The public disclosure of classified documents by Edward Snowden has been a polarizing issue, particularly among my friends and colleagues in the infosec world, who pay close attention to matters involving civil liberties, national security, and the Internet. The thing that I have found most disappointing about this whole affair is the need that people have to rationalize their feelings about it by ignoring its reality. I've seen a number of very smart people, for whom I have tremendous professional respect, twist the facts of this situation inside out in order to create simple, morally clear narratives that are utterly wrong.

It is this aspect of human nature that makes political discussions so difficult. We approach challenging controversies with the desire to affirm our own sense of identity and our self interests. Often, the best way to accomplish that, is a selective reading of the facts.

Partisan pundits are professionals who specialize in weaving these narratives for us. They take a set of facts, emphasize and exaggerate some of them, and ignore or minimize others, in order to reach a conclusion that is emotionally satisfying. Having established that the facts clearly lead to a particular conclusion, they then proceed to attack anyone who reaches a different conclusion for not having their "facts straight."

Part of the problem is that we just aren't very good at putting ourselves into other people's shoes, particularly other people that we are angry with.

Its easy to discard facts that don't have any personal relevance for you. In order to understand the relevance to someone else, you've got to go to a lot of effort to understand their circumstances and their point of view. Then you've got to incorporate their legitimate interests into the narrative, leading to a conclusion that is less clearly about you.

It is much easier to just disregard the other side or ridicule them than to respect them and take their interests seriously in this way and risk having to make compromises with them. We want to feel a certain way about a given situation and we're just not interested in points of view that make us uncomfortable. So we construct echo chambers where other people who are just like us tell us how insightful they find our narrow views. People seem to do this regardless of how smart they are, how informed they are, or what part of the political spectrum they are on.

Many of the facts that we ignore and dismiss through this process have more relevance for us upon careful examination than they did at first glance, but we rarely get far enough to figure that out.

Four Americas

In light of these observations, the way that peo... [ Read More (3.8k in body) ]