The things we see and the stories we tell

These days everyone wants to claim the mantle of being the "reality-based community." In other words, all of our divergent political factions think they have exclusive ownership of reality and the facts. How many times have you recently heard that quote from Senator Moynihan, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts?" Plenty I'll bet.

The trouble with that quote is that many people have their facts right. Its simply a matter of which facts they chose to embrace (as opposed to ignore) and what story they weave with those facts.

I ran across an example of that this morning when I was reminding myself of some of the history of the poutragers when it comes to President Obama's support of women - specifically on reproductive health issues. The front-page champion of women's issues at Daily Kos wrote this a couple of months ago.

Because when there are risks involved, when the president must choose between standing up for women and achieving other goals, his commitment to women disappears. And to date, he has been unwilling to expend any political capital to defend, protect, or expand women's rights.

She goes on to defend that statement with two "facts." The first is that President Obama did not use the occasion of the passage of health care reform to get rid of the Hyde Amendment (which denies the use of federal funds for abortion). Of course she dismisses other facts - like the reality that health care reform would never have passed if it included a rejection of the Hyde Amendment. And if it had failed to pass under those circumstances, Hyde would still be in place and we'd be left without health care reform (including the provision that requires insurers to cover birth control cost-free.)

Her other example is that President Obama has refused to declare a "war on women." She's right, that is a fact. But it's just too ridiculous for words so I'll leave it be.

Of course the author completely ignored other facts that also demonstrate that President Obama does, in fact, "defend, protect, or expand women's rights." Examples of those would be too numerous to list here comprehensively, but lets just note the nomination of two women to the Supreme Court and the line in the sand he drew during the 2011 budget negotiations over funding for women's reproductive health.

So, you see how that works? She can claim membership in the "reality-based community" because she is relying on facts. And then she can craft a narrative of the President not being willing to risk political capital over women's issues. The trouble is...its a totally false narrative.

This happens all the time in politics. And I suspect that I'm guilty of it as well. In order to understand why, you have to look a bit deeper at human nature and our current media environment. There are several layers of how this is done.

First of all, there is the notion of confirmation bias. That's all about the reality that we tend to gravitate towards facts that prove what we already believe and ignore the one's that don't.

Secondly is groupthink whereby those with a certain confirmation bias tend to gravitate to one another and create feedback loops that endorse what they already believe.

Finally, Julian Sanchez has developed a term called epistemic closure. He applied it mostly to conservatives, but I think there are replications on the left as well.

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile...The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal.

A perfect example of this happened the other day when I saw one of the lead poutragers over at GOS say in a comment that she never reads the White House Blog because its all propaganda. So she gets all her information from where? GOS, FDL, Greenwald, etc.

At this point, you not only have confirmation biases endorsed by groupthink, you have the exclusion of any thought/idea/piece of information that might threaten the narrative. And that's when you have created an ideologue - which to me is dangerous.

Sanchez hints at the antidote to ideologues in his title to the linked piece where he uses the phrase "the threat of doubt." Being able to ask questions of ourselves and sustain the dissonance of doubt are the keys to avoiding this phenomena. And that starts with at least being aware of it's existence.