“The Constitution of Knowledge” Excerpts

Excerpts from “The Constitution of Knowledge”

What is objective reality?

Jonathan Rauch

Fall 2018

…Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with…. Previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump's approach is entirely different….

He was asserting that truth and falsehood were subject to his will…. The lying reflects a strategy,... a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood….

Michael Hayden, “We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself."....

What is objective reality? …Humans have no direct access to an objective world independent of our minds and senses, and subjective certainty is in no way a guarantee of truth….

(Objective reality) is a set of propositions: propositions that have been validated in some way, and have thereby been shown to be at least conditionally true — true, that is, unless debunked.,,,  

(But) the locution "validated in some way" hides a cheat. In what way? … Who should decide who is right? And who should decide who gets to decide? … This is the problem of social epistemology, which concerns itself with how societies come to some kind of public understanding about truth.

No wonder we hanker for consensus…. Disagreement about core issues and even core facts is inherent in human nature and essential in a free society…. 

We need an elite consensus, and hopefully also something approaching a public consensus, on the method of validating propositions. ... A critical mass needs to agree on what it is we do that distinguishes truth from falsehood, and more important, on who does it.

Who can be trusted to resolve questions about objective truth? The best answer turns out to be no one in particular…. After the invention of the printing press...experimenters and philosophers began entertaining a radical idea. They removed reality-making from the authoritarian control of priests and princes and placed it in the hands of a decentralized, globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other's errors. In other words, they outsourced objectivity to a social network. Gradually, in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the network's norms and institutions assembled themselves into a system of rules for identifying truth: a constitution of knowledge. 

Though nowhere encoded in law, the constitution of knowledge has its own equivalents of checks and balances (peer review and replication), separation of powers (specialization), governing institutions (scientific societies and professional bodies), voting (citations and confirmations), and civic virtues (submit your beliefs for checking if you want to be taken seriously). The members of the community that supports and upholds the constitution of knowledge do not have to agree on facts; the whole point, indeed, is to manage their disagreements. But they do need to agree on some rules.

One rule is that any hypothesis can be floated. That's free speech. But another rule is that a hypothesis can join reality only insofar as it persuades people after withstanding vigorous questioning and criticism. That's social testing. Only those propositions that are broadly agreed to have withstood testing over time qualify as knowledge, and even they stand only unless and until debunked. The community that follows these rules is defined by its values and practices….

in 2017, CNN fired three senior journalists for getting a story wrong,... CNN showed that, unlike Trump, it adheres to standards of verification….

The community that lives by the standards of verification constantly argues about itself, yet by doing so provides its members with time and space to work through their disagreements without authoritarian oversight….

The results have been spectacular, in three ways above all. First, by organizing millions of minds to tackle billions of problems, the epistemic constitution disseminates knowledge at a staggering rate.... Second, by insisting on validating truths through a decentralized, non-coercive process that forces us to convince each other with evidence and argument, it ends the practice of killing ideas by killing their proponents.... A marketplace of persuasion, because the only way to establish knowledge is to convince others you are right. Third, by placing reality under the control of no one in particular, it dethrones intellectual authoritarianism and commits liberal society foundationally to intellectual pluralism and freedom of thought.

But they have always had natural enemies. TROLL EPISTEMOLOGY. Unlike ordinary lies and propaganda, which try to make you believe something, disinformation tries to make you disbelieve everything. It scatters so much bad information, and casts so many aspersions on so many sources of information, that people throw up their hands and say, "They're all a pack of liars."...Steve Bannon…, "[T]he way to deal with [the media] is to flood the zone with shit."

Cross-pollinated with the internet to produce something new: the decentralized, swarm-based version of disinformation that has come to be known as trolling. Trolls attack real news; they attack the sources of real news; they disseminate fake news; and they create artificial copies of themselves to disseminate even more fake news. By unleashing great quantities of lies and half-truths, and then piling on and swarming, they achieve hive-mind coordination. Because trolling need not bother with persuasion or anything more than very superficial plausibility, it can concern itself with being addictively outrageous. Epistemically, it is anarchistic, giving no valence to truth at all; like a virus, all it cares about is replicating and spreading….

All it can do is spread confusion and demolish trust…. Some trolls find it amusing to give offense (what they call "triggering"); some style themselves protesters against political correctness; and some love the thrill of vandalism and defiance. But there are other, less nihilistic reasons.

We run the hypotheses through a massive, socially distributed error-finding process. Only a tiny few make it to the narrow end of the funnel…. The constitution of knowledge makes a very strong claim: a claim to supremacy in organizing social decision-making about what is and is not reality (much as the U.S. Constitution claims supremacy in organizing political decision-making)... If your beliefs don't check out, or if you don't submit them for checking, you can't expect anyone else to publish, care about, or even notice what you think….

By insisting that all the fact checkers and hypothesis testers out there are phonies, trolls discredit the very possibility of a socially validated reality and open the door to tribal knowledge, personal knowledge, partisan knowledge, and other manifestations of epistemic anarchy…. 

That last tactic is especially insidious. The constitution of knowledge is organized around an epistemic honor code: Objective truth exists; efforts to find it should be impersonal; credentials matter; what hasn't been tested isn't knowledge; and so on. Trolls violate all those norms: They mock truth, sling mud, trash credentials, ridicule testing, and all the rest. Instinctively, the champions of the constitution of knowledge defend their values — but when they do, they "feed the troll.”....

In 2013, someone using the handle @backupwraith tweeted, "i firmly believe that @realDonaldTrump is the most superior troll on the whole of twitter." Whereupon @realDonaldTrump took the trouble to tweet back: "A great compliment!" We can't say he didn't warn us.

 Liberalism's diffuse, decentralized model thrives on dissent…. The Associated Press could bundle reporting from reputable papers everywhere and distribute it to outlets around the world. Economies of scale favored real news….

What we could not foresee was a perfect storm of technological, economic, and political changes, all working to the disadvantage of the constitution of knowledge…. First, social media created a distribution platform for disinformation…. Second, software learned to hack our brains. Sophisticated algorithms and granular data allowed messages and images to be minutely tuned and targeted…. Third, the clickbait economy created a business model. Disinformation went from vandalistic to profitable…. Because accurate reportage is orders of magnitude more expensive to produce than disinformation, the economic advantage of real news vaporized.

Politicians and nation-states weaponized trolling…. Trump's most important contribution to the trolling of the American mind is not what he says, but that it is impossible to ignore what he says….  

The troll army will encounter a disadvantage. Trolls have swarms, but the constitution of knowledge has institutions…. Creating knowledge is inherently a professionalized and structured affair…. (It) requires time, money, skill, expertise, and intricate social interaction…. But at the core of the constitution of knowledge, by its very nature, are professional networks.

The distinguishing characteristic of journalism is professional editing…. The distinguishing characteristic of academic research is professional review…. Modern jurisprudence, policy development, and intelligence collection would be unthinkable without institutions like the courts, law schools, and think tanks, as well as agencies like the Congressional Budget Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Central Intelligence Agency, and many others — all staffed and run by elaborately trained people who exchange detailed knowledge across specialized channels, using protocols developed over decades and centuries. To be an accomplished scholar or journalist requires years of training and acculturation, which only institutions can provide….   

Troll networks are acephalous (without a head), which makes them self-organizing and persistent…. They cannot approach the institutional depth of the communities built up around the constitution of knowledge, nor do they try. Instead, they relentlessly attack the institutions at the heart of those communities, hoping to make the public see professional academics and journalists as scammers peddling biased personal opinions….  

How much damage the troll attack inflicts depends on a lot of things, but it depends most on how successfully the institutions rally to improve their performance and defend their values…. Trump's attacks on the press seem to have strengthened its resolve and its popularity…. The courts and law enforcement have also responded resolutely, even bravely…. Whether Facebook and Google can get a handle on the problem remains to be seen, but they are trying, and that is important and good.

But then, in the not-so-hot category, there is academia, … On campus, conservative speakers are often shunned, shouted down, denounced in hysterical terms…. News stories about campus intolerance and unreason ricochet throughout the media to portray the university as a place that puts political standards ahead of professional ones. No wonder much of the public has formed the impression that academia is not trustworthy….

Universities are the mainstays of the constitution of knowledge. They train students and scholars in the methods and mores of structured inquiry; they build and safeguard knowledge; they ask the questions that others overlook or avoid…. And so if universities are rackets, merely imposing some opinions on everyone else or pursuing someone's political agenda, then the constitution of knowledge is a racket, too.