From dogmatic narratives to knowledge ecosystems

Everyone has probably heard some version of an adage about how every perspective is limited and can never be equated with absolute truth. "The map is not the territory". "All models are wrong, but some are useful". "Breakthroughs come from the fringes". "6 from the other direction is a 9". Or the old parable about blind men and the elephant.

We also know about a great many historic examples of dogmas and narratives that people firmly believed in and were willing to fiercely defend, even though from today's perspective they look completely silly. When Ignaz Semmelweis proposed doctors should wash their hands to prevent deadly infections, he was ridiculed and rejected by the scientific community. Galileo Galilei was put in house arrest and forced to publicly apologize for promoting the heliocentric model that we now have no doubt about. Slavery was justified by the belief that white race was fundamentally superior to black and that science supposedly supported this claim.

We know all this... in theory. But in practice, does knowing it make us any more humble or open to see the world differently? We look at all the historic examples and see them as a reflection of the primitiveness of societies of that time. We chuckle at how silly they were, marvel at all the progress we've made since then and pride ourselves that we're in modern times now and science is much more developed and we're smarter and this time we finally really know what's true. We say "trust science", but then we cherry pick data that supports our worldview and deem other ones as corrupt. We celebrate diversity, but then we get into a rage rampage over which political ideology is correct. We live in an economic dogma that economic growth is the answer to all our problems and that capitalism is the best economic system, even as we're seeing it sweep the social and environmental foundations of our civilization. We get angry when someone says that one race or gender is superior to another, but at the same we use science to justify man's dominion over animals.

We're just as full of dogmas and false narratives as our medieval ancestors - we just have better ways of explaining why we believe what we believe. We still mostly base our behaviour on arbitrary value judgements that we cling onto even when they have no basis in reality. We then use motivated reasoning to rationalize our beliefs and convince ourselves that they're solid.

How can we be progressively more able to not just rationally understand, but embody and accept the notion that there are always more ways to see a situation and that they can all be equally true? How can social and academic institutions be built around this diversity and not around appealing to dominant narratives in order to get funded? How can we acknowledge that everything we perceive to be true is conditioned by our prior beliefs? How can we see that we buy into dogmas without even questioning them, start questioning them and let go of those that are not serving us anymore? How can collective wisdom emerge?

It's worth pursuing these questions. But first, let's try to understand how we even fall into dogmas.

How we fall into dogmas: power structures + psychology

History is written by the winners, goes the saying. So are the dominant narratives that shape our worldviews. Throughout history and including today, power structures were and are the ones determining what most people perceive to be true and how things should be. At times, this was achieved through violent repression of any opposing views - like the inquisition. At other times, through centralized control over information - like propaganda and censorship. Still at other times, manipulation and direction of information by economic pressure - like the media of today. A combination of all these mechanisms (and probably others) is still at play as we speak. Violent conflicts between regimes that hold different worldviews are still raging, propaganda still works like a charm and information flows are heavily manipulated and distorted by economic and political interests. Regardless of the method used, the result is always the same - the majority of people buys into the narratives determined by the dominant power structures, not by what's objectively true.

Think of any major popular narrative you want and it can be traced to a power structure. Church and religion are an obvious example that doesn't even need any explanation. How about science then? Shouldn't this be an objective framework? If a scientist wants to have any chance of getting somewhere in her career, she needs papers and citations. Research that doesn't align with what the mainstream science considers to be true or relevant will have a hard time getting published and/or cited. In addition, in order to get any funding for her research, she needs to apply for grants. If the funding institutions don't think it's relevant, it won't get funded. There we have the power structure - research that lies outside the dominant interests is unlikely to get accepted and amplified. Also, science is tightly intertwined with social and cultural paradigms - both influence each other. It's not a coincidence that the industrial revolution (mechanization of society) followed the scientific ideas of Newton (universe is a mechanical clock) or that classical liberal economics (competition on the free market) gained foothold as a scientific discipline around the same time as Darwin's evolution (competition is the driver of evolution).

How about the narrative that technological progress and economic growth are good for society and making life better? Certainly we can find many reasons to consider that true. But also many reasons to consider it false. Those of us today living in materially rich economies belong to the lineage of winners in power games, so it's easy from our perspective to look back and see how much better everything is (although even that is not completely true, depending on which aspect we look at). But this is not the case for everybody. Not for all the indigenous people that were slaughtered when colonial powers plundered their riches, allowing their economies to boom and leading to the world we have today. Not for all the people that lived perfectly well in subsistence communities and then got all their land privatized, forced to work for money and pay rent, which they didn't even need to do before that - poverty in monetary sense didn't exist. Not for all the other life forms that got killed or kicked out of their habitats so people could mine the resources, do industrial agriculture and build the infrastructure for more than we ever need. Not for animals going through daily torture in industrial farms. And certainly not for our children and generations after them that will inherit all the ecological debt our current economy is running on.

So again we have here the narrative that most believe to be true, but is actually a highly biased story told by the dominant power structure (i.e. capitalism) to justify its own continuation and existence and raise young generations into this dogma so that they can propagate the same structure.

There is one more important note about the power structures. We should not equate power structures with powerful individuals. There is no need to have clever conspiracies and secret ploys by the people on the top to keep the structures in place (that may very well be going on too, but the point is that it is not necessary in order for the structure to work). Power structures are systems that are outside the control of any one individual - that's also why they're so difficult to break down. Even if the individuals on the top are removed, the system will go on and the new people will very likely do no better, because in order to stay on the top, they have to obey the rules of the structure (and by rules we don't mean laws, but rules of power). This is why thinking in systems is so important, instead of just blaming individuals for their selfish decisions.

In the example of science, the researchers are trying to get ahead in their career and thus appeal to the mainstream narratives or interests of the funders. Economically, they are pressured into either obliging the system or getting kicked out. The design of the academic system coupled with the economy is the power structure. The group of scientists that is the most successful in appealing to the narrative that offers the most funding will get ahead, in turn they will have more decision power over what new research gets done (i.e. more reviewers of papers, higher academic positions, more direct control of funding, etc...), and that's how the dominant narrative gets reinforced while the other ones stay on the fringes with very little chance of making it into the mainstream. Same thing with capitalism - those who are the most successful in turning resources (living and non-living) into privatized profit will in turn get the most power to further influence the system (through investing in firms who comply with their values of business, advertising, lobbying, buying up more land and capital etc...), reinforcing the system of extraction and profit accumulation. Those who stay true to other values on average don't make it to positions of high power and therefore don't get to influence the system very much. Psychopathic people being in the most influential positions in the world is thus as much a consequence of their psychopathy as it is a consequence of system design, i.e. economics, institutions and (lack of) checks and balances through governance. Once the power structures are in place, they are self sustaining.

This brings us to the second part of the dogma trap - psychology. The key question is what makes individuals susceptible to being manipulated or pressured into following a dogmatic narrative.

For one thing, basic survival instincts like fear, craving and feeling of safety. In our modern times, the survival mechanism is mainly linked to making money. We often forget that for most of human history, this wasn't the case for most people. Monetary poverty and working paid jobs for bare survival is yet another feature of the power structure in order to sustain itself, not a default way human societies are (for this reason, justifying the necessity of economic growth to provide jobs is not a social policy, but apologism for maintaining the same system and a sign of entrapment in the economic dogma). It's very easy in such a system to get people to sustain it, as playing by the rules of the economy means survival. Conversely, trying to change it comes with fear of not being able to meet your needs and lack of safety. That's a strong motivation to silence any opposing voices you have inside of your head, accept the dogma and manipulate yourself into believing it in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Then we have a whole set of psychological tendencies and biases linked to the way we process information and behave in a social context. There are many, but groupthink and confirmation bias are probably two of the most relevant for the topic here. We like to appeal to our social group, meaning we're likely to accept what most people around us think and say without any critical evaluation. We will often not raise disagreements or controversial points of view out of the desire for group cohesion. Also, once we have an established belief, we're biased towards perceiving the information that supports that belief and filtering out or twisting the meaning of information that contradicts it. That's why we're also likely to join groups that have the same views as we do.

We can see how these psychological phenomena make dogmatic beliefs very easy to arise and hard to let go of. We're all raised into a whole set of narratives that we never even question because people around us think the same and because we start seeing only information that supports them. Conflict (ethnic, political, religious, ideological, social, etc...) can be sustained not necessarily because there's any real basis for it, but just because it has been like this for generations. Each side is raised into their own set of beliefs and a historic narrative about how the other side did them wrong. So each side views the present actions of the other side through the lens of this narrative (as offensive and wrong) and sees their own actions (that can be equally violent and offensive to the other side) as righteous.

The combination of power structures and these psychological tendencies can cause huge distortions of perceived reality. It's why political polarization is so strong, even though the left-right spectrum is a completely arbitrary categorization that we happened to settle upon through history without any fundamental basis in reality and is actually limiting the capacity to see any other political possibilities. It's why we can't seem to do anything to stop capitalism even as it's causing social and environmental breakdown in front of everybody's eyes - because the economic dogma is so entrenched that most people can't even imagine a different world.

Thinking about this systemic bias in the way we make sense of the world can seem grim, but this is not to say that everything we know is just a dogma and that we're all stuck in lies told by the most powerful. Obviously, there has to be some truth or relevance to people's experience in every narrative. Obviously, there is still a lot of diversity - we can coexist in spite of disagreeing around many things and having different ways of thinking and doing. And obviously, there are many people who don't conform to the dominant narratives. So, equipped with the understanding of our vulnerability to distortion of reality and manipulation of behaviour by power structures and our psychological mechanisms, we can return to the questions presented in the introduction of this article: How can we systemically amplify diversity and coexistence of perspectives? Why would we want to do that? How can collective wisdom emerge?

How can collective wisdom emerge?

The previous section focused on how power structures and psychological phenomena together result in amplification of dominant narratives and repression of marginal ones. A good question is whether this is necessarily bad and why we would want to change it. Is this something we want to fix or is it just a natural consequence of the distribution of knowledge that, even though producing some unwanted dynamics, most of the time serves us well? Without even going into moral or social arguments, we can demonstrate a very simple mathematical answer to this question. We'll go back to a 1906 country fair in Plymouth and a statistician called Francis Galton, who, ironically, was among other things a proponent of biological racism that we mentioned in the beginning of this article as an example of a dogma.

The country fair featured a contest to estimate the weight of an ox. 800 people participated and while none of them individually got the weight right, Galton calculated the median of the distribution of their answers and found out that it was accurate to within 1%. This statistical phenomenon is known as "wisdom of the crowd" and it has not only been shown in many experiments since, but also plays out in many social domains where distributions play a role, like markets or elections .

The key conditions for this to work are independence and diversity - answers were very diverse and, crucially, did not influence each other in terms of individuals using somebody else's answer as a reference for their guess. Funny thing that happened in some of the later versions of the experiment is that a group of experts made a worse guess than the crowd collectively. Now imagine the answers were not independent. Say this group of experts were to publicly say that they are experts and disclosed their estimate. People would likely want to reevaluate their answer, which would have made the collective estimate worse.

What can we learn from this? Even though individual answers can be far from the truth, their diversity leads to a collective outcome that is the closest to truth. Conversely, breaking independence and narrowing down this diversity by influencing answers to draw them closer towards any chosen individual answer leads to a collectively worse outcome. This answers our question - yes, amplification of dominant narratives and repression of marginal ones is bad for collective wisdom and we want to change it.

Thus, we want to build social systems that encourage independent thinking and nurture diversity of knowledge, perspectives and experience, even if that diversity includes perspectives that are considered irrelevant or far off by the majority. We want guardrails that prevent research and information flows from being hijacked by economic and political power plays. We want education and parents that raise independently thinking individuals with the courage to stand up for what's right, instead of preparing them for the workforce by indoctrinating them into a narrative that will make them the best servants to the current power structure. We want science to serve its purpose of exploration and enrichment of collective knowledge, not to be an economic tool. We want more interdisciplinarity where we're not looking for THE answer, but for different ways of looking at the same question. Because THE answer doesn't exist.

What might this look like?

On a personal level

What this essentially breeds is freedom. Right now, we live in an illusion of freedom - we think we're free to make choices and buy what we want, but what's really happening is the power structures are hijacking our innate emotional triggers. It also breeds a new basis for identity - instead of clinging to a political camp, economic success or an ideology about what's the "right" view, we can recognize that each one of us brings our own, unique experience into collective wisdom. The seemingly paradoxical point towards which we're aiming is where empowerment to bring our authentic self to the table, and a sense of all of us belonging to something common that no one can individually understand, coexist.

This requires each one of us to de-hijack ourselves. We're not likely to grow out of our innate psychological biases anytime soon, but we can be conscious of them, see how they make us fall into traps and work to avoid that. For example, I know that my news feed is custom-made for me such that it shows me content that keeps me engaged. I also know the goal of the system (social media) is not to present me with a realistic view of the world, but to maximize screen time in order to show me as many relevant ads as possible. Knowing this, I recognize that me feeling drawn (or opposed) to a particular narrative I see in the feed has nothing to do with whether it's true or false - it's my emotions being hijacked in order to turn my attention into revenue. My emotional reactions are not a healthy response to a real-world situation, but a result of conditioning and amplification in order to maximize engagement. If I want to cultivate freedom of thought and better understanding, I need to actively seek perspectives different from the one I conform to.

There are many ways to do this, for example:

• Look at the situation from the point of view of a different discipline or framework for explanation. The issue of climate change, for example, can be explained from many different angles, like physics, history, engineering, anthropology, psychology, game theory, economics, ethics, philosophy, spirituality, etc. Looking at it from only one of them provides only a very narrow and usually inadequate window. Saying that climate change is, say, an engineering problem, leads to the situation we have today - a bunch of new, more efficient technology developed, but no success achieved in actually reducing emissions. That's why interdisciplinarity is so important.

• Look for merit in opinions you don't agree with. Actively seek out information that contradicts your belief.

• Talk to people with a different life experience than yourself and imagine looking at the situation with their eyes. Each one of us has a unique life experience that defines the filter through which we perceive reality. Think about how your life experience brought you to accepting a certain narrative and how somebody else's life experience may have brought them to accepting a different one.

• Acknowledge the unknown unknown. Never let yourself get into the belief that you fully understand something - believing this makes us blind to hints that there may be much more out there (or in here) which we can't even imagine.

On a level of design of social structures and technologies

Every system has its function (or goal or purpose, whatever we want to call it) and we can see where our problems come from just by inquiring what goal our technological, economic and social systems serve. Not the goal we pretend they have (or wish they had), but the actual goal they're optimizing for and the incentives they provide.

The media is optimizing for clicks, subscriptions and ad revenue. The political decisions are optimizing for getting reelected and satisfying a certain group of voters (not the common interest). Financial markets are optimizing for ROI. The economy as a whole is optimizing for conversion of resources into profit streams. The education system is optimizing for scores according to some defined standards of knowledge. Academic science is optimizing for the number of papers and citations.

These are some of the main systems that define how our society works and thinks, and yet their goals have nothing to do with making society more wise or better off. Even though sometimes this is their side effect (e.g. competition for profit in the economy does also produce some genuinely beneficial innovations, competition for papers does also lead to some interesting scientific breakthroughs, etc...), it's not their main purpose. This is why the benefits almost always get hijacked and trampled by economic power plays.

How might these systems look if we changed their goals then?

What if the goal of media was not clicks, but the most insightful and quality reporting? First, the financing model would be different. Ad revenue and sponsored content would have no place there. It could be financed by the state (assuring checks and balances to avoid political capture), by readers directly, or both. It could include regulative feedback loops to incentivize towards quality - for example that readers can report if they detect political or other bias. It probably wouldn't be for-profit, or if it would, there would be strict regulations in place.

What if the goal of social media was not screen time, but presenting as representative a sample of real world distribution of opinions as possible? Or detecting where users have the highest bias and showing more opposite content? The algorithm would be completely different. So would financing models - again, ad revenue and sponsored content fall out and direct subscriptions by users would probably be the most appropriate. Because it wouldn't incentivize addiction, usage would be much lower, also drastically decreasing revenue.

What if the goal of academic science was not papers and citations, but enriching public wisdom with research that dives into some of the most interesting questions about life? Academic positions and research projects would not be granted to those with the most academic points, but to those that pose the most interesting questions that challenge existing knowledge and those that demonstrate the competence to provide meaningful answers. The funding would not come from industry, the military or public money with the goal of advancing those two.

If you paid attention to the above three examples, they would all entail less profits and a much smaller economic pie. Going down this line of reasoning in most other systems would bring us to the same conclusion - economies would need to drastically shrink. This makes perfect sense given what we explored in the beginning of this article, i.e. that building equitable knowledge ecosystems would require breaking down of power structures; capitalist economy being the biggest one of our time. Research actually showed this same logic for environmental damage - if we were to account for all the environmental destruction in companies' financial bottomlines, most of the global industry would be unprofitable. Meaning, getting the economy into sustainable limits means drastically shrinking it.

This opens up many more questions. Because money is circulating, smaller economies would also mean less money available for public spending on science, education, media, etc... Not to mention all other public areas, like healthcare, pensions, public services etc... It is this trap that's difficult to get out of, because the public domain of society has become so existentially dependent on capitalism that it seems like there's no way to live without it. Fortunately, this is again just another narrative we keep telling ourselves to justify not putting in an effort to conceptualize something radically different and better. That's why in our research, we're focused on exactly this. A growing body of interdisciplinary knowledge and ideas can be found there.