I recently began posting pictures of our home base in Sedona to Instagram (check it out in column to right). It’s been a strange trip. If you are not familiar with how Instagram works, it’s fairly simple: you post pictures and other Instagram members can “follow” you and you can follow them, meaning that you see their pictures and can tap a little heart icon to show you like their pictures. My goal, if I have one, is just that I like the Northern Arizona mountains and deserts and like thinking about the composition of photographs. I’m also interested in the gear and techniques involved in taking and processing pictures. I did, however, market my own books on the platform—briefly, and with apologies.
But Instagram, like Facebook, is a world unto itself.
Shortly after starting on the platform, I received follows from blond Russian beauties who appear to be marketing online sex services. I have received odd follows from variations on the same name who have no content on their pages and who disappear after a day or two if I don’t follow them back. Though I don’t have any definitive evidence, I suspect these might be bots. I have received follows from people who seemed to be marketing themselves as, well, people—including one who bait-and-switched with good landscape photography. They are typically attractive young people, often showing off their six-pack abs, and trying to build a following with the goal of making money off of Instagram. Maybe they plan to show off products or reference them, thus becoming “influencers” in the lingo of social media. Maybe they are trying to fund their travel experiences by reaping revenue from advertisers that co-exist with their popularity in their image feed. Oddly, and quite often, they have remarkably few images—say thirty or forty—and may spend what time they do on Instagram just reaching out to follow others, thus gaining more followers themselves.
Occasionally there are efforts to parody Instagram itself and the effects it is having on Instagrammers. Christopher Ketchum’s Atlantic article, How Instagram Ruined the Great Outdoors, beats up Instagram for inspiring people to be obnoxious when being outdoor tourists. Ketchum references the Instagram feed, Public Lands Hate You, which has remarkably few posts but is emblematic of the backlash against the Instagram impact. He then narrows in on some sources for social media’s appeal:
Researchers have produced mountains of studies on the motivations and rewards that drive the social media user. The craving for attention, the narcissistic self-referencing, the seeking-out of the digital mob for emotional sustenance: It all comes down to the basic human need to be validated by others—to be loved, that is.
And, as he points out, to make some money off the platform, though getting outraged at some backcountry soul who portrays herself reading Edward Abbey while hawking almond milk seems a bit peevish. Stop following her and focus on other matters! I follow mainly architecture, photography, classical music, and a few other topics so far, though I’m not sure I’ve learned anything from any of it other than a few ideas about photographic composition. Instagram doesn’t bill itself as a learning forum, so that’s just my overindulgent pomposity rather than a desire to, well, engage (whatever that means!)
When Facebook, another narcissistic platform, was in its infancy, Peter Thiel of the PayPal mafia provided early-stage investment capital to “scale up,” as they say in Silicon Valley. Part of the impetus for that investment was driven by Thiel’s study of former Stanford literary theorist René Girard, who studied mythology as his core academic work. Girard’s ideas about scapegoating and mimesis (mimicry of idols and others for Girard), led Thiel to suspect that a personalized social platform would grow exponentially because people want to narcissistically seek fulfillment in others. An online system, with a stage as large as the world itself, enabled that.
And what about the scapegoating aspect to social existence in Girard’s view? Perhaps the condemnation and virtue signaling that pervades social media fulfills that role as well?
Who knows? While there are mountains of research on social media rewards, as Ketchum’s quote points out, there is little to recommend Girard’s theory. It’s a literary theory, after all, so maybe we shouldn’t expect much more, but it should be noted that Karl Popper’s falsification theory was partly invented to try to diminish psychotherapy and Marxism as proper “sciences.” The Austrian School of economics felt the same way about Leftist economic theories, while producing strangely unscientific add-ons themselves (see The Road to Serfdom). Also strange is Thiel’s own investment in alternative science press activities like Inference that cover topics that range from pseudo-science to anti-science, but only in a murky way.
But falsification is notoriously porous as a dividing criteria for science and non-science. Take alchemy. I can create a falsification criteria that says alchemy is falsified by there being no chemical method for converting lead into gold. That would seem to make alchemy a science since I’ve provided a falsification criteria. But, you say, it is impossible to convert lead into gold. Well, we could get there through neutron bombardment, you silly goose! You just didn’t wait for the theory of alchemy to reach sufficient maturity. Alchemy is not only falsifiable but ultimately vindicated!
Hmmm, maybe the same is true of Marxism?
So we need a more comprehensive demarcation criterion or set of criteria to judge science from its detractors. The parts and pieces are similar to Sean Carroll’s critique of falsification in the previous post, but need to expand beyond just abduction and algorithmic methods for achieving it. For instance, a real science might distinguish from non- or pseudo-sciences in that it fits with or builds upon other sciences that are validated by success. This is a meta-coherence criteria that can then be enhanced by requiring a science to be methodologically naturalistic in that it can’t propose any non-measurable or unexplained background forces as a basis for the theory. It should perhaps also be subject to rejection or repudiation. If it ain’t working, we throw it out with the garbage. This gets us closer to Kuhn and Feyeraband, though would likely not be radical enough for the latter.
The resistance to repudiation is more relevant than falsification for something like “creation science,” where the underlying claims are impervious to the evolution of data or our understanding of the natural world. For climate science or vaccine resisters, self-interest supported by verifying signals from influencers overrides the first criteria.
But what of Girard’s theories? They are like Jung or Jordan Petersen, interesting to behold as a way of interpreting the human condition, but they build only on a non-scientific framework of intuitions and suspicions. We are not fucking pawns of mythology, and our cultures evolve in wildly different ways and with equally radical divergence. Sure, we have egos and want attention and sex and money, but that’s more explainable by careful psychological investigation that interlocks with our biology and evolutionary systems of explanation.
Beyond that, it’s just a glass bead game, abstract and unknowably distant.
Bug fixes or, as we say, editorial changes…
I like your idea about a stricter demarcation, but wonder if that strictness might cause us to prematurely abandon some theories. The first thing I thought of was how would this apply to Einstein’s cosmological constant? Einstein himself admitted that he just kind of threw it out there so the equations would balance and maintain a stable universe, after the constant was judged to have failed with the observation of an expanding universe. Would a stricter demarcation have caused future physicists too completely abandon the idea of the constant because it wasn’t really based on previous science and just kind of fudged in, and failed? Or am I being stricter than you intend? I might be due to reading too many critiques of Einstein from the time that labeled his work as pseudoscience due to the failure of the cosmic constant. That and I kind of like Marx. 🙂
It’s a valid concern, but you may be stricter than I intend… Cosmological Constant vs. alternatives both meet the basic contract of science. They are based on empirical footholds, etc. It’s just that one is ultimately better than the other, So the final criterion of repudiation comes into play. It actually may be premature to apply that…
I wonder how much we can even trust “evolutionary systems of explanation”. It seems evolutionary arguments often perform the same type of narrative fitting that Jung or Peterson do. In fact this is what Stephen Gould called the “just so” argument – everything we see today can be conveniently explained “just so” by an evolutionary argument. And if we saw the opposite phenomena, they are also explainable by a certain evolutionary argument! It is therefore very easy to explain evidence using a genetic evolutionary argument, or a cultural one, or a group selection one. All plausible!
But it is only ever observable evidence – we can never prove it. Well, same with Peterson’s mythological explanations!
I am not saying we should believe Peterson, nor the evolutionary theories without question. We should consider them plausible explanations, but not necessarily the only one (or even the most heavily weighted ones). I simply see them all as possible hypotheses in an inventory I can use to explain the world – not necessarily “the truth.”
I have no complaint with skepticism about evolutionary arguments concerning certain classes of phenomena. Indeed, the further the explanation/phenomenon veer from testable into speculation, the lower the level of trust. That does not include literary ideas derived from mythological speculation for me, however. They can be clever enough and fun, even, but unless there is a path to empirical verification, they should remain as literary theories in their own “separate magisteria,” to quote Gould again.