An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.
It is one thing to say, “Joe said X, and X is wrong.” It is another thing to declare “You cannot trust anything Joe says.” The latter approach seems to dominate our political discussions, unfortunately.
The author suggests that you can only extract someone from cult thinking if you have first gained their trust. Not so simple. Anyway, I think that my three-axes model is in the spirit of trying to get people to detach from their echo chambers.
The charitable interpretation is that the authors do not appreciate the significance of capital regulations. The uncharitable interpretation is that they are trolls.
Echo chambers?
Can’t stand to listen to Limbaugh because almost half of what he does is play clips from the media. Call me a cultist but if I never hear CNN again I would be happy after having been subjected to it as a captive audience member in so many airports and hotel breakfast areas.
Yeah, but the best way to get someone to trust you is to label them an uninformed cultist. Pretty clear here the book’s target are factcheck.org and Annemberg donor types needing to feel good about themselves being so much smarter and knowledgeable than the plebes in flyover country.
Pretty rich in fact for a factcheck.org founder to be telling people that their problem is that they don’t trust enough. Ah well, that must be the joy of tenure, impugning those with whom you disagree with pure righteousness and total lack of self awareness.
I can think of a much larger, and much more powerful, echo chamber than the one that supposedly includes Rush Limbaugh. I guess self-awareness is not a requirement for social scientists.
The irony of criticizing echo chamber while standing in one is both sad and amusing. I mean, it’s not that they’re wrong. I’m just reminded of something about not removing the speck in your brother’s eye until you remove the plank from yours.
Is this an attack on echo chambers or merely opinions with which the authors disagree?
[[[An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
Think about how we trust others in every aspect of our daily lives. Driving a car depends on trusting the work of engineers and mechanics; taking medicine depends on trusting the decisions of doctors, chemists and biologists.]]]
Trust is a funny word. Engineers, mechanics, doctors are all accountable with respect to their duties — I trust the insurance company that issues a doctor’s med-mal. Ideologues on “the other side” are often unaccountable snakes. Should you trust a snake or his followers? And must we only rely on our own personal predator-detection systems to ID snakes? I don’t need to sit down and play a hand to spot a card sharp, and if someone I trust spots one, that’s good enough for me.
Also, if someone is peddling discredited snake-oil (like New & Improved Communism), only a historically ignorant fool (hello, college students!) or a snake is going to buy that bill of goods.
Savvy people dole out trust in bite-sized pieces they can afford to lose. I’ll trust a stranger on ebay with $50, but not my wallet. I’ll trust a Leftist to obey traffic laws, but he won’t get my vote.
> Trust is a funny word. Engineers, mechanics, doctors are all accountable with respect to their duties — I trust the insurance company that issues a doctor’s med-mal.
You’re just kicking the can down the road trying to explain away trust with accountability. Why do you trust the insurance company not to collude with the doctor (perhaps they issue him malpractice insurance for a bribe)? Because they are themselves apprehensive of being sued, so your trust moves on to the legal system. But why do you trust the legal system? An insurance company has lots of money, it could have tame judges that will throw out suits when the company needs it – this sort of thing happens all the time in the Third World and many ex-USSR countries. Then perhaps you start talking about judges’ reputation and county attorney elections, etc., and it becomes obvious that what you’re talking about is not merely accountability. Accountability as an explanation is insufficient because of the quis custodiet argument. I might say that the “trust” we’re talking about here is the residual of accountability, the thing that makes accountability work. Because it definitely doesn’t work everywhere, even controlling for HBD.
It seems like the echo chamber sells and can be produced very cheaply. Rush Limbaugh ‘echo chamber’ has made Hundreds of millions so I am not sure how you recommend slowing it down.
It is wise to remember when the Left thinks of the conservative movement they think of Rush Limbaugh not David Brooks or Ross Douthat.
I venture so say that beyond elitists almost no self-identifying conservatives even know who David Brooks or Ross Douthat are.
I’ve seen many, many people accuse their ideological opponents of living in an intellectual echo chamber, which, about 99% of the time, turns out to be just another form of outgroup demonization.
“Oh, on this side, we’re in the reality-based community, reasonable, rational, open-minded, etc. but on their side, well, it’s nothing but a dogmatic echo chamber over there.”
Now, it’s certainly possible that the members of two sides could be making accurate accusations about the other side without recognizing their own failings, but in this case, the charge of “echo chamber” gets thrown around without any effort at rigor in making the case.
I’m not even sure it’s really a useful concept. There is usually plenty of argument and debate within our current ideological groupings, whereas “echo” implies uniformity and mere and parroting. That’s not what’s going on.
How would, say, some kind of rationalist Bayesian go through life in terms of evaluating what information to consume, and who to trust and distrust.
Well, by experience, our Bayesian gradually starts to learn enough about who is reliable and who engages in enough faulty argumentation or uncivil / bad behavior to categorize people somewhere on the spectrum of reliability and trustworthiness.
After a while, he starts to have his own information-supplier social networks, and heuristics for determining his “circle of trust”, and likewise a circle of distrust. Since time, attention, and possible areas of expertise are scarce, he has little choice but to include as one of his heuristics the tactic of relying on people he trusts to vouch for other new individuals as trustworthy or, at least, worthwhile with some caveats as to reliability. Trying to scrutinize every claim on one’s own puts up impossibly costly mental costs, so one must “epistemically economize” somehow.
Now, once this individual has his social networks well-established based on evidence and experience, such that he has a trusted set, a distrusted set, and perhaps an unknown or questionable set, do we say he’s living in an “echo chamber”? If so, it’s a good echo chamber – those who he distrusts have earned and deserve that distrust. For example, you recently mentioned that you cancelled your Washington Post subscription because the editors has decided to dedicate the institution to undoing the results of the last election instead of fairly reporting the news. That would be a “good echo chamber” application of distrust, wouldn’t it. And if not, then what’s the distinguishing factor?
In this case, I’d say it’s whether that trust or distrust is fairly deserved. But that only raises additional questions about who to trust, and how we can tell.
If one tries to get specific about, one can see what I mean.
Try to fill in the variable blanks with this one, “Members of X group tend to distrust anything members of Y group say. But Z is a member of Y, and I am personally vouching for Z, and saying that X’s should expose themselve’s to Z’s content because Z is often trustworthy and reliable, at least within his field of expertise.”
If one tries to fill in the Z with any of the mainstream media outlets of any ideological tendency, how confident would you be in staking your own reputation (“skin in the game”!) on that claim? Not very, I’m guessing.
“echo chamber” gets thrown around without any effort at rigor in making the case.
I’m not even sure it’s really a useful concept. There is usually plenty of argument and debate within our current ideological groupings
As the old saying goes, “Harvard professors are very diverse. They range all the way from the moderate left to the far left.” So you do indeed get debate and even hate. E.g., far left Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould hated moderate left E. O. Wilson.
You ought to read the transcript/listen to the podcast of the debate between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein on race, IQ, identity politics, etc. It’s somewhat of a shitshow, and they talk past each other frequently. Actually, maybe don’t read/listen to it, too depressing.
Here’s the transcript: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast
Here’s some relevant commentary from Quillette: http://quillette.com/2018/04/12/sam-harris-right-ezra-klein-know-better/
The point might be better taken if C Thi Nguyen could have managed to give even a single example of a left-wing echo chamber. Failing to do so pretty much establishes that the author lives in one (or, more likely, most of them). When you can see a single radio show as an echo chamber (he’s still on the air? Who knew?) while failing to see the echo chamber in universities, several major media organizations, several identity political movements, etc., you lose credibility as a provider of insight pretty quickly.
The distinction between echo-chambers epistemic bubbles in a really interesting idea. To me (a former liberal now libertarian who often interacts with people inside the Hannity-Limbaugh echo chamber) it seems like liberals — particularly younger liberals — face relatively more epistemic bubbles, while the issue with “conservatives” (or at least, Trump supporters) — particularly among the prime time Fox News set — is clearly one of echo chambers.
Sounds like a completely specious distinction to me.
I have followed your blog for years and read several of your books as well. Your Three Axis model struck me as very insightful, and it still does. But upon reflection of recent events, I think you might have missed an Axis – Populism. They see things on a “Us vs. Them” axis.
Marc, I agree that there is a different axis, which I call the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo axis (referring to David Brooks’ “Bobos in paradise”). But all of the axes are “us vs. them.”
Thank you for responding to my comment.
Please forgive me if I am mildly incoherent, I am still working through this in my own mind and have not yet come to a firm conclusion.
A few years ago I took one of those online surveys of political opinion that sorts you into various groups (I came out Moderate Libertarian). It had four quadrants: Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, and Populist. When I first read about the “Three Languages” here on your blog, I instinctively “got” the them. I didn’t even consider a fourth quadrant.
Obviously an oversight on my part. Intellectual snobbery? Lack of creativity? Inability to empathize with someone so different in outlook from myself?
Anyway, there is a large group out there – call them Populists? – that has its own view of the world. It has its own axis, its own filter, view of the world. I don’t feel like “Bobo vs. Anti-Bobo” fits exactly, but I can’t think of a better name, either. That’s where I get the US vs. Them axis. I know that the others have an US vs. Them element as well, but this is different. I can’t put my finger on it.