October book club | Public opinion

About this event

The central thesis of ‘Public Opinion’ is as obvious as it is profound: the modern world is too big and complex for anybody to understand. Writing in 1922, in the wreckage of the First World War, Lippmann’s still-underread masterpiece identifies the great epistemic challenges of modernity and explains why most people don’t appreciate their importance. The small-scale social worlds that characterised most of human evolution and history were fundamentally knowable. In contrast, we have no hope of grasping the scale and complexity of the modern world. So, we rely on highly selective, simplifying mental models that compress and distort reality, stitched together by interactions among first-hand experience, Pleistocene intuitions, motivated reasoning, and biased media reporting. We then confuse these mental maps with the territory, leading to confusion, frustration, bad politics, and explosive divisions whenever we confront citizens who don’t view reality through the same simplifications and distortions. The catastrophes of fascism and communism in the twentieth century – in both cases, popular ideologies that simplified and distorted modernity in disastrous ways – vindicate Lippmann’s worries, as do the recurrent challenges that democracies have faced in delivering competent government. His own proposed solution –to make democracies more technocratic, more reliant on rigorous expert bodies of knowledge that can overcome ordinary human bias and fallibility – has had, at best, mixed success. A central question we will confront in an era of rapid advances in AI is whether it will exacerbate the epistemic challenges Lippmann identified, or whether it might finally deliver the objective, technocratic knowledge that saves us from our own ignorance, confusion, and political divisions. To ensure a deep, lively, and highly collaborative debate, it is strongly advised that all attendees read the book ahead of time. It is a quick, engaging read, and second-hand copies are widely available online for under £10. Whether you are a tech professional, a philosophy enthusiast, or simply curious about where humanity ends and machine intelligence begins, pull up a screen and join the conversation.