How magic & anthropology can help us understand misinformation (Spam Mail #23)

Hi there,

I love taking ideas from different disciplines to solve a problem, and this week’s issue has two very different Financial Times articles on misinformation.

Both articles give a unique lens to the misinformation issue, and they’re particularly fascinating when looking back at the history of the internet. This week there’s Vandal and Esquire’s internet history to do that too.

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💎 Word gems

What magic teaches us about misinformation (Financial Times / Tim Harford)

A fascinating dive into why we share misinformation. It sounds so simple but our impulse is to share, not judge true or false. Harford has a wonderfully cutting statement: “We fondly imagine ourselves to be sharper, more attentive and more consistent than we truly are. Our own brains conspire in the illusion, filling the vast blind spots with plausible images." We simply just don’t pay enough attention.

Why do people — and by “people” I mean “you and I” — accept and spread misinformation? The two obvious explanations are both disheartening.  

The first is that we are incapable of telling the difference between truth and lies. In this view, politicians and other opinion-formers are such skilled deceivers that we are helpless, or the issues are so complex that they defy understanding, or we lack basic numeracy and critical-thinking skills.

The second explanation is that we know the difference and we don’t care. In order to stick close to our political tribe, we reach the conclusions we want to reach.  

There is truth in both these explanations. But is there a third account of how we think about the claims we see in the news and on social media — an account that, ironically, has received far too little attention? That account centres on attention itself: it suggests that we fail to distinguish truth from lies not because we can’t and not because we won’t, but because — as with Robbins’s waistcoat — we are simply not giving the matter our focus.

The human factor — why data is not enough to understand the world (Financial Times / Gillian Tett)

Continuing the misinformation thread, Tett highlights how data alone isn’t enough. Tett argues why mixing in anthropology brings in the more ‘fuzzy’ side of data and knowledge to understand all sides of complex issues better.

Even in a digitised world, humans are not robots, but gloriously contradictory, complex, multi-layered beings, who come with a dazzling variety of cultures. We cannot afford to ignore this diversity, even after a year in which we have been cloistered in our own homes and social tribes; least of all given the fact that global connections leave us all inadvertently exposed to each other. So in a world shaped by one AI, artificial intelligence, we need a second AI, too — anthropology intelligence.

The 50 Greatest Moments in Internet History (Esquire / Daisy Hernandez)

There’s some questionable choices, especially for the more recent moments, but this is a fun trip through the history of the internet nonetheless.

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