Monthly Archives: August 2020

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Fact-Checking and the Conditions of Responsible Citizenship

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The history of classical liberal thought is replete with (empirical) arguments that run basically this way: If the government increases its involvement in X, then ordinary people will stop seeing X as their responsibility. Instead of being concerned about X and working to advance X, they will leave care of X to the state, which will do a worse job at it.

Perhaps the most frequent context in which this argument is invoked involves care for the less fortunate. To wit, if we take it that the government bears responsibility for caring for the poor and downtrodden, this will predictably (and unfortunately) undercut support for mutual aid organizations that can often leverage local knowledge to be more effective at alleviating problems than large, centralized bureaucracies like states. Here’s Wilhelm von Humboldt in a characteristic passage (from The Limits of State Action).

As each individual abandons himself to the solicitous aid of the State, so, and still more, he abandons to it the fate of his fellow-citizens. This weakens sympathy and renders mutual assistance inactive; or, at least, the reciprocal interchange of services and benefits will be most likely to flourish at its liveliest, where the feeling is most acute that such assistance is the only thing to rely upon; and experience teaches us that oppressed classes of the community which are, as it were, overlooked by the government, are always bound together by the closest ties.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/humboldt-the-sphere-and-duties-of-government-1792-1854

My fellow blogger Andrew (J.) Cohen recently advanced a similar argument in the case of state-provided education: the more we see the education of children as the state’s responsibility, the less we (particularly parents) see it as something that we ought to look after.

There are many worries one might have about such arguments. First, is the empirical claim that state solutions crowd out non-state solutions even true? Second, even if the empirical claim is true and private individuals and mutual aid organizations are more effective in some ways, still their help can be bad news for freedom insofar as it can be withheld unless recipients meet oppressive conditions. Third, decentralized efforts to address public problems lack mechanisms for ensuring competence and fairness. Even if fully supported, perfectly fair, and much more effective where they operate, such organizations may under-provide needed services elsewhere. And so on.

One thing my own work has forced me to think about lately are the increased calls for fact-checking and labeling of misinformation by social media giants.

My previous posts (here and here) have briefly touched upon reasons for worrying that social media censors and fact-checkers are bound to be fallible. (Indeed, fact-checkers have long shown troubling signs of fallibility, see here, here, here, here, here and here—though also here and here for some reasons for optimism that these shortcomings might be overcome by more thoughtful fact-checking strategies.)

But set aside these issues with the quality of the fact-checking and the political power it might or might not involve. Suppose that the fact-checkers do a decent enough job. Still, the old classical liberal argument above provides reason to worry that widespread fact-checking of this kind might undermine conditions of epistemic responsibility. In short, if we come to expect others to do the hard work of fact-checking for us, we will lose the skills and sense of responsibility for doing it ourselves.

Of course, fact-checking and labeling misinformation is often proposed as an alternative to outright censorship, and it’s likely that it is indeed better than outright censorship. After all, it allows individuals to access and assess the mistaken content for themselves, rather than blocking it from view altogether. Moreover, labeling false or misleading content in this way might well improve our epistemic situation by stopping the spread of misinformation that might otherwise “go viral”. But even if we accept that these benefits of the practice reliably obtain, they need to be weighed against its costs. And one set of costs I’ve heard little about involves those associated with the kinds of people an over-reliance on fact-checking might produce. I’m wary (I think reasonably, but maybe not) of anything that will encourage average people to be more lazy regarding their epistemic duties than they already are.

Now, social media giants are not states. Accordingly, it might be that their efforts to take greater responsibility for fact-checking the content they host is best-interpreted as an instance of voluntary organizations doing what the state is not now doing (better than the state could do), rather than a threat to voluntary solutions for misinformation. And it is clear to me that it is preferable to have non-state entities in charge of fact-checking than to empower the state to do it. In general, it’s healthy to have lots of different institutions with lots of different norms surrounding what kinds of content they tolerate in their jurisdictions.

Still, lots of people get their information on social media platforms. Many have argued this means that they have certain state-like powers. Though I’m skeptical of the strongest of these claims, it’s reasonable to be concerned that, under conditions of wide-spread fact-checking across platforms, users might come to be disposed to accept what they read in these spaces somewhat uncritically. After all, people might develop the reasonable expectation that someone is looking out to ensure that nothing misleading is to be found there. And even if we ignore the fact that, in practice, fact-checking will be “gappy” (with much factually inaccurate information making it through the filters) is difficult to overstate the dangers associated with allowing other people to do our reading and thinking for us.

It’s fair to object that, because the impetus for further fact checking is itself the fact that people are bad at processing information, likely to believe lots of foolish nonsense for bad reasons, and so on, there’s nowhere to go from our present situation but up. Still, this seems to admit that the root of the problem lies with how individuals are trained to evaluate information and its sources. Widespread, public fact-checking can at best ensure that the worst of the problem’s consequences are averted. But it does nothing to address the problem itself–and indeed, it may even make it worse.

In a provocative passage in The Conflict of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant reminds us that many calls to “take human beings as they are” rather than “good-natured visionaries fancy they ought to be” ignore the role that political institutions play in making people the way they are. The lesson is that, if we find that we are bad at discharging our epistemic duties, it is worth asking whether this because of the incentives we face or whether it is it a fixed feature human nature. If the former, then, other things equal, we should avoid strengthening those bad incentives and should rather work to improve them.

For various reasons, I suspect that the trend of increased reliance on independent fact-checkers is here to stay. If I’m right, we must take care to avoid a situation in which we become complacent, off-loading the difficult work of responsible citizenship to strangers with their own sets of interests (which might not track our own). It is true that this is demanding work. But if we can’t figure out how to do what it takes (or if indeed failure is inevitable given deep features of human nature), then it is harder to gainsay the increasingly popular (but in fact ancient) claim that there might be more attractive alternatives for governance than democracy (CE*).

(Thanks to Andrew Cohen for his thoughts on a previous version of this piece.)

CE*=RCL earns commissions if you buy from this link; commissions support this site.

Current Events, Education, Ethical Issues, Social Criticism

Schools, Teachers, Parents, and a Bad Assumption

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In my last post, I discussed the problems surrounding opening schools and, importantly, how we discuss them. In this post, I want to raise an issue about schooling more generally that is rarely discussed at all. I want to show how our current system encourages a false belief about parents and teachers that has pernicious results.

I begin by noting that my wife is a public school teacher and, given how Georgia is handling the pandemic, I have a clear preference for her to not teach in her school building. I also have a school age child who was, until a month ago, in a private school. The administration of that school is, I think, approaching the situation far better than most, but we still worry about both health and pedagogical risks. Thinking about both returning (or not) to school has me once again wondering about fundamental social problems—especially regarding schooling and parenting.

I think most of us are pretty bad at parenting. (Philip Larkin understood this well, but I should be clear that I think there are a huge variety of ways that we are bad at it—some are overbearing and some are entirely too loose, for opposing examples.) Worries about increased child abuse with school closures are therefore not at all surprising. On the other hand, I also think most K-12 schools are pretty bad at educating. Having served on committees for two charter schools and volunteered and watched at my son’s schools, I’ve been amazed at how unwilling school administrators can be to make use of evidence about best educational practices. (This is sometimes true even when they clearly know the evidence—in such cases, they tend to point out that they are constrained by budgets, politics, etc.) Schools don’t, in my view, offer enough music or art or time to relax, run, and breath outside. They also tend to start too early in the morning, foolishly insist children sit still and at desks, force students to maintain logs of reading, and even penalize students that read unassigned books at the wrong time. Worries about children being stifled and losing their innate curiosity because of school rules are therefore also not surprising.

Many parents are aware of problems with their children’s’ schools. Some even work to correct them. Most, though, seem to “mind their own business”—as if the education of their children were not their business. Indeed, many parents seem to think that because schools are provided and mandatory, they are themselves absolved of the responsibility for educating their children. (As schools feed and medically nurse children, parents may feel absolved of even more responsibility.) Even the best of parents tend to assume their children are being well taken care of at school. Unfortunately, too many parents assume their children are the school’s responsibility during the day. Interestingly, the pandemic helped some see that their school was not working for them. (See this interesting NY Times piece.)

I do not think any of this is surprising or unexplainable. We live in a society wherein government has encouraged parental abdication of educational responsibilities. Parents often rightly feel that they cannot opt out of government run schools. Where they can, they usually are constrained to choose either the local government school or a nearby private school. Only in some locales is there a simple and straightforward process through which you can legally educate your own child. (The option is, I think, available everywhere in the US, but with more or less red tape involved.) Encouraged is a belief that I suspect drives the problems that beset schools: that parenting and teaching are necessarily distinct and must be kept separate.

Our system of K-12 education relies on the idea that parents are not teachers. Indeed, some homeschooling parents have been condemned for thinking they could teach their own children. Parents, on this view, are supposed to feed, clothe, love, and maybe socialize children. Schools, on the other hand, provide teachers to educate children, too often including moral education (and might also provide food and healthcare for the children). And schools—or the administrators thereof (or, worse, politicians)—decide where a child will learn and how. A parent that tries to send her child to a better public school than the one closest may face jail time—because the school system decides, not the parent. (See this and this.) Parents, after all, don’t know about education.

Two problems emerge when people believe parenting and teaching are necessarily distinct. The first, I’ve discussed above: schools operate with a variety of problems and parents don’t work to change them or do so but face insurmountable difficulties in the attempt. When they don’t try, it is likely at least partly because thinking that parents aren’t teachers makes parents think teachers have an authority they do not. And, of course, they assume teachers run schools. The second problem is a corollary: because parents are led to believe schools and teachers have an authority they do not themselves possess, parents don’t think they need be active participants in their children’s education. In short, parents take less responsibility for raising their children, leaving more and more to schools. What society gets, too often, is school graduates who learn to do as they are told, conforming to societal requirements. If parents were more active, we’d get more diversity in how children are educated, resulting in many benefits (though admittedly also costs in terms of equity). I think we are seeing some of this already and hope to see more. We’d get more people contributing in more and more varied ways to society, creating more and more varied benefits for all.

In short, the all too common belief that parents and teachers are necessarily distinct lets parents off the hook for too much and grants schools too much leeway. Challenging that belief would encourage parents to challenge their children’s schools, thereby either improving the schools or having the schools lose students to other alternatives.

The pandemic has forced us to re-evaluate many things. Hopefully, one positive outcome will be a healthier view of the relationship between parenting and education–one that emphasizes parental responsibility and acknowledges the limits of career educators (especially those in what might be called “educational factories”). One might even hope that this would help make parents better at parenting.

(Conversations with my wife and with Lauren Hall, JP Messina, and Kevin Currie-Knight inspired, and helped me with, this post.)

Current Events, Discourse

On School Openings

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Back in April, I “predicted” we’d see 150 to 200 thousand deaths from COVID-19 in the US.  As we are now in that range, I’m hoping I was right and we don’t go past the 200,000, but of course this is so far outside my expertise that my guess means little.  But here we are and school openings approach.  Some seem deadly afraid of school openings and some seem deadly afraid of schools not opening. (I’m primarily thinking here about K-12, but much of what I say applies to colleges as well—and of course, high school juniors and seniors are more like college freshman than kindergarteners in terms of COVID-19 transmission and symptoms.)

Those conflicting views often accompany two others: that people favoring school openings foolishly think young children are immune to the effects of COVID-19 (or otherwise don’t understand the risks of reopening) and that people opposing school openings don’t care about education (or otherwise overestimate the risks of reopening).  

Meanwhile, I don’t believe any thinking person really thinks any children are immune to COVID-19, despite claims coming from the White House.  Of course, young children do seem to get badly sick from the virus much less than anyone expected back in March.  And there is no reason to believe that those worried about sending kids into closed buildings with hundreds of others don’t care about education.

My biggest issue with discussions about this—and many things—is that people seem unable or unwilling to keep the pros and cons in mind at the same time.  But schools are, by and large, run by groups of people that have to be able to do just that in order to make rational decisions about whether to open, close, reopen, re-close schools—sometimes despite political pressures by governing bodies, unions, parental organizations, and more.

This has to be a hugely difficult question and cannot be made without considering both the costs and the benefits.  At a minimum that includes the following assumptions (yes, I think both of these are true):

-if schools are open, kids and teachers are going to get sick (plexiglass around the kids, masks all day, etc, is not going to stop it). They will also bring the disease to their families, friends, and neighbors.  We’re likely to pass 200k deaths more quickly (and with more children) than we would if schools stay closed.

-if schools are closed, children of working class parents will suffer long term consequences.  Their parents can’t stay home with them and help them with their schoolwork.  Middle class and wealthier parents will hire tutors or join “educational pods” where parents pool resources to monitor children doing school work, but not those from poorer backgrounds.  (And as others have noted, there will be more cases of suicide and spousal and child abuse.)

There are further economic issues that would follow either decision as well, but I’ll not delve into those here.  What I want to urge now is simply (a) not demonizing those you disagree with about this and (b) bearing in mind both the pros and cons if you have decision making capacity here.  

I keep myself limited to those two points as I really don’t know what the best route is for any school (and, of course, different schools in different locales with different population densities and with different student bodies, will be different).  I suspect a lot of thought will be going into it, and not just from current school administrators and school boards.  (And parents—the topic of a future post.)

Hopefully, new ideas will emerge that actually bring new approaches and new institutions that do better for children than schools now do.  Smaller schools with more parental decision making, more variety of teaching techniques, and yes, better use of technology to not merely monitor children and allow for physically distanced communication, but also to spark curiosity.  I can’t predict the innovations; I remain optimistic that they will come and that innovators will consider the many concerns as they seek to appeal to a wide customer base.

This pandemic is going to have long term effects.  We are likely to see more work at home across the board and less use of commercial office space and that may bring new opportunities for housing, lower rents in some areas, and reductions of city populations.  Better systems of education responding to these changes and the above challenges would be a wonderful outcome of a bad situation.

(Thanks to Ronit Elk for the impetus to write this and to  JP Messina for helpful suggestions and comments.)

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Social media censorship: Further reflections on suppressed coronavirus disinformation

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On Wednesday August 5th, Donald Trump posted a snippet of a Fox and Friends segment to his social media accounts. Discussing the important matter of school reopenings, the president said the following:

Schools should be reopened. When you look at children, children are almost—and I would almost say definitely, but almost immune from this disease…they’ve got stronger—it’s hard to believe depending how you feel about it—much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this and they…don’t have a problem…and I’ve seen some doctors say that they’re totally immune.

Trump goes on to cite as evidence the fact that only one person under 18 died from the virus in the state of New Jersey, which he (no less than his viewers) should know falsifies any claim of total immunity. Charitably, he likely means that children are shielded from the worst effects of the virus. Evidence: Just weeks ago, Trump made more reasonable claims that (1) children face less risk from the virus (they recover quicker) than adults and (2) that they may transmit it less readily than adults. As in the case of transmission to and from animals, the evidence concerning children’s role in transmitting the virus is still coming in. Whereas about a week ago, experts were optimistic about children’s role in transmission (believing on the basis of limited evidence that it might be lower), a recent German study has raised doubts (though has yet to pass through peer review). But regarding this risk, Trump admitted that further research was necessary and that his administration was taking this factor seriously.

Speculation about what he really means aside, the false and misleading nature of the letter of his claim (that children are immune) led Facebook and Twitter to remove the video for violating their policies around misinformation and covid-19. Were they right to do so?

In my previous post, I indicated that there was good reason to worry that this was actually the best way of promoting what might be dangerous content. Once again, I awoke to numerous headlines which repeated Trump’s claim. Thanks to the Streisand effect, people will see this claim, that children are ‘almost immune’ to coronavirus, repeated over and over again; thanks to the illusory truth effect, people may be more susceptible to believing it, even if they know it’s false.

Here, I want to emphasize a different strategic aspect of all of this. Suppose that Trump knows that the more strident claims are strictly false and that they will cause controversy. (If you watch the video closely, he indicates that he knows as much when he hedges: “I hate to use the word totally because the news will say, ‘oh, he made the word totally and he shouldn’t have used that word”.)  Might censoring it frustrate the aims of the censoring parties and ultimately serve Trump’s interests?

Perhaps. It is unprecedented for social media platforms to remove the president’s speech. Their policy, to date, has (reasonably in my view) been that, though what the president says might be false, misleading, or harmful, the people have a right to know that he’s said it (even if they should also be informed that it is misleading). But such platforms have been facing increased pressure by representatives of more traditional media, by politicians, by advertisers, and by some users to exercise a heavier hand in this regard, and to stop exempting Trump’s speech from their community standards. Trump, already so annoyed by the ways in which social media platforms have handled his content as to issue an executive order barring them from engaging in censorship, presumably knows this. The more he can get social media companies to censor him, the more he may be able to convince his base that these platforms are untrustworthy.

Supposing that it is true that a majority of users of social media platforms (including 38% of democrats) already believe that social media platforms are biased against conservatives, censoring the president’s speech in this manner might further negatively impact the reputations of these platforms (reputations which have already taken a large hit in the past year). Not only can this sort of censorship further increase polarization by leading conservatives to disengage (costing the platforms active users, and, ultimately, advertisement revenue), it may also cause people more generally to doubt social media platforms’ disclaimers about the dangerous or misleading content they choose to leave up, reducing their credibility and leaving vulnerable persons more susceptible to misinformation (though see Goldman’s Knowledge in a Social World, ch. 7). In the particular case at hand, these effects may be amplified because the censored party here is the president and it is reasonable to believe that voters have a legitimate interest in knowing what their leaders are saying, true or false, good or evil (though some evidence suggests that, with respect to offensive content in particular, many think this kind of censorship, even of the U.S. president, is desirable).

One thing that these considerations put into sharp relief is that despite the bare facts that social media companies have a right to censor and legitimate interests in censoring, there is no guarantee that they will censor well, even relative to their own goals (somewhat narrowly construed). If they are sufficiently bad at choosing which content to censor to advance their ends (was this really the most dangerous segment we’ve heard?), this establishes a weak presumption against their censorship—not as a matter of law or even of ethics, but a matter of organizational rationality.

Still, the claim that children are basically immune from coronavirus is false and may mislead parents into taking risks with their children that they ought not to take. While I think Trump did not mean exactly what he said (and that most people can understand this), surely an interest in protecting children favors censoring the content, outweighing this presumption.

Yet, whether this consideration is decisive in favor of censorship does not simply depend upon the magnitude of the risks unreflective uptake of the content poses (which might be slight). It also depends crucially upon censorship’s being sufficiently effective in stopping parents from taking such risks as to outweigh people’s legitimate interest in hearing what our elected officials say about important topics and the costs to credibility that platforms might incur as a result. Here, it is important that the censorship will not achieve this much unless enough people who would have otherwise seen and taken Trump’s words at face value are now shielded from their harmful effects. My other worries about the unintended consequences of censorship aside, I wonder how many now find themselves in such a position.

In the end, though Trump is wrong that children are immune to covid-19, he might well be right that the evidence favors reopening schools. Given plausible hypotheses about the importance of early education in socializing children, for adding meaning and purpose to their lives, for helping parents get back to work, for taking children out of deprived and abusive environments, and for ensuring that vulnerable children are not left behind, reasons to favor reopening hang heavy in the balance. These reasons must be weighed carefully against risks to children and to teachers and family members from reopening, risks that Trump himself has previously acknowledged. If the United States chooses to reopen its schools, it will not be alone. Sweden never closed them, and a number of other countries (many of them apparently faring better in the fight against coronavirus) have similar plans.  All other matters aside, it would be unfortunate if discussion of these serious issues were to take a back seat to the political theater of a battle between Silicon Valley executives and the commander in chief. Sadly, all parties involved are acting in ways that may predictably realize this unfortunate outcome.