It's even worse (at least with emotional political opinions); when confronted with adversarial data we tend to become more entrenched in our positions.
Absolutely. Again, I’m not choosing a side here, just trying to observe phenomena. My own politics don’t fit neatly into a box.
I think one could accurately describe both as explosions of long-standing resentment, legitimate reasons to be upset, and lack of trust in institutions, finally ignited by social media making it easy to construct exaggerated or outright false narratives.
And I think this constant is not constant. It's growing with pollster distrust and with cynicism (which, let's be honest, is much more prevalent in genZ than before).
There is no doubt that popular culture and public policy continue to shift leftwards. If one is conservative, then that is a valid foundational concern. The MAGA movement identified this as an opportunity and capitalized on it. And social algorithms skew perspective to give the impression that the problem is orders of magnitude worse than it actually is, adding fuel to the fire.
Surely at some point they'll see that what they're being told doesn't make sens
In the US as significant part of the population will believe that the political party in power is the source of everything bad, counter to any evidence. Paradoxically, evidence against that point of view is almost taken as proof: "that's what they want you to believe!".
Try talking to an ardent Trump opponent or supporter that he did even the least little thing right or wrong. It's maddening the contortions of reasoning and deflection. He's so very polarizing so the phenomena is more extreme with him but the same goes for any president in my lifetime.
Now imagine there's only one real political party, more controls on information, and a general human desire to not see themselves or their "tribe" as the villains in any situation...
The type of sentiment change you're hoping for can occur, but my own observation is that it only happens very gradually over many years or very suddenly when sparked by something cataclysmic, and that second method has as much chance of hardening the mindset with more rationalizing as it does changing it.
I think our collapse began before Trump with the advent of Machine learning. ML was then hitched to advertising and click generation. Now individuals entire view of the world are shaped by algorithms designed to keep you clicking so they feed you to an echo chamber. This is the reason for the massive chasms between the 2 political sides, Brad Parscales was just able to harness that power for Trump.
If you step back and think about how almost everything you see on the internet is designed to keep you coming back for more and the way it can shape peoples world view, it is quite terrifying.
Particularly disturbing are the sites with comment sections where it's taken a step farther than this, resulting in one of the brain-diseased diatribes against 'liberals' and 'government'. Ignorance combined with absolute confidence is the dangerous hallmark of our political times.
My biggest fear is how angry I'm becoming at Republicans and how they are even engineers, people who based their career on data and yet they are here on this site.
I've noticed the same phenomenon. I think it is, at least partly, driven by the collapse of local power structures that the local information bubbles (great phrase, btw!) enabled. Those power structures are built into our genes, and have roots that go back ages. They are fighting back, or at least our innate responses are fighting back. It's tough to run a church or a school or a family, when those under you can reveal your ignorance quickly on their phone. And so the power structures are attempting to exert their own reality. It's what Trump runs on, he pushes a reality that people want to exist, and are willing to let go of actual reality to get it. Not that the phenomenon isn't also seen in the Left, it just is less malignant (for now).
I got really stressed out by Trump winning, but I still think the backlash against social media and tech companies has a lot to do with the establishment being afraid of losing power. When the Arab Spring happens, the free flow of information is an unalloyed good, but when Trump gets elected we suddenly need to curtail "troll factories", and ensure Fake News is being fact checked, and see to it that personal data isn't being used to influence elections.
I'm the first person to admit that I'm not impressed by my peers when it comes to electing suitable leaders, but it worries me much more that we're now falling for the temptation of reasoning for them, and protecting them from themselves. I think this straitjacket that we're so eagerly putting on our fellow man for his own good may very well be put on us, or perhaps the truly original thinkers that we yet don't know about.
So no, comments like these aren't infantile, they're crucial for maintaining the liberty that we've thus enjoyed on the internet, and that I would very much like to keep enjoying, even if I don't always agree with how people tend to use that freedom.
Stronger: For the last several years, the US has been the target of a disinformation and agitprop campaign. (Or more than one. And it doesn't really matter if the origin of the campaign is domestic, so you have to count the Republican and Democratic machines, which both paint a picture that things are terrible, and our side is the only one that can fix it.) That doesn't make it easy to form a realistic assessment of how good or bad things are...
In addition to Trump Derangement Syndrome there is also a Democrat Derangement Syndrome, and many others. Tribalistic news feeds tempt many of our brains into seeing all of life along these lines. Even food ican be political
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