Twitter is not the real world
But it is where our brains go to die
Goats on boats
Before the advent of refrigeration systems and dried rations, goats were a sea-fairing staple. Sailors set out to sea on long journeys would bring an ample supply of milk and meat, in the form of live goats. When colonizing new lands or temporarily settling on islands, the goats were brought ashore. In one case, on the Isla Guadalupe off the coast of Baja California, goats were left behind on the island for the sake of establishing a fishing village. The idea was if you left a few goats behind, they would begin breeding and establish a sustainable food source for a future fishing community.
The plan worked. Freed from the constraints of natural goat-eating predators, the Isla Guadalupe goat population rapidly skyrocketed to the thousands. The infestation of goats had to eat too, and they soon decimated the plant life on the already sparsely vegetated volcanic island. Within about a century, Isla Guadalupe’s natural ecosystem was in tatters. As an island, several endemic species exist there that cannot be found anywhere else on Earth, and just about all of them are in peril thanks to the goats. Curiously, no one who hears this story thinks to blame the goats. Evidently the goats were only doing what they have been programmed to do — eat and breed. It’s the sailors that are to blame.
The Guadalupe goat example is, rather unfortunately, not a particularly unique phenomenon. Invasive species like this exist across the planet. The question is, what makes invasive species so problematic? The answer is both mundanely simple, and fascinatingly complex. When displaced from the “natural” (this is a loaded term in evolutionary biology) environment that a species was raised in (evolutionarily), there is the potential to be freed from constraints like predators and competitors. That’s the simple side of the equation.
The complex side of the equation is about tradeoffs. For example, the muscle mass of a large predator is an example of a tradeoff between killing power and chase speed. Too slender, and they lack the killing strike to take down their prey even if they are fast enough to catch it; too muscular and they lack the speed and endurance to ever deliver the killing blow. Another tradeoff example is gravity: most mammals are constrained in overall size by the stress and tension that gravity places on joints, bones, and discs. But in the water, freed from these constraints, blue whales became fucking enormous.
The reason invasive species tend to wreak havoc to their novel environments is they become temporarily dislodged from the set of tradeoff constraints in which they evolved. The Guadalupe goats, for example, soon learned that they did not have to spend time being vigilant for predators and so instead could spend all their time grazing and breeding without consequence. Tradeoffs are the property of nature that keeps everything in check, and the reason why there are so many species on Earth: each species occupies a different solution to the biotic and abiotic n-dimensional tradeoff space. Each species’ unique location in n-dimensional tradeoff space is called a niche.
Rabbit Island
I’ll be honest — I’m not entirely sure this analogy is going to land, but you don’t know until you try right? Imagine an island existed where there were no tradeoffs. There was no requirement to eat, perhaps because the island was covered in an endless supply of optimal food. There were no predators to worry about. There was no stormy weather or other natural disasters to worry about. There was, however, one crucial remaining tradeoff — competition for mates. Now, imagine we planted a small population of rabbits on this island.
For a few generations, Rabbit Island would be pretty uneventful. The rabbits would look the same as we left them. They might be a little overweight and a little more tame, given that they had no predators to contend with, but otherwise would be completely recognizable to us. Sooner or later, something would start to change. By the law of natural selection, rabbits that did better would become more common. And which rabbits could possibly do better on Rabbit Island where there was enough food for all of them? The rabbits that could have more bunnies (technically baby rabbits are called kittens, but let’s go with bunnies for colloquialism sake). How can rabbits increase the number of bunnies they have? Well, for females there’s really only one option in sexually reproducing species: choose good males to mate with. Females rabbits are constrained by the energetic costs of making the bunnies. Males, on the other hand, are playing a whole other game. By competing with other males, male bunnies might be able to increase the number of offspring they sire by monopolizing the females. I understand this model of sexual competition does not grant much agency to the female rabbits, but hey, I didn’t make the rules.
Now, I’m a little far afield from the point I wanted to make, so I’ll wrap this analogy up. Given enough time, Rabbit Island is going to be dominated by hyper-aggressive male rabbits that mate with every female he can get his little paws on, and shreds every other male rabbit to bits, Monty Python style. The nature of the rabbit has changed, as a function of its environment. The environment shapes the evolution of a species by way of manipulating tradeoffs.
Twitter Island
Environments not only shape the appearance of animals (muscle mass in mountain lions) and the behaviour of animals (killer male rabbits) but also the ideas that humans espouse (huh?). Consider religion. In particular, the violent and oppressive religions have had a hell of a time flourishing in a world with Internet. Internet is an environmental constraint on religion. Religion tends to not pair well with the Internet because it depends on hiding certain truths to sustain the illusion that God is pulling the strings. Religion is a magic trick, and the Internet is Penn and Teller explaining that all magic is illusion, and no real magic exists. The Internet is many things, but above all else it is a place to go to find information. And, regardless of one’s religiosity, information is a threat to faith.
I could write a whole article about the de-religification of the western world in the face of increased Internet access, but this one is about Twitter. Twitter is to sensemaking what the Internet was to religion: a threat. Sensemaking, a term popularized by Daniel Schmachtenberger, is the concept of converting complex informational inputs into organized heuristics for understanding how the world works. Rather than crafting novel heuristics each time one is confronted with new information, humans tend to rely on shoehorning new information into established heuristics. It might seem backwards, but it is how our brains save on RAM. As a result, one must be clever in creating tools that allow people to update their heuristics.
Twitter represents a tool for doing the exact opposite. Its purpose is not to challenge preconceptions, but to enforce them. And it makes it easy for the reader. Twitter does the shoehorning for you, so you literally don’t have to think for yourself. Twitter delivers information prepackaged and ready to fit perfectly into a cozy space in your heuristic house of information. Twitter does this by signal boosting the information that is maximally cohesive with the maximal number of people across the minimum number of distinct camps. Cohesive here refers to the ability for the information to ‘fit’ into an existing heuristic. When information is cohesive, it requires little effort to consider because it is already aligned with our existing perceptions and requires no updates to our heuristics.
Because Twitter is incentivized to maximize the amount of time its users spend on the platform, it promotes tweets that more people engage with. This assumption might seem like common sense, but it’s actually worth considering how it could cause serious problems - I’ll get back to this point. The ‘minimum number of distinct camps’ dynamic refers to fracturing the user base into the fewest number of groups possible. This function is pivotal for maximizing the number of engagements that a Tweet gets. The math is straightforward: the fewer groups the population is divided into, the more people cheer for each group. When the goal is to maximize the number of people engaging with a tweet, the reduction in the number of distinct teams is an inevitable side effect. What this creates is power in numbers for those belonging to one of these teams, or complete isolation for choosing not to.
In conclusion, the environment of Twitter incentivizes its users to:
Craft tweets that maximize the number of people the tweet appeals to;
Associate with one of a limited number of teams;
Maximize cohesion of your tweet with existing preconceptions;
Minimize the inherent complexity of your message.
Twitter Rabbits
Just like the environment is the cause of rabbits on Rabbit Island becoming crazed brethren-killing lady-rabbit-raping lunatics, so too is the Twitter environment to blame for our collective sensemaking crisis. The inability to hold actual nuance in one’s mind is exactly what you would expect from someone who has been using Twitter. Furthermore, the inability to understand how someone could hold views other than the two (or at most three) canonical perspectives promoted by Twitter’s algorithm is exactly what you would expect. What this elucidates is Twitter’s retardation not only of one’s own sensemaking ability but also of one’s ability to empathize with another’s sensemaking.
The environmental conditions at Twitter Island have two effects on its users: first, it manipulates the way people communicate their ideas, as outlined in the numbered list above; and second, it manipulates the way people consume information. By feeding your brain information that adheres to the criteria outlined in [1-4] you habituate yourself to expect and even prefer this type of information. Given that this information is intrinsically preferable by its very nature, our brain’s never stood a fucking chance. It is precisely why so many of us are addicted to it.
The secret to why Twitter information is intrinsically preferable is in the ease with which it feeds information straight into our synapses. Our brains are designed to maximize efficiency and minimize effort, so information that is more difficult to parse or that requires reconfiguring our neurons, is less palatable. Twitter allows us to consume data that specifically minimizes the effort in interpretation, the need for updating heuristics, or the evaluation of our biases. Twitter’s promotion of maximally cohesive information might seem like a useful optimization feature, but it is in fact a reality distorting abyss. No longer do our cognitive processes serve to make sense of the world, Twitter serves to present a version of the world that already makes sense to our cognitive processes. And our brains fucking love it.
The Sensemaking Crisis
The longer one spends consuming the carefully groomed information on Twitter, the harder it becomes to come back from it. For example, there is a growing body of literature investigating the effect of social media consumption on reading speed and attention span, but anecdotally most people notice within themselves the difficulty in sitting down to read a book after an hour-long scroll sesh on Twitter. More nefariously, Twitter is compromising our ability to make sense of the world. As I laid out in my blog post introducing The Red Queen, I explain that a world crafted through natural selection is seldom coherent. The human brain has evolved to do its best to seek coherence in an incoherent domain. Twitter is doing its best to distort the incoherent domain into a coherent one, which I contend weakens the brain’s ability to do the coherence resolution. Sensemaking is simply a concise term referring to this ability to resolve coherence from an incoherent environment.
About ten years ago a fad took off: minimalist shoes with individual toes. The concept is quite simple: rely as little as possible on supportive footwear to assist you while running. The minimalist design is intended to maximize the engagement of all the muscles required for running, whereas shoes with arch support or heel support may reduce the work certain muscles need to do to propel you forward. By relying solely on our God-given bodies to run, the idea is that we will become better runners because all of the muscles required to run will be maximally engaged. By minimizing the use of a tool (the shoe) we maximize the use of our body (our legs) to complete a task.
Take the inverse of this analogy now. Imagine electric shoes that did all of the work for you. These shoes lift the weight of your leg, propel it forward, absorb the impact of the pavement, and push off again. Consider what might happen to a runner’s physique if they started training with these shoes: it would deteriorate. That is exactly what is happening to our brains on Twitter. By neglecting our sensemaking organ, it is deteriorating. Combined with the fact that the story of the world we’re being given isn’t true, we’re left believing in fiction and unable to recognize our dissonance.
False information, manipulative narratives, and a disabled sensemaking organ have led us into the mess we are in. We fail to converse with one another because we don’t know how. It is not a skill we practice anymore. Conversation is no longer about two brains comparing notes on their own sensemaking, it is about two brains representing the views of spoon-fed reality distortions that fit perfectly into a heuristic house of information and must therefore be true. With information so coherently received, and our brain’s so neglected in the process of sensemaking, it is no wonder people’s regard for information is ideological.
As individuals, all we can do is train our own sensemaking organs. Society at large is probably a runaway train that can’t be stopped. It is an experiment that we are being forced to live through, and the only option is prepare ourselves for what remains on the other side.