Mass Misreading

= "the systematic construction of positions that were never held, followed by their systematic demolition". [1]

Description

Richard Hames:

"Mass misreading — the systematic construction of positions that were never held, followed by their systematic demolition — is one of the defining features of contemporary public discourse, and its costs are not trivial.

The first cost is epistemic. When the response to an argument is almost always the argument’s caricature, genuine disagreement becomes structurally impossible. You cannot update your position in response to a counter-argument that was never actually made. The feedback loop that keeps thinking honest – the loop that runs: here is a position, here is a challenge to it, here is a refined position – is broken. Everyone gets louder. No one gets wiser.

The second cost is social. The inference machine does not just produce wrong readings of texts. It produces wrong readings of people. The writer who argues X becomes, in the reader’s mind, someone who believes Y and Z and probably also holds views that were never expressed and would be denied if raised. The person disappears into the position attributed to them. And the position attributed to them is the one most useful to the argument the reader was already having.

This is not a new problem. But the scale of it is new. The speed is new. And the architecture that incentivises the most energetic misreading — that rewards the confident attribution of motive and the viral demolition of the position that was never held — is new, and it’s operating at a civilisational scale."

(https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/the-text-belongs-to-the-reader-now)