Of Rabbit Holes and Echo Chambers

“The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself
before she found herself falling down a very deep well.”

So begins the adventures of Alice in Wonderland where Alice literally falls down the hole of the White Rabbit, transporting her to a strange and alternative universe called Wonderland. There she has many wondrous, often bizarre adventures with thoroughly illogical and very strange creatures, often changing size. Through its amazing creativity, the book quickly became a best seller and its popularity continues today, faithfully engaging the imaginations of all ages.

Alice in Wonderland falls into a literary genre called “nonsense,” a class of writings which upend language conventions and logical reasonings. Its enduring story resonates at many levels, from the entertaining to the symbolic, with many features of this “nonsense” story often showing up in contemporary culture as timeless metaphors.

The rabbit hole is one of those widely used metaphors to which Webster calls a “complexly bizarre or difficult state or situation conceived of as a hole into which one falls or descends.” You can “trip” into the rabbit hole through the taking of hallucinogenic drugs, or you can get there unintentionally when repeatedly sidetracked. Or, as Morpheus said in the Matrix, “You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Ashamed and Troubled
“I am ashamed. Ashamed of a biased and corrupt media, ashamed that this is happening in the USA. Ashamed that people whom I consider friends are willing to look the other way and believe they’re right without knowing or wanting to know the facts. I am ashamed that they are not willing to consider or acknowledge that something very unusual and way out of the norm has occurred, the implications of which are sinister and deeply troubling.”

I recently saw words like this posted, deep into the post-election period. The poster was one of the good guys and I wanted to be of help. A wealth of factual information was readily available through the many court opinions. I provided him with some links so he could read those opinions himself. I had been impressed by their consistent findings, and how the many affidavits had been dealt with when confronted by the rule of law. A blindfolded Lady Justice had taken those allegations and weighed them in her balance. Forty-six verdicts had come in with nearly all of those allegations found wanting.

If the poster had just read those opinions, I’m sure he’d discover that the MSM was spot on. He’d know that the only “biased and prejudiced media coverage” were from the sources he thought were true, and that the only “sinister and troubling” things came from right-wing media’s continued escalation of false narratives.

I wish I could help more folks like him, but that’s not how this process works. Once the tribalist train has left the station, the time for facts is gone. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t first reason themselves into. And the more you push back against a tribalist narrative, the more they stiffen their ideological position as their journey into the rabbit hole goes deeper.

The present-day version of the rabbit hole metaphor is a media-driven three-step journey. It starts with a tribal narrative that we quickly turn into personal belief. It’s then reinforced through cognitive biases where we pick and choose to cement in those beliefs. Social pressures sharpen this narrative through the influence of dichotomous thinking. Our media consumption then circles the wagons creating echo chambers for more of the same, as we spiral down into the rabbit hole where we become bound and blinded by our tribes.

The post-election dystopia has been the latest Wonderland red pill with many of the Republican faithful doubling down on their unsubstantiated claims. It casts a troubling and ominous darkness that’s fueled by leaders which know better. The narratives act like whack a mole, because there will always be one more theory. Last week, for example, SCOTUS used one sentence to reject a Pennsylvania case, but an even more specious Texas lawsuit was then brought before the court one day later. The absurdity of these cases prompted the conservative evangelical David French to tweet:

“I think it’s important to note just how craven it is for the 17 Attorney Generals to support the Texas SCOTUS case. They’re lawyers. They KNOW they’re going to lose. They’re inflaming the public for their own ambitions, confident SCOTUS will spare them from reaping what they’re trying to sow…There is absolutely no modern “whatabout” to compare to what a great many GOP politicians are trying to do to the American republic. It makes a court-packing effort look like Candy Land. If they get their way in court (they won’t), they would break the country. There is no excuse.”

A Personal Story and a Simple Corrective
I can personally speak about those rabbit holes as I’ve been faithfully partisan throughout most of my life. Yet I taught my children the importance of diversity, a practice I modeled in my daily life. Although Fox News along with Rush Limbaugh were, for a time, part of our weekly sustenance, magazines like the Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Commentary served a prominent role too. That reliance on diversity is an important lesson to learn. And it’s a critical principle in statistics when seeking the truth about data outside of your control. To wit:

“When asked in a meeting what can be done in observational studies to clarify the step between association to causation, Sir Ronald Fisher replied “Make your theories elaborate.” The reply puzzled me at first since by Occam’s razor the advice usually given is to make theories as is consistent with the known data. What Sir Ronald Fisher meant, as the subsequent discussion showed, was that when constructing a casual hypothesis, one should envision as many different consequences of its truth as possible and plan observational studies to discover whether each of these consequences is found to hold…” as reported by William Cochran.

This was one of the most useful pieces of advice I encountered in my scientific career. It not only helped me in my profession but I found it applicable in the whole of life. Given the inherent uncertainty in what we understand, we must be skeptical about our opinions, and particularly those arising from our tribes. Willing to listen to alternative explanations in order to learn instead of defend. And if we followed that advice when establishing our judgements and beliefs, I believe that our echo chambers would lose their power, enabling many of life’s rabbit holes to slowly wither away.

Of course, we need more than just this one strategy. We need objective benchmarks to compare against competing explanations. We need to avoid populist worldviews which cancel the other side. But just through this one practice of truth discovery, by willing to risk our tribal narratives, a powerful corrective becomes unleashed. For it’s hard to stay buried in our rabbit holes when our echo chambers get broken down, and we begin to listen with an eye towards truth, rather than just to demonize the other side.

P.S. The Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit too, again without dissent.