The Information Diet

2007, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists—the last major scientific body to reject climate change’s existence and cause— changed its mind. Climate scientists reached consensus: global warming is “unequivocal” and mankind is the primary cause.[54] Since then, no recognized scientific body has dissented from the theory[55] or rejected the idea of climate change. In the five years since consensus was reached by the scientific community, the number of people doubting climate change’s occurrence has increased. When the battle for scientific minds ended, the doubt production machines shifted into overdrive.

Back in 1954, psychologist James Olds found that if he allowed a rat to pull a lever and administer a shock to its own lateral hypothalamus, a shock that produced intense pleasure, the rat would keep pressing the lever, over and over again, until it died. He found that “the control exercised over the animal’s behavior by means of this reward is extreme, possibly exceeding that exercised by any other reward previously used in animal experimentation.”[48] This launched the study of brain stimulation reinforcement, which has been shown to exist in all species tested, including humans. At the heart of brain stimulus reinforcement is a neurotransmitter called dopamine.

“Why do humans reason?,”[43] they argue instead that “reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.” Mercier and Sperber argue that our minds may have evolved to value persuasion over truth. It certainly is plausible— human beings are social animals, and persuasion is a form of social power.

We already know that things like confirmation bias make us seek out information that we agree with. But it’s also the case that once we’re entrenched in a belief, the facts will not change our minds.

Westen and his colleagues found that when these subjects processed “emotionally threatening information” about their preferred candidates, the parts of the brain associated with reasoning shut down and the parts responsible for emotions flared up.[41] Westen’s research indicates that once we grow biased enough, we lose our capacity to change our minds.

In 1995, in the very early days of the World Wide Web, Clifford Stoll wrote in Silicon Snake Oil (Anchor), “Computers force us into creating with our minds and prevent us from making things with our hands. They dull the skills we use in everyday life.” Keller, Stoll, and Carr all point to something interesting: new technologies do create anthropological changes in society. Yet