by John Allen Paulos
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book, I’ve Been Thinking, just came out, and I was reminded of a party game he’s written about. A variant of the child’s game of twenty questions, it is relevant to an increasingly pressing question: How do different social bubbles, media subcultures, or cults develop. Let me start with the game, generalized versions of which are ubiquitous. It’s probably one of Dennett’s most compelling intuition pumps; that is, thought experiments with made-up, but plausible outcomes.
Imagine a group of people at a party who choose one person and ask him (throughout, or her) to leave the room. The “victim” is told that while he is out of the room one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the group. He is also told that on his return to the party, he must try, asking Yes or No questions only, to do two things: describe the dream and possibly figure out whose dream it was.
The big reveal is that no one relates any dream. The party-goers decide to respond either Yes or No to the victim’s questions according to chance or, perhaps, according to some arbitrary rule. Any rule will do and may be supplemented by a non‑contradiction requirement so that no answer directly contradicts an earlier one.
What might happen is that the victim, impelled by his own obsessions, constructs a phantasmagoric, or at least a, weird dream in response to the random answers he elicits. He may even think he knows whose dream it was, but then the trick is revealed to him. The dream, of course, has no author, but in a sense the victim himself is. His preoccupations dictate his questions, which even if answered negatively at first, frequently receive a positive response when slightly reformulated. These positive responses are then pursued.
We can relax the rules of the party game. It’s not hard to develop more realistic generalizations that can be presented informally, say as a quiz on a slyly programmed website. Instead of inducing the victim to describe a dream, for example, he can be tasked to elaborate on a generic story or parable (for example, boy meets girl, or person overcomes obstacles, or man tricks his boss) he’s given. Let’s also assume that the party-goers are somewhat more uniform, say university students, or race car fans, or pediatric nurses, a collection of bots, or whatever, and that they are told that their answers should be generally random, but coherent and loosely relevant to the generic story. The story elicited by the victim’s questions in this case might be likely to reflect a worldview similar to the party-goers, albeit perhaps more self-revelatory and extreme.
Or we can go much further and assume that the victim himself chooses the party-goers. Assume these people belong to a loose association of more or less like-minded people, either online or in real life, and that they subscribe to a party line that jibes roughly with his outlook on many matters. The group (or even an app or a collection of bots) is also told (programmed) to give answers that are somewhat random, but coherent and generally relevant to their take on the generic story given to the victim. Because of the victim’s existing but perhaps nascent predilections and his similarity to the party-goers he has chosen, the group’s simple Yes-or-No answers to his questions are more likely to lead him down a political, psychological, or even hallucinatory rabbit hole. Again the author of the resultant story is the victim, whose obsessive questions guide its development, but here the party-goers obviously have a much stronger supporting role.
Moreover, in this latter case when the victim chooses his party-goers, matters can easily become incestuous enough to further shape the group as well as the victim. Over time, their inchoate inclinations can be mutually cultivated, repeated, and exaggerated to allow them to settle on those they endow with halos and those they endow with horns. The distinction between victim and party-goers dissolves and a cult is born.
These extensions of the party game are not such unrealistic scenarios as common critiques of the algorithms governing various platforms show. Not just parties, but many everyday interactions in close-knit social groups easily give rise to similar situations as well. Tweaking the game in these and other ways can lead a victim to a lockstep submission to groupthink. His hypothesis-generating ability can remain intact even if the ability to test or falsify hypotheses is undermined by misinformation, sensory deprivation, societal unrest, or interpersonal stress. He rejects nuance and uncertainty and unencumbered by any critical reality checks, spews out dreams, absurdities, and extreme political views.
Similar remarks may help clarify why silly I Ching sayings, astrological predictions, ethnic and religious differences, or even QAnon conspiracies seem to so many to be so apt. Their aptness is self‑provided and often bolstered by the group with whom they gradually choose to align ourselves.
To one degree or another we’re all prone to the party game of life. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Difficult as it may be, we have to forswear simple questions and answers, be wary of the people with whom we associate, and restrain our tendency to be seduced by just-so stories, our own and those of others. Voltaire was dead-on: believing absurdities can lead to committing atrocities.
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John Allen Paulos is a Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and the author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. These and his other books are available here.