An Odyssey in Sensemaking pt. 3

The Apparatus and Its Discontents

Imagine if I told you there is a group of people dedicated to controlling how you perceive the world and the events that go on in it. A group of people focused on making sure that you do not have any bad opinions or bad thoughts. A group of people so vigilant that they seemingly go out of their way to quash ideas and opinions that argue against the narrative that they want you to believe.

This group of people is made up of the elites. People that went to the best schools and were trained in highly-lauded programs. They are highly paid and their opinions are given great weight. You don’t even know it but you absorb their narrative through all the popular media you consume. You regurgitate their thoughts thinking they are your own.

What would you call me if I told you such a group existed? A conspiracy theorist? A nutter? Bananas? You’d never take me seriously again. I would be cast out of polite society or only brought around for some entertainment as I rant and rave at the dinner party while you giggle behind my back. And, frankly, I wouldn’t blame you.

Except for the fact that such a group does exist. We call it the media.

Now, my above characterization is a bit unfair, I will allow that, but it is, in essence, an accurate description of what the media is and does. And even calling it the media is a bit unfair, really I am talking about what ought to be described as the corporate media. These are media companies and conglomerates controlling the majority of news sources. ABC, NBC, Fox News, the New York Times, etc. All of these companies are staffed by people that went to good schools, went through prestigious programs, and are generally pretty intelligent. We also pay them to make sense of the world for us. We pay them with our eyeballs and subscriptions, and for good reason, we NEED them, or at least something like them. Allow me to explain.

Consider the amount of data that we have to process just going through our daily lives. It is quite a bit and without strong sensemaking skills we are liable to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it. Now broaden out the scope of what you need to make sense of. While an individual can generally get by pretty well just being focused on their immediate surroundings and relationships, most people want to know and understand what is going on in the wider world around them. This is an impossible task for one person to do, especially if they have a job and family and other obligations. So what are they going to do?

They outsource it. By appointing certain people in the community to the job of broader communal sensemaking, everyone else is able to focus on what they need to do day-to-day while also being plugged in to the world at large. Consider the tasks of scops, shamans, scribes, and others in the ancient world whose role it was to maintain and utilize the communal sensemaking tools so other people could farm, hunt, build, and raise children. When a community gets large enough (I suspect above ~200 people) this role becomes necessary for societal cohesion.

There are millions of people in the United States and billions in the world. Thanks to technological advances, there are events all over the world that require our attention in one way or another. Some are relatively minor to our day to day, like slight fluctuations in oil prices in the Middle East which cause a 4 cent increase per gallon here (slightly annoying but no real big deal) to the spread of a highly infectious and deadly virus in a city that most Americans have never heard of (kind of a big deal). Because of these concerns, we as a society have developed an apparatus to consume and process all this information and then give us what we need to know to make sense of the world. This is our sensemaking apparatus.

There are other parts of the sensemaking apparatus but these three, media, academia, and education, are the three major components dedicated to making sense of the world as it unfolds around us. Education gives us tools, media is on the cutting edge, and academia works on long trends, broad contextualization, and making better tools.

This view, that we as a populace are being collectively gaslit by a corrupted sensemaking apparatus, is extreme. I understand that. And I would understand if you stopped reading this and wrote me off as a nut but indulge a thought experiment. Think about how a news source on the opposite side of the spectrum frames any given issue (if you are on the left think Fox News, if you are on the right think CNN or MSNBC). Do you have any problems with their characterization of that issue? Are they leaving out facts that you think are necessary for a strong analysis? Do you think they are (sometimes) outright lying? Now, if the other side does all that, do you think your side doesn’t? The incentive structure that causes this behavior affects all the corporate media outlets, why is the one that you agree with special or exempt from it? They aren’t. All the corporate media outlets, on all sides of the political debate, need eyeballs for revenue. They can do this through solid and fair reporting and being nuanced and subtle in their analysis, but that’s hard. It is much easier to inflame partisan sentiments and sell outrage porn to keep people interested. It’s like the annual ‘War on Christmas’ stuff that comes out of the right or the ‘Trump is finished’ routine that seems to be on a three-week rotation out of the left. The incentive structure of the other parts of our sensemaking apparatus have also been perverted. I have another essay planned for this series about the nature and end of education and how that has been corrupted so we won’t cover that here.

If we accept that we, as a society, must develop a sensemaking apparatus to be able to function and that the apparatus we currently have has been corrupted through changes in incentive structure, what do we do about it? The best solution would be to repair the incentive and cut out all the bad actors that do not sign on to the honorable and necessary mission of the apparatus, but that does not seem likely (at least to me). The second-best solution is to develop your own sensemaking skills to be able to compensate for the failings in the broader apparatus. By doing this, you will be equipped to sift through all the data you are receiving and make sense of it. This will also allow you to recognize gaslighting and other manipulation techniques when you see them so you can counteract them. This is what the rest of this series will be about. A discussion of individual sensemaking techniques and how to recognize fallacies and manipulation of what the apparatus is giving to you.

I am not an expert in this. I am writing these essays to sort this stuff out for myself and I wanted to share that odyssey with others. It will be hard, and I will get things wrong, but hopefully this will be a constructive experience not only for myself but for anyone else that wants to come along.

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