A Roundup of Reviews

With the election weeks away, it’s time to make sure you’re registered to vote, to know where to go and to make a plan for either voting early or when you’ll be able to show up on Nov. 5.

               Voting season is spooky season. Beware the spiderweb of online algorithms and the memes plastered like stickers on the bumpers of social media. Beware the polls. Beware of overconfidence and negativity. Beware of the inherent bias in any platform that wants to keep your eyes locked on it. Social media and news platforms need your eyes to generate advertising dollars.

In the final weeks of election season, how about switching up the style of the column with three reviews that may enrich or deepen how you reflect on the world as you know it?

First, a talk from University of Cambridge researcher, Sander van der Linden, “Why we disagree about facts,” posted to YouTube – you can search the title and speaker’s name. We humans are inherently social beings. We have a tendency to look to other human beings to see what they think, says van der Linden. In social situations, we tend to conform. We let others distort our understanding of reality.

Van der Linden became a social scientist because he was curious about how these human tendencies influence our thought and behavior. They impact his own, he admits in an embarrassing story that he recounts in the talk. While traveling, he and his wife entered a bakery, where he saw they had almond cake. A favorite of his, he approached the counter, but none of the cakes looked like almond cake. The uncertain counter staff suggested that another cake looked like almond cake, and though he was skeptical – it didn’t really – he took a chance. It turned out to be carrot cake, his least favorite.

“How could he not like carrot cake, especially with cream cheese icing?” You might be wondering. Carrot cake is clearly better than almond cake. Right? Humans like to be validated in their beliefs. We sort into like-minded groups to avoid being challenged. So, what happens when wrong information infects a group? No one likes to be wrong. Is there a way to inoculate humans from being swept up in error?

In his book Foolproof: How Misinformation Works And How to Counter It, van der Linden unpacks the mental shortcuts humans use to process the overwhelming amounts of information in the world.

Over decades and around the world, researchers have found that most people scrutinize information five ways: looking to see if others believe it, seeking supporting or corroborating evidence, asking if it fits our previous knowledge on the matter, checking to see if the internal argument makes sense and verifying the source’s credibility. It’s when our brains have limited time and capacity to process that we fall back on cognitive biases and mental shortcuts.

If you want to find out how inoculation against misinformation works, researchers working with van der Linden invented a 15-minute game called Bad News. In it you’ll see how someone builds (un)credible and persuasive content that infects busy and overwhelmed readers in the U.S.

               Bad News may frustrate you if you’re a person concerned with ethics, truth and not gaming the system. But it also shows how the algorithms and social media platforms are built to facilitate opportunism and manipulation. It shows how it works for anyone motivated by influence, validated by followers and persuaded that theirs is the ONLY right way. Check it out at https://inoculation.science/inoculation-games/bad-news/.

               Are you weary of all these people warning you against misinformation? “Who decides what is misinformation anyway,” you may ask yourself. Perhaps you’ll be interested in Jacob N. Shapiro and Sean Norton’s “Why Scholars Should Stop Studying Misinformation” (Sept. 10, 2024, The Chronicle of Higher Education). In the article, the authors point out that “scholarly examination of ‘misinformation’” creates challenges. First, the people creating “misinformation” mix true and false information to achieve their goals and that increases the work of scholars. They have to judge what’s true and what’s false, and they have to investigate what is motivating and incentivizing the creation of misinformation. It creates a whack-a-mole effort because misinformation pops up constantly for all kinds of reasons.

               Instead, they propose that “the global research-policy community should invest in building detection and measurement systems we need to observe how the information environment is changing and how that impacts real-world outcomes.”

               Finally, for a pivot, check out Petr Lebedev and Derek Muller’s “Why Democracy is Mathematically Impossible,” which is a deep dive into many kinds of democratic voting including “winner take all” (also called “first past the post”) voting and types of ranked choice voting. Lebedev and Muller provide a bibliography of their sources, a rarity on YouTube. They’ll help you understand how various forms of voting emerged.

               You’ll learn how the math behind different types of voting leads to our dissatisfaction with elections. For anyone frustrated by the two-party system, Lebedev and Muller suggest that our first-past-the-post voting reinforces that system. So, they dig into ranked choice voting, which is gaining ground in local and state elections around the country. Is it the answer we need? It may be an imperfect improvement, they say. They’ll visually walk you through the probabilities. They’ll show you why there’s always a “dictator,” the pivotal voter who tips a close election. They’ll try to answer the question: how do we find a system where the pivotal voter doesn’t tip the election, but instead reflects the majority? They propose approval voting, giving all candidates an approval rating. Here’s the problem: It’s only been tested on a small scale.

               While these ideas may be new to you, they’re not solutions to problems we face in the next seven weeks. How should we then proceed? As Winston Churchill noted, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms of government that have been tried.”

               The work of democracy asks us to be engaged. It asks us to show up and vote, even in a flawed and dissatisfying election. We’re not only voting for state and federal leadership, we’re voting for local candidates, and these leaders make decisions that impact our day-to-day lives.

If you need to learn more about candidates, especially local and state candidates, the League of Women Voters provides Vote411.org. In addition to non-partisan candidate information, you can check your registration and register to vote.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan, multi-issue political organization which encourages informed and active participation in government. For information about the League, visit the website www.lwvmontcoin.org; or, visit the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, Indiana Facebook page.