We take in massive amounts of information on a daily basis. Our brains use something called pattern-recognition to try and sort through and make sense of this information. My guest today, the philosopher Megan Fritts, argues that in many cases, the stories we tell ourselves about the patterns we see aren’t actually all that meaningful. And worse, these so-called phantom patterns can amplify the problem of misinformation.

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Show Notes and Transcription:

[music: Blue Dot Sessions, Golden Grass]

Christiane Wisehart, host and producer: I’m Christiane Wisehart. And this is Examining Ethics, brought to you by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

We take in massive amounts of information on a daily basis. Our brains use something called pattern recognition to try and sort through and make sense of this information. My guest today, the philosopher Megan Fritts, argues that in many cases, the stories we tell ourselves about the patterns we see aren’t actually all that meaningful. And worse, these so-called phantom patterns can amplify the problem of misinformation.

Megan Fritts: The occurrence of the phantom patterns not only makes the problem of misinformation worse, but if used intentionally, as we think they are by certain algorithms used by social media companies or sites like YouTube, it can actually be a case of what we call epistemic exploitation. Some epistemic good of ours, by which I mean some part of our good life related to things we believe or things we know are taken advantage of.

Christiane: Stay tuned for our discussion on today’s episode of Examining Ethics.

[music fades out]

Christiane: In her book, The Right to Know, the philosopher Lani Watson writes, “Knowing matters. What we know, or what we think we know, and what we don’t know determines much of what we do. We decide what to buy, what to risk, who to trust, and who to vote for on the basis of what we know, or think we know, about the world around us.” 

What we know is being constantly challenged in the era of “Big Data” and online misinformation. Each one of us takes in an incredible amount of information, and our brains tend to try and make sense of that information by recognizing patterns. Some of these patterns end up being false, or as my guest Megan Fritts puts it, they are “phantom patterns.” She argues that our ability to know information and recognize patterns gets exploited when online media outlets weaponize that instinct. She uses the term “epistemic exploitation” to describe this phenomenon. (And in case you’ve missed our other episodes on epistemology, “epistemic” means relating to knowledge.) I’ll let Megan explain further.

[interview begins]

Megan Fritts: So in this paper, my co-author and I argue that one reason that misinformation, especially misinformation that’s accessed digitally over social media or other websites is such a gripping problem right now. One reason that it seems like such a prevalent problem and it’s hard to fight, is that we’re exposed to vastly more information than we ever have been really at any point in history. All of this data that we’re exposed to gives rise to what we call… Well, a term that we took from two data scientists, what they call phantom patterns.

A phantom pattern is something that looks like a meaningful pattern that requires an explanation, but is actually not meaningful. It’s a phantom. And these phantom patterns can arise either randomly just as a result of us taking in so much information all the time that spurious correlations start to look meaningful, or they can actually be intentional phantom patterns kind of fed to us as a way of getting things to look meaningful or important, so people are more inclined to click on articles, people are more inclined to read them and feel more anxiety about the topic.

So what we argue is that the use of phantom patterns or the occurrence of the phantom patterns not only makes the problem of misinformation worse, but if used intentionally, as we think they are by certain algorithms used by social media companies or sites like YouTube, it can actually be a case of what we call epistemic exploitation. This is another term we borrowed from philosopher Lani Watson. In cases of epistemic exploitation what happens is some epistemic are good of ours, by which I mean some part of our good life related to things we believe or things we know, are taken advantage of. They’re exploited for the benefit of someone else. So what we argue is that in some cases, phantom patterns are used intentionally to exploit people into being misled by misinformation, and that this constitutes a violation of a right.

Christiane: And you write that what’s being taken advantage of here is humans’ ability to recognize patterns and it’s called the pattern recognition instinct. So could you flesh that out a little more? What is that and why is it so important to humans?

Megan Fritts: So we use patterns all the time, whether or not we recognize what we’re doing. We use patterns when we make art, when we write poetry or novels, stories. There’s certainly a pattern to narratives that people find meaningful. There’s universal recognition of particular human narratives. Just our ability to recognize faces is an aspect of the pattern recognition instinct. If you’ve ever recognized a face in something that’s not actually a face at all, if it’s the front of a semi truck or something, they always look like faces to me. That’s the pattern recognition instinct at work. This is a really good instinct that we have. In the early days in humanity, it was a crucial survival skill. It’s maybe not so much a survival skill anymore, or a survival trait any longer, but rather it’s what we call a humane instinct. It allows us to communicate with, and through the use of patterns in meaningful ways to other humans. So when this capacity starts to be used against us, when we are thrown into an environment where there are all these phantom patterns triggering our recognition of meaningfulness that actually aren’t meaningful at all, the result is that this capacity becomes useless or even becomes a detriment to us.

Christiane: When you say that the pattern recognition instinct is an epistemic good, you mean that it’s a way that we can collect information and make sense of information or collect knowledge and make sense of knowledge, right?

Megan Fritts: Yeah. Absolutely. Right. By epistemic good I mean it’s some good capacity that we have that relates to our ability to know things or to come to have true beliefs or good beliefs.

Christiane: we’re now in the era of what you and your co-author call “Big Data,” where we humans are interacting with massive amounts of data, massive amounts of information. Wouldn’t it be a good thing for our pattern recognition instinct to take over in this era of information overload?

Megan Fritts: So, that’s certainly how it seems. We tend to operate under the assumption that the more information we have, the better off we are. Anyone who has spells of anxiety like myself, knows that when you’re in the middle of an anxious episode, often the instinct is to go straight to information gathering, to get as much information as you possibly can on a topic. It feels like getting more information means becoming more in control, having better access to the truth. 

This is actually not the case though. So when you get enough information, when you get enough data, as the amount increases, what also increases alongside it is the risk or the chance of getting spurious correlations. One funny example from the early days of the era of Big Data was in, I believe it was 2004 to 2006. There was a spurious correlation in the data that people didn’t know was spurious at the time. We were gathering data on a whole bunch of things and noticed a correlation between the increase in murder rates and the increase in the sales of iPods.

So we measured this over the course of a couple years, and the rates of increase stayed very similar, nearly identical between the two. A few very well-respected institutes, The Urban Institute in Washington, hypothesized that these two rates were connected. They called it an iCrime wave and hypothesized there must be a relationship between these. Maybe people are being murdered for their iPods, maybe listening to your iPod too much made you homicidal, something like that. And as it happened, these two numbers weren’t related at all, we had so much data that we were able to see things that looked like they must be connected, but it just turns out that they weren’t at all. So once you get too much data, it becomes almost a statistical certainty that there will be spurious correlations that look meaningful. And the difficult part is figuring out which ones a