers, Agenda 21, and directed energy weapons -- are distinct enough that they form their own nodes, they still have strong connections to all the others.  The only one that stands out as essentially independent of all the others is the Flat Earthers.

Evidently the Flerfs are so batshit crazy that even the other crazies don't want to have anything to do with them.

This demonstrates something that I've long believed; that acceptance of one loony idea makes you more likely to fall for others.  Once you've jettisoned evidence-based science as your touchstone for deciding what is the truth, you'll believe damn near anything.

The other thing that jumps out at me is that the pro-vaccine and anti-flat-Earth groups have virtually no connections to any of the others.  They are effectively closed off from the groups they're trying to counter.  What this means is discouraging; that the people working to fight the network of nonsense by creating accounts dedicated to promoting the truth are sitting in an echo chamber, and their well-meant and fervent messages are not reaching the people whose minds need to be changed.

It's something that I've observed before; that it's all very well for people on Twitter and Facebook to post well-reasoned arguments about why Tucker Carlson, Tomi Lahren, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are full of shit, but they're never going to be read by anyone who doesn't already agree.

It's why Fox News is so insidious.  Years ago, they and their spokespeople, commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, started off by convincing their listeners that everyone else was lying.  Once you've decided that the only way to get the truth is to rely on one single source, you're at the mercy of the integrity and accuracy of that source.  In the case of Fox, you are vulnerable to being manipulated by a group of people whose representation of the news is so skewed it has run afoul of Great Britain's Office of Communications multiple times on the basis of inaccuracy, partiality, and inflammatory content.  (And in fact, last year Fox began an international streaming service in the UK, largely motivated by the fact that online content is outside the jurisdiction of the Office of Communications.)

Mahl et al. write:

Both anti-conspiracy theory communities, Anti-Flat Earth and Pro-Vaccination, are centered around scientists and medical practitioners.  Their use of pro-conspiracy theory hashtags likely is an attempt to directly engage and confront users who disseminate conspiracy theories.  Studies from social psychology have shown that cross-group communication can be an effective way to resolve misunderstandings, rumors, and misinformation.  By deliberately using pro-conspiracy hashtags, anti-conspiracy theory accounts inject their ideas into the conspiracists’ conversations.  However, our study suggests that this visibility does not translate into cross-group communication, that is, retweeting each other’s messages.  This, in turn, indicates that debunking efforts hardly traverse the two clusters.

I wish I had an answer to all this.  It's one thing if a group of misinformed people read arguments countering their beliefs and reject them; it's another thing entirely if the misinformed people are so isolated from the truth that they never even see it.  Twitter and Facebook have given at least a nod toward deplatforming the worst offenders -- one study found that the flow of political misinformation on Twitter dropped by 75% after Donald Trump's account was suspended -- but it's not dealing with the problem as a whole, because there even if you delete the platforms of the people responsible for the wellspring of bullshit, there will always be others waiting in the wings to step in and take over.

However discouraging this is, it does mean that the skeptics and science types can't give up.  Okay, we're not as multiply-connected as the wackos are; so we have to be louder, more insistent, more persistent.  Saying "oh, well, nothing we can do about it" and throwing in the towel will have only one effect; making sure the disinformation platforms reach more people and poison more conduits of discourse.

And I, for one, am not ready to sit back and accept that as inevitable.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The meaning of love

There's no denying that as careful as we try to be, language can be ambiguous.  One of the first things I used to do with my Critical Thinking classes was to get them to think about how terms are defined, and how that can change the meaning of what someone says or writes -- sometimes causing serious misunderstandings.  They start with a list of words -- love, evil, truth, beauty, loyalty, jealousy, and so on -- and first try to define them on their own, then for each one, come up with a word that's a synonym but has a differing emotional weight.  Then they compare their answers to their classmates'.

The results are eye-opening.  Not only do the definitions differ wildly, when they try to come up with synonyms, there is a huge variety of suggestions, many of which don't carry the same connotations at all.  For evil I've had students with bad, wrong, hateful, destructive, wicked, immoral, sinister, and despicable -- which themselves carry drastically different meanings.

And that's for just one word.  By the time we're done with the whole exercise, they have a pretty good idea why misunderstandings are so common.

A study that came out yesterday in Science adds a new layer of complication to the situation.  Apparently the connotations of emotionally-laden words differ greatly between languages.  So if you look up how to translate the word love into Latvian, you'll certainly find a corresponding word -- but the associations that a native speaker of Latvian has with the word might differ greatly from yours.

The paper was entitled, "Emotion Semantics Show Both Cultural Variation and Universal Structure," and was the work of a team of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and mathematicians led by Joshua Conrad Jackson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  What they did was to use a statistical model to create networks of words that had associations with each other, for no less than 2,474 languages from twenty different language families.

The results were fascinating.  The authors write:

[W]e take a new quantitative approach to estimate variability and structure in emotion semantics.  Our approach examines cases of colexification, instances in which multiple concepts are coexpressed by the same word form within a language.  Colexifications are useful for addressing questions about semantic structure because they often arise when two concepts are perceived as conceptually similar.  Persian, for instance, uses the word-form ænduh to express both the concepts of “grief” and “regret,” whereas the Sirkhi dialect of Dargwa uses the word-form dard to express both the concepts of “grief” and “anxiety.”  Persian speakers may therefore understand “grief” as an emotion more similar to “regret,” whereas Dargwa speakers may understand “grief” as more similar to “anxiety.”

It takes long enough to become fluent in a second language; how much longer would it take to understand all of the subtle connotations of words?  Even if you're using the "right word" -- the one a native speaker would use -- you might still misjudge the context unless you had a deep understanding of the culture.

Here are four examples of their linguistic networks:

The most interesting thing I noticed about these maps was the placement of the word anger.  In Austronesian languages, anger connects most strongly to hate; in Austroasiatic languages, to envy; and in Indo-European languages, to anxiety.  I can only imagine the misunderstandings that would occur if a speaker of a language from one of those families was speaking to a speaker of a language from another, and said something as simple as, "I am angry with you."

Another curious example is the familiar Hawaiian word aloha, which is usually translated into English as love.  The researchers found that to a native speaker of Hawaiian, aloha does mean love, but it is strongly connected with a word that is surprising to English speakers; pity.  The meaning of love, which is supposed to transcend all cultural barriers somehow, is apparently not as uniform across languages as one might expect.

The authors conclude thus;

Questions about the meaning of human emotions are age-old, and debate about the nature of emotion persists in scientific literature...  Analyzing these networks sheds light on the cultural and biological evolutionary mechanisms underlying how emotions are ascribed meaning in languages around the world.  Although debates about the relationship between language and conscious experience are notoriously difficult to resolve, our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that emotion experiences vary systematically across cultural groups...  Analyzing the diverse ways that people use language promises to yield insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale.

And considering how interlinked our societies are across the globe, anything we can do to foster deeper understanding is worth doing.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor.  What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions.  What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon?  Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns?  What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?

Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading.  His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor.  It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Networks and creativity

It's no wonder I'm interested in the neurological origins of creativity.

Besides the fact that I'm a fiction writer -- so coming up with creative and engaging lies is basically my stock-in-trade -- I'm also a lifelong musician.  And I'm not the only one in my family.  They're all creative in various ways.  My father was an amateur jewelry-maker and designed and built stained-glass windows in his spare time.  My mom was a ceramic artist and exceptionally talented oil painter.  My wife's art consists of using handwritten text, much of it almost microscopic, in combination with watercolors and glass etching to create pieces of an intricacy that nearly beggars belief.  (Take ten minutes and check it out; I can almost guarantee you've never seen anything quite like it.)  Our older son is a talented sketch artist and cartoonist, and our younger makes his living as a professional glassblower.

So I can say with all due modesty that we're a pretty creative bunch.

As far as where it all comes from, that's a little trickier.  The nature/nurture issue rears its ugly head here; it's certainly a possibility that creativity is to some extent genetic, but (in the case of my kids, for example) they were raised by parents who were constantly looking for new ideas and modes of expression, so it's natural enough that they gravitated that way themselves.  But last month, a paper  was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called "Robust Prediction of Individual Creative Ability from Brain Functional Connectivity," by Roger Beaty et al., which gives some credence to the fact that whatever its ultimate cause, creativity has a definite biological underpinning.

What the researchers did was to use fMRI data from 183 individuals who were engaged in a classical divergent thinking task (such as, "Think of as many possible uses for a paperclip as you can").  People vary greatly in their competence at these sorts of things; an average person might be able to come up with twenty or so, but a highly creative person can generate many more -- usually by questioning the baseline assumption of the task (for example, does it have to be a standard paperclip made of metal?  Could it be made of styrofoam?  Could it be a hundred feet tall?).

What they found was that the people who scored as the most creative (the highest on the divergent thinking scale) had a different fundamental connectivity in their brains.  The authors write:

At the behavioral level, we found a strong correlation between creative thinking ability and self-reported creative behavior and accomplishment in the arts and sciences (r = 0.54).  At the neural level, we found a pattern of functional brain connectivity related to high-creative thinking ability consisting of frontal and parietal regions within default, salience, and executive brain systems.  In a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis, we show that this neural model can reliably predict the creative quality of ideas generated by novel participants within the sample.  Furthermore, in a series of external validation analyses using data from two independent task fMRI samples and a large task-free resting-state fMRI sample, we demonstrate robust prediction of individual creative thinking ability from the same pattern of brain connectivity.  The findings thus reveal a whole-brain network associated with high-creative ability comprised of cortical hubs within default, salience, and executive systems—intrinsic functional networks that tend to work in opposition—suggesting that highly creative people are characterized by the ability to simultaneously engage these large-scale brain networks.

So the presence of this connectivity between different parts of the brain acts as a good predictor of the capacity for creative thought, and (apparently) also correlates with creative behavior (e.g. taking up art, music, writing, dance, and so on).

Which probably explains why it's so difficult to teach creativity.  In my experience both in writing and in music, it's not hard to teach someone to improve their skills (although in practice, it does take a lot of work on the part of the student), but it's nearly impossible to teach creativity itself.  In writing, training someone to generate novel ideas is a bit of an uphill battle.  In music, learning how to play expressively can be equally challenging.  I distinctly remember one of my flute students who had hired me specifically to teach her how to play with feeling -- her playing, she told me, had been characterized as "cold" and "mechanical."  Over a period of a few weeks, I found something very interesting about her.  Technically, she was a better flutist than I am.  Her sight-reading ability was certainly leaps and bounds beyond mine.  But if she wasn't told how to play something -- if there were no dynamic markings of "fortissimo" and "pianissimo" on the page, for example -- she had no idea what to do with it.

At first, I was convinced she just had never been shown how to recognize the emotional content of music, but could be taught to do it.  I tried to start with the simple stuff first.  We took a piece of Shetland folk music that, to me, is heartwrenchingly emotional -- the lament "Da Slockit Light."  I played it for her completely flat, no dynamics, and asked her to try to identify for me how she would add dynamics to increase its emotional impact -- where, for example, to play louder or softer, where the emotional climax of the tune was, and so on.

She couldn't do it.  She was trying -- that much was clear -- but it became quickly obvious that she was guessing.  So I played it for her with the dynamic structure as I heard it, and she said, "That was really pretty, but I don't know how you figured that out."

I find a similar thing in my biology classes.  The final project is that the students do a design-your-own-experiment -- they come up with an idea they want to test, and figure out how they could create an experiment to find the answer.  Some students jump right in; their problem often is that they come up with too many ideas, and have a hard time winnowing it down to a single one.  But some students find this task nearly impossible.  I have some methods for helping them at least generate an idea they can work with, but the process of coming up with a creative question to ask about the world is difficult and frustrating.

I wonder if it's all the same thing, really, and might have to do with the multiply-connective brain networks identified by Beaty et al.  All of these things require you to link disparate realms -- sounds with emotions, media with visual impact, scientific questions with novel methods.

Whether this connectivity is genetic or comes from early exposure and training is still an open question, of course.  But it does show one thing -- being able to think outside the box requires your brain to have boxes with distinctly blurry edges.