Reinforcing outrage

I got onto social media some years ago for two main reasons; to stay in touch with people I don't get to see frequently (which since the pandemic has been pretty much everyone), and to have a platform for marketing my books.

I'm the first to admit that I'm kind of awful at the latter.  I hate marketing myself, and even though I know I won't be successful as an author if no one ever hears about my work, it goes against the years of childhood training in such winning strategies as "don't talk about yourself" and "don't brag" and (my favorite) "no one wants to hear about that" (usually applied to whatever my current main interest was).

I'm still on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, although for me the last-mentioned seems to mostly involve pics of my dog being cute.  It strikes me on a daily basis, though, how quickly non-dog-pic social media can devolve into a morass of hatefulness -- Twitter seems especially bad in that regard -- and also that I have no clue how the algorithms work that decide for you what you should and should not look at.  It's baffling to me that someone will post a fascinating link or trenchant commentary and get two "likes" and one retweet, and then someone else will post a pic of their lunch and it'll get shared far and wide.

So I haven't learned how to game the system, either to promote my books or to get a thousand retweets of a pic of my own lunch.  Maybe my posts aren't angry enough.  At least that seems to be the recommendation of a study at Yale University that was published last week in Science Advances, which found that expressions of moral outrage on Twitter are more often rewarded by likes and retweets than emotionally neutral ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons "Today Testing" (For derivative), Social Media Marketing Strategy, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Apparently, getting likes and retweets is the human equivalent of the bell ringing for Pavlov's dog.  When our posts are shared, it gives us incentive to post others like them.  And since political outrage gets responses, we tend to move in that direction over time.  Worse still, the effect is strongest for people who are political moderates, meaning the suspicion a lot of us have had for a while -- that social media feeds polarization -- looks like it's spot-on.

"Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” said Yale professor of psychology Molly Crockett, who co-authored the study.  "This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage...  Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement.  Given that moral outrage plays a crucial role in social and political change, we should be aware that tech companies, through the design of their platforms, have the ability to influence the success or failure of collective movements.  Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society.  Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time."

Which is troubling, if not unexpected.  Social media may not just be passively encouraging polarization, but deliberately exploiting our desire for approval.  In doing so, they are not just recording the trends, but actively influencing political outcomes.

It's scary how easily manipulated we are.  The catch-22 is that any attempt to rein in politically-incendiary material on social media runs immediately afoul of the rights of free speech; it took Facebook and Twitter ages to put the brakes on posts about the alleged danger of the COVID vaccines and the "Big Lie" claims of Donald Trump and his cronies that Joe Biden stole the election last November.  (A lot of those posts are still sneaking through, unfortunately.)  So if social media is feeding social media polarization with malice aforethought, the only reasonable response is to think twice about liking and sharing sketchy stuff -- and when in doubt, err on the side of not sharing it.

Either that, or exit social media entirely, something that several friends of mine have elected to do.  I'm reluctant -- there are people, especially on Facebook, who I'd probably lose touch with entirely without it -- but I don't spend much time on it, and (except for posting links to Skeptophilia every morning) hardly post at all.  What I do post is mostly intended for humor's sake; I avoid political stuff pretty much entirely.

So that's our discouraging, if unsurprising, research of the day.  It further reinforces my determination to spend as little time doomscrolling on Twitter as I can.  Not only do I not want to contribute to the nastiness, I don't need the reward of retweets pushing me any further into outrage.  I'm outraged enough as it is.

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Hipster math

One of the guiding principles of teenagerhood is "I want to be unique, just like everyone else."

Not, mind you, that I'm criticizing efforts toward individuality.  We all have to find a way to express ourselves, be it how we dress, talk, or style our hair.  But what's always struck me as funny is how the drive to be different often pushes people toward the same solution, creating stereotypical pseudo-rebellious subcultures that are often parodied because they all on some level look and act alike.

This subject has been the focus of mathematician Jonathan Touboul, of Brandeis University, who looks at how information transfer through societies affects behavior.  And he's been studying something he calls the "hipster effect" -- that rejecting conformity simply drives people to conform to something else.  Even more interesting, he's found that these patterns of synchronization have parallels in how many other systems interact, in areas as different as neural firing patterns and reactions by investors to information about the stock market, and may well be describable by the same mathematical model.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Infrogmation of New Orleans, Redbeans15 Downtown Hipsters, CC BY-SA 2.5]

In his paper "The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look the Same," which appeared in the online journal arXiv, he has the following to say:

In such different domains as neurosciences, spin glasses, social science, economics and finance, large ensemble of interacting individuals following (mainstream) or opposing (hipsters) to the majority are ubiquitous.  In these systems, interactions generally occur after specific delays associated to transport, transmission or integration of information.  We investigate here the impact of anti-conformism combined to delays in the emergent dynamics of large populations of mainstreams and hipsters.  To this purpose, we introduce a class of simple statistical systems of interacting agents composed of (i) mainstreams and anti-conformists in the presence of (ii) delays, possibly heterogeneous, in the transmission of information.  In this simple model, each agent can be in one of two states, and can change state in continuous time with a rate depending on the state of others in the past...  [W]hen hipsters are too slow in detecting the trends, they will consistently make the same choice, and realizing this too late, they will switch, all together to another state where they remain alike.  Similar synchronizations arise when the impact of mainstreams on hipsters choices (and reciprocally) dominate the impact of other hipsters choices, and we show that these may emerge only when the randomness in the hipsters decisions is sufficiently large.  Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science, domains in which delays of communication and the geometry of information accessibility are prominent.

Which is kind of cool.  Although it's a little humbling to think that our choices about how to express who we are, which feel so important and deeply personal, can be emulated by a simple mathematical model that works equally well to describe how nerves fire and how investors make their stock trading decisions.

What's funniest is the outcome when Touboul tried to model a population with equal numbers of conformists and hipsters.  It resulted in a seesawing oscillation between different outcomes -- for a while the hipsters have beards and the conformists don't, but if you wait for a while, the reverse becomes true.

Of course, life is usually more complex than a bunch of binary choices.  But when this is the situation, the result is remarkably predictable.  "For example, if a majority of individuals shave their beard," Touboul said in an interview with Technology Review, "then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to a new, synchronized, switch to shaving."

Touboul wants to expand his model to include choices where there are more than two options, and see if it continues to emulate observed trends in social dynamics.  My guess is it will, although I don't begin to understand how you'd manage the mathematics involved.  As for me, I've got to look around and count the number of guys with facial hair, and decide whether I should shave off my beard.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Facts about a non-epidemic

Having participated in raising two boys who presented nothing more than the usual challenges of parenting a couple of rambunctious and strong-willed kids, I cannot begin to imagine the difficulties faced by parents of an autistic child.

Friends of mine who have children with autism spectrum disorder have told me that the experience is not without its rewards, and I am certain that it is true.  But the obstacles that those children themselves face -- not least in the realm of acceptance by the outside world -- must present their parents with a formidable and exhausting task, and one for which I have nothing but the utmost respect.

Such a diagnosis often leaves parents searching for a cause as well as a treatment, and in such periods of emotional strain people will sometimes grasp at straws.  Thus the completely discredited Andrew Wakefield "study" pinning the cause of autism on routine vaccinations.  The truth is that medical researchers still have not identified a single clear cause for autism spectrum disorder; a genetic basis is strongly suspected, with perhaps a variety of epigenetic effects contributing, along with possible environmental triggers as well.

That, of course, is still not enough for some people, and the vaccine myth persists.  It has been debunked roundly by more authoritative individuals than myself, and a quick Google search will provide you with all of the reputable information you need (and scads of specious and fear-laden pseudoscience, as well).  I want to deal with a different facet of the misinformation here -- the idea that autism rates have skyrocketed in the past few decades.

That we are in the midst of an "autism epidemic."

Such claims are rampant, and bolster the (unsupported) conjecture that autism is caused solely by some toxin in our modern lifestyle (once again, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in vaccines is often named, although its use was discontinued in the USA and EU in 2003).  Take, for example, this article by Dan Olmstead, that not only refers to autism as an "epidemic," but claims that the "medico-industrial complex" is trying to hush the fact up.

The first problem is, Olmstead is trying to support his point using information that simply isn't true.  He claims, for example, that the first children with autism were identified in 1943, even though Houston and Frith's book Autism in History makes an excellent case that one Hugh Blair of Borgue, Scotland exhibited all of the classic symptoms of autism spectrum disorder -- way back in 1747.

But the difficulties run deeper than that.  If Olmstead and (many) others are correct, then there is not only a correlation between vaccination and other environmental toxins in the industrial west, there's also a causative link.

And a study just published in Psychological Medicine demonstrates conclusively that there isn't even a correlation.

This paper does an exhaustive analysis of the data, worldwide, of the incidence of autism in the last twenty years.  And not only does it indicate that the rates of autism haven't changed appreciably in the last twenty years -- pretty curious if it's an "epidemic" -- the incidence of autism in sub-Saharan Africa (30.0 affected children per 100,000), where very few children are vaccinated, is actually higher than that for western Europe (24.8 affected children per 100,000), where almost all children are immunized.

Kind of blows a hole in the idea of a human-induced autism epidemic being suppressed by the evil medico-industrial complex and "Big Pharma."  The authors of the study, of course, put it in more measured terms, stating, "After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010.  Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs."

And if you add that to a further study that found that in places where rates of autism diagnosis have risen, diagnosis of mental retardation has fallen, the situation becomes even clearer.  Consider this graph, developed by from United States Department of Education data:

[after Shattuck et al.]

It is evident that in times past autistic children were lumped in with those who suffered from other developmental disorders -- those unfortunates who were labeled in the US Census starting in 1850 as "idiots, imbeciles, deaf & dumb, blind, or insane" and who were often institutionalized in conditions so horrible that they defy belief.

In taking issue with the people who are publicizing false information about an "autism epidemic," I am in no way trying to minimize the struggles that autistic children and their parents go through, nor am I unsympathetic with their desire to understand the cause.  But no one -- least of all the children with ASD -- are helped in any way by fear-mongering, alarmism, and conspiracy theories.

As with anything: we are always best off knowing the facts, even if those facts still leave us in a state of ignorance regarding ultimate causes.  Recent advances in identifying the genetic underpinning of autism and related disorders leave me hopeful that we may soon have answers; in the meantime, what we need is compassion and understanding for ASD children and their caregivers, and some caution about promoting spurious and unscientific theories about the disorder's origins.