Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of sources, and use statistical modelling to prove… um, whatever bullshit conclusion you hoped to prove in the first place.
For all the excitement of the information age, we must remember that self-serving delusions like nothing better than large quantities of information. The internet was a gift to conspiracy theorists, for instance. But confirmation bias is also more pronounced among the educated. (No one measures the negative consequences of higher education, but a naïve faith in universals has to be one of them.)
Back in the analogue age, people couldn’t avoid exposure to shades of opinion. Today we face so many facts that it is easy to ignore awkward information altogether. In police work this is known as ‘privileging the hypothesis’, where you obsessively look for information in support of your initial theory and unconsciously fail to follow any line of enquiry which might contradict it.
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