Volume Bias

In the words of the legendary Terry Pratchett, in the Discworld novel The Truth:

“A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has had a chance to get its boots on.”

Or from one of my favorite bands, The Protomen in their song, “The Hounds”:

“When I say he was a monster

When I set fire to his name

It does not matter where you hear it from

Whether truth or lies, it gets said all the same

…

Whatever’s on the table plays!”

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I’ve been on a kick recently about a propensity for us to misunderstand or misrepresent people who aren’t in our tribe. And how BS gets amplified.

In “How to casually radicalize a citizen,” we talked about how people with less-than-awesome intent can easily (and do) create a stream of the worst of the opposition. You can see this and then get a bit radicalized yourself, as we see.

But this is happening passively, too. I call it VOLUME BIAS.

Shout-out to…

• Bob Nelson
• Clint Lohse
• ElianTheWitch
• DXXXVIII

SUMMARY:

-More partisan positions tend to be simpler

-Simpler is easier to digest, shorter to say than more nuanced positions

-Easier to repeat, too

-You’ll hear them more often

-They naturally get more opportunities to make their massage heard

How I think volume bias works among regular people:

1. More partisan people are both more certain and more passionate about their certainty, because less partisan people are more prone to have nuance and remaining questions
2. So partisan people can…
   1. State a clearer position
   2. State a shorter position
   3. Say it with deep conviction that less partisan ones can’t
3. More partisan folks are more likely to attack others, as well, meaning the less partisan folks often get intimidated out of the conversation, too
4. Less partisan folks are indeed having conversations, but quiet ones – in the kitchen. I’m one of the folks they confess to, all over the political spectrum. They feel they’ve lost touch with their own party (or vice versa)
5. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle

How volume bias seems to work in the media and elections

• Nuance is harder to understand than the more loud/short/simple positions
• And so, the nuanced stuff will literally be forgotten, it won’t catch our attention nearly as much
• We’re largely consuming media differently — getting more individual bits about more things going on in the world, but with less time and focus for each individual thing
• So even where the news / politicians are playing more nuanced stuff, you just don’t hear it nearly as well, don’t digest and retain it nearly as well…
• …especially if you are not consuming long-form articles

The result

• There is a bias in what we’re exposed to – higher volume stuff is shared more
• There is a bias in what we digest and remember – it’s like we have a high-pass filter for anything that’s not loud/simple enough
• So we only really get very loud versions of what our team believes and what the other team believes…
• …these loud versions are the most partisan, certain, and simple
• Through highly repeated exposure we start to lose our own ability to remember that there can be nuance in our own team’s positions, much less the other team’s

Examples:

1. The vaccine itself – how it works, why it’s safe
2. Trump’s great at it: “I’m gonna build a big, beautiful wall” “I’ll end the ISIS war in 100 days”
   1. The fact that both of these were ridiculous took more time to explain, so it was harder to convince people
3. “The election was stolen”

INITIATIVE

Is huge.

Generally accusations and affirmative positions, once stated, if they are attractive, require far, far more energy to refute than they were to spread in the first place. 

Volume Bias Likely Helped Trump Get Elected

• Trump predicted news ratings would take a hit when he was no longer president
• He was right
• The guy was very loud, and people listened whether they loved or hated him
• (The fact that news ratings dropped without him is a key case study – it’s our own reading/listening behaviors that drive the volume bias)
• Trump not only got a lot of free airtime…
• …but the typical “sparring debate” cable news shows had a democrat and a pro-Trump republican because having agreement is not loudu and therefore BORING

How was this prevented in the past? Are we doomed?

Demagogues did pop up! And, lo and behold, they had very simple messages that could be repeated easily. Greece and Rome, 20th century Europe, etc, all come to mind. There is always space in a fairly free society for Charlatans.

HOWEVER, the big thing in parts of the past was clearinghouse that had the technological and economic power to constrain what got volume, and the incentives to do so.

And generally I think there is a trend of technology between fracturing and consolidation of power over messaging volume. We are in an incredibly fractured state now. 

I gave a few talks at MIT’s Enterprise Forum about just this, and in making this episode I just now decided to go get those onto the podcast for y’all, so stay tuned