It's also tragic that most online discourse is so polarized, yet when I go out and talk politics irl with people who have drastically different views I'm able to have nuanced conversation where both parties can at least see where the other has good points.
Idk what can be done. It's easier to manipulate people into poor self serving thinking than to get them to rationalize.
It’s not as hard as you make it up to be, you simply have to instill values in the population which promote diversity of thought, independent thought, and recognition of moral signaling behavior.
The major problem with the left leaning political spectrum in america is a somewhat blind authoritarian “respect” for “diversity” where what counts as diverse is rather restricted and generally doesn’t include disagreement on the subject.
The key missing ability is getting people to empathize with each other and not to confuse radical ideas which one finds abhorant and moderate ideas one finds disagreeable.
A cheap way to make this much easier is to ban labels like political party, gender, etc. If you stop sorting people (and yourself) into bins it becomes a whole lot more difficult to be so polarized as you aren’t dividing the world into us and them by dealing with a new human one by one.
First part is good. Second part of "needs to be made clear" is where you will run into issues.
We have this need to get everyone to agree with our views. But firstly it's not important to get things done and secondly it's not possible because of the variety of different needs and personality traits in the population.
It's a possible approach only on Putin or Xi planet . But it breaksdown in democracies (esp given the propaganda these days) people just harden their positions(they hear your view as an ultimatum or a demand), get defensive, react, attack etc. Trust breaksdown and then there is no hope for anything nuanced.
Better option is to give people something else to focus on, something to do etc while doing everything you doing well in your first para.
I wonder if this could be done intentionally. It's cheaper to make a view popular with a niche, disliked group than to make the opposite view popular with a large voting bloc
There's no problem with wildly differing views. The problem is dehumanizing speech. Taking reddit as an example, there's a thriving r/Libertarian and r/guns together with Sanders supporting or communist subreddits.
Don't conflate strong disagreements with toxic speech.
My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.
For example if you are running for a congressional seat which is 50% republican voters and 50% democrats I would imagine that being a moderate centrist is probably a relatively good strategy.
If the seat is 80% one side then probably you want to be much more extreme in that direction because what the other 20% thinks doesn't matter so much.
However I agree, the internet was meant to make us all open minded and tolerant and yet has had the opposite impact.
Having gone from a very leftist upbringing, to indulging in right wing conspiracy theories, and back to left leaning political views, I would say this article is pretty accurate. As you navigate these different “realities”, it feels like you are entering worlds with very different sets of facts, axioms, and emotional responses. Understanding or changing other people’s viewpoints is virtually impossible, and people are quick to chalk others opinions down to being uneducated, or stupidity. This will quickly create a divide that is even harder to cross. I’ve been wondering if there’s any way to help alleviate these conflicts, but all I can think of is if we collectively don’t give a shit about whatever we’re arguing about. But the problem is that maintains the status quo.
You know honestly I don’t have a good answer for that. On the one hand I feel like we’re intelligent enough to rise above partisan or two sided politics but on the other hand we’re not intelligent enough to realize what the true implications of some of the platforms we’ve built are. And we’re definitely don’t have the forethought to understand that our platforms will and should be used by people we don’t agree with.
+1, most of the people I know haven't really thought through their political views so when it comes up in person, I very often end up saying something that would be shocking to them if I wasn't there to make the case for it (and in 99% of cases, they end up convinced or at least convinced that my position is valid).
Online is an entirely different story. The barriers to communicating efficiently makes people default to pattern-matching instead of thought, which pretty quickly devolves into the lowest common denominator of conversation.
As you say, places like reddit are better for this, where people have a higher tolerance for longer conversation and the interface supports longer posts. I'm part of a subreddit that's probably in my top 3 fora ever for quality of conversation ever, but it relies heavily on the fact that the norms are pretty well-internalized by everyone.
How do you take into account the views of everyone, when different segments of the electorate sometimes have irreconcilable desires and views, and not wind up with "tyranny" of some sort simply by having to set some policy that can't please everyone?
True, but EFF and others managed to get past that as well, I think mostly by not overreaching, always being fact-based and consistency. It would certainly take quite a while to gain enough trust and support if you're not ideologically aligned.
I worry that it's just hard to do. It takes a special kind of person (and lots of them) to keep general politics out, even more so when you're successful and advocating your personal politics would be easy and effectful. Oh, and being vigilant so you don't get co-opted by a political movement.
I love this angle. There's a lot of room to improve the methodology, but this is getting at the heart of the question of why we are seeing increasingly polarized politics.
With a wide perception gap, we are guaranteed to be framing our opponents' views inaccurately and therefore fighting the wrong battles if movement at a societal level is actually what is desired.
The more politically diverse your direct in-person interactions are, the better your perception gap, and the more likely you are to be able to accurately frame your opponents' arguments when debating with them.
I wish this attitude was more prevalent. The most dangerous thing we can do is turn a non-partisan issue into a partisan one. As soon as it becomes about right vs. left, you have an army of people on Twitter, etc. who are ready to mindlessly shill a viewpoint, not because they know anything about it, but because it aligns with their political identity.
People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds.
The real issue is integrating opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that's where actual understanding takes place.
But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.
The only exception I can think of is The Economist, whose articles often follow exactly the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which of course is why they're known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present "both sides" in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.
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