Rational consensus and deliberative democracy in complex societies dominated by online social media interactions

Resumen

The purpose of my article is to explore the effects that complex communicative interactions in online social settings may have on our understanding of truth and validity, as these concepts have been defined in modern practical philosophy. For the latter, truth and the validity of democratic institutions can be assessed by a rational consensus that is, firstly, potentially universal for all possible rational beings or interlocutors, and, secondly, that can be interpreted as a reflective equilibrium achieved amidst an argumentative community of speakers. I aim at contrasting both intuitions with what really happen when rational agents confront their opinion in a real space of argumentative debate of complex nature, with possibly millions of interlocutors in principle accessible to the speaker: the public agora represented now by online social networks. I argue that, perhaps due to restrictions of physical nature, when social media corporations model the space of online conversations the- re could be a critical threshold where an opinion, as true as it may be, cannot be universalized, and where all “reflective equilibria”, as understood by John Rawls, are unstable. In paragraph 7 of my paper I develop an argument as to why this must be so, which depends on the effect of complexity models for 1) the goal of reaching a suitable choice or balance between the variance of attributes within a model and the bias represented by truth (the problem posited by the so-called “bias-variance tradeoff ”), and 2) for the goal of modeling true or valid semantic meanings in multidimensional frameworks. I conclude that both restrictions, the bias-variance tradeoff and the so-called “curse of dimensionality”, maybe of true physical nature rather than a problem of algorithm design, do tell us something important about our philosophical understanding of truth and validity of statements and judgments about the world. They challenge the ancient philosophical intuition that truth can be, ceteris paribus, shared universally throughout a space of rational interlocutors, because, for the first time in history, it is possible to see that the clause “all things being equal” cannot be possibly fulfilled in a complex society. Finally, this would mean that universality of consensus is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the establishment of truth of a statement.