Free speech and free deliberation

Data practitioners: data scientists, analysts, researchers, data engineers, data ops engineers, machine learning engineers and artificial intelligence engineers, all dedicate considerable time and energy clarifying and purifying data in the belief that some system, be it human or artificial, will make better decisions with better data. There’s a belief, optimism, that accuracy and validity help to drive understanding, reason, and in general, better. It’s better to be accurate with fatter error bars, experience more discomfort with the ambiguity and make decisions that make things somewhat better than to feel extremely confident and making things a lot worse. Ground truth is difficult to chart, and it’s the bedrock upon which progress is built. It’s why we bother to try.

In our corporate lives, we encounter a lot of misinformation, some of it repeated by well meaning people, and some of it simply manufactured in order to discharge some form of anxiety, be it to gain status, face, position, claim far more credit than objectively credited, halt change, promote change, deflect attention, assign blame to other parties or factors than objectively credited, or other forms of causal attribution. What separates the great companies from the least is the ability of leadership to systematically help the system integrate its anxiety and touch ground truth. Leadership has a few tools to do that. Data practitioners promote the view that an understanding of ground truth is an essential one.

In our social lives, we encounter a lot of misinformation, some of it repeated by well meaning people, and some of it simply manufactured in order to discharge some anxiety. What separates the great societies from the least desirable is the ability of civil society to systematically manage the anxiety and promote the understanding of ground truth.

Free speech

Consider the following three nested contexts: corporate, political, and societal.

If, as an employee in a corporation, you manufacture and disseminate misinformation, then depending on which form of private government (Anderson, 2017) you’re employed by, you may be promoted, bonused, warned, receive a note on your permanent record, held back, demoted, or dismissed. In some cases, where some forms of misinformation is presented to the state or shareholders, employees may end up losing not only the autonomy over their physical selves for a period of time, but may also lose the ability to ever direct a company again. Consequences don’t always involve imprisonment. Even with non-financial reporting, quite a few leaders have been released to discover other opportunities for engaging in various forms of deception with analytics and internal reporting [*].

If, as an employee of society, a politician in an elected office, you manufacture and disseminate misinformation, then depending on which form of government you’re engaged in, and the amount of power you have, you may be dismissed by the electorate, citizenry, or by extra-state actors. In some cases, where misinformation is presented to the judiciary, politicians may end up losing not only the autonomy over their physical selves for awhile, but also lose the ability to ever run for elected office again. In certain systems, spreading misinformation is itself a signal of power. He must get a jolt when, as an authoritarian looks into the camera and lies, and knows that you know that he’s lying, and there’s nothing you can do about it. He’s the monkey in charge of the bananas. In some ways, the integrity issues common with politics has severely reduced the ability of some politicians to affect change. Consequences don’t always involve a humiliating defeat in a safe seat or falling backwards into a bullet accidentally. Even with basic communication, quite a few leaders can be starved of attention by refusing to polarize [**].

If, as a citizen of a society, you manufacture and disseminate misinformation, then depending on the nature of the speech, and the amount of power you have to secure whatever rights you may or may not have, you may be ostracized, lose autonomy over your physical self for a period of time – including forever, be tortured, and/or executed. In some ways, the integrity issues common with society itself has severely reduced the ability of some citizens to affect change. Consequences don’t always involve torture and death. Even with basic communication, quite a few citizens can be shadow banned by their favourite platforms for triggering a false positive classification, with no awareness, and as a result, no recourse [***].

In all three spheres, in different contexts, the ability, desirability, and consequences for the manufacture and dissemination of misinformation vary. The speech itself is free. The distribution of that speech, and the consequences of it, are not.

I don’t know if speech has ever been truly fee. It doesn’t seem likely. There sure does seem to be a monkey around that is awfully sensitive about who’s in charge of the bananas.

Free deliberation

Is deliberation limited in the same way that speech is?

Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought about something if I had had more time to think about it. The brutal aspect about wondering about those experiences is just how much thought I willingly outsourced to third parties.

To take a mundane example, for many years I trusted the planogram architects at Safeway to place products that I’d like at eye level, and to relegate the products that I wouldn’t be as interested in beneath eye level. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time researching mustard selections. At least, not until much later in life. As I accumulated more knowledge about mustard, I came to see more distinctions, and my eyes wandered from the central shelves towards the others. Just because French’s mustard is French, it doesn’t guarantee that it’s as fancy as France itself. I wonder what I would have known sooner if I had thought more about it in my teens.

To take a less mundane example, for many years in the mid-naughties, I trusted the recsys engineers, and my followers, to frame my attention, at eye level, in my newsfeed. I really didn’t start thinking hard about it until social analytics drove me to. Later, I asked you in 2018 who you trusted with your attention. I wonder what I would have thought about data governance if I had a different framing, sooner.

I think a lot about my beliefs about my own estimation of the consequences of misinformation in 2002. I thought that generally, most people were like New Brunswickers: long on memory and reputation. Imagine my surprise in 2004 when it turned out that most Americans were nothing like New Brunswickers. I wonder what I would have thought about reputation attribution if I had a different framing, sooner. More of this in a bit.

If you’ve ever had the experience of truly becoming an expert in something, then you know that feeling when the symmetrical becomes unsymmetrical and the dissonance hits. It becomes quite a bit easier to time travel to the before times, to look at it in the way that it made sense when you experienced that delightful feeling of confidence that you had the subject licked. You really got it. You didn’t of course, but you sure felt as though you did. It takes a lot of time to get over that hump. It takes a lot of deliberation. It takes a lot of work. A lot of discomfort. In most ways, I’d be a lot happier if I knew a lot less about a lot more. Yet, it’s a capability. And for many of us, we get to choose how, and which, capabilities we get to develop in ourselves.

Where there’s liberty there’s heterogeneity. By definition, half the population is sub-median at any capability. That median is in part a function of the social capital investment, the development, the opportunity for every member of a society to realize their fullest potential. Some societies have greater social capital than others. The median is different, in different places, and different times. It follows then that the capability of deliberative capacity is heterogenous.

And I’d predict that where there’s more liberty, you can expect fatter tails on the distribution of deliberative capacity. More liberty means more opportunity to develop more capabilities in all sorts of ways. It makes for a lot more diversity. We don’t get much time to deliberate as much as we want. We can’t all be an informed expert on absolutely everything that goes on in society. We have to make choices amongst weighted alternatives. We have to be strategic in our choices.

Ground truth is important for quality deliberation. Imagine, if you would, going to your local super market for mustard. What if the prices listed under the different bottles of mustard were deliberately mislabelled? What if you needed to stand in line and wait your turn for the cashier to scan the barcode to inform you what the price of that gritty honey dijon truly was? What if the manufacturer deliberately misled you as to the contents of the container? What if you got home and discovered that it wasn’t honey in your dijon at all, but a dye that turned it blue? It would make life a lot harder to deliberate wouldn’t it? Misinformation, like a thick fog blanketing a morning road or a misleading picture on a mustard label, obscures ground truth.

Are you truly free to deliberate if you can’t trust any of the information you’re using to deliberate?

To come back to a less mundane example, when Colin Powell told me on February 5, 2003 that there were WMD in Iraq, I discounted the counter-narrative that he was lying because I imagined the consequences to be devastating. Could you imagine if the US invaded Iraq and there wasn’t WMD? Surely, decision makers would calculate the impact to their ongoing credibility? After all, you’re sending youth to go die in horrific ways, and many are coming back emotionally bruised at best, and physically dead at worst. War is hell. Citizens should be extraordinarily cautious at inviting such pockets on Earth.

As a rather young New Brunswicker, my stance was rooted on the idea of long memories casting long shadows. Looking back, this is a Hinterland way of thinking. Of course trust networks matter in the Hinterland. It’s survival. But in the maw of Washington or Constantinople or Rome, in an imperial core, trust is like coin in the treasury. It’s there to be fritted away.

So whether it’s Dubya, Colin and Tony lying about WMD, it’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner fudging inflation statistics, Tom from Marketing peacocking the digital analytics numbers to look good, a despot lying about aggression because he knows you know he’s lying — are people truly free to deliberate when they’re soaked in misinformation?

Misinformation for fun, profit, status, resistance, protest, power

People will use their free speech to create and disseminate misinformation for fun and profit. LARPers on 4chan are having fun until somebody who doesn’t know any better takes what they’re reading seriously. And then it becomes hilarious for awhile. After all, it is the engine of comedy and these are the equivalent of Internet Elites messing with the simple folk. It’s all comedic until…the most mentally vulnerable lurch deeper into social isolation and radicalization. Then it’s tragic. Because nobody wins.

People will use information to gain status. They’ll do it for the likes and subscribes. Why differentiate by adding value when you can differentiate by being more hardcore extreme than the nearest neighbour?

People will use their free speech to create and disseminate misinformation for resistance and protest. They know that you know that they’re lying. They don’t care because they believe that it’s resisting whoever they are imagining as their opponents. They’re showing those Elites. They’re letting those Elites know that they know. This comment on Twitter will show’em. They’re letting them know that they see them. That’ll do it.

People will use misinformation to mobilize a society to blow bubbles of Hell on Earth.

Given that the short-run incentives to create misinformation are massive, what can be done?

Information for fun, profit, status, resistance, protest, power and progress

Ground truth is ultimately more rewarding.

It’s more fun to discover something that is more likely to be true than to have that feeling later on that you had been misled.

It’s certainly more profitable. Strategies rooted in ground truth are far more likely to be executed in a way that self-reinforce potentials into reality. Strategies rooted in delusion, originating in a banana obsessed mind, are far more likely to be executed in a way that self-reinforce delusion into victim narratives.

Some people earn status for discovering novel truths and telling them, so long as they have sufficient media training. In general though, if you’re looking for status, it’s probably a lot easier to lie about something you said you could have done and totally did but something happened that they’ll totally tell you about latter. Don’t worry about it.

Telling the truth is a powerful form of resistance and protest. Authoritarians hate comedy the most because the laughter is an uncontrollable response.

The truth is the motherlode of power and progress.

Information is the best kind of free speech because it enables so much more free deliberation.

It’s the best alignment.

In the short-run, the return on misinformation is great. In the medium-run, the cost of misinformation is ruinous.

It could be somewhat better.

It’s worth it to try.

Sources and Footnotes

Anderson, E. (2017). Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It).

[*] The integrity issues within marketing are more known outside of marketing, which has severely reduced the ability of the CMO to sit at the big table and affect any sort of strategic change. There’s framing and then there’s deception. This distinction matters.

[**] How many boring, yet useful, voices starve for want of attention?

[***] Many algorithms reward engagement, which incentivizes extreme valence. That valence frontier is jagged, and if it’s difficult to train an agent to algorithmically detect where the gradient, what chance do the unskilled have?