New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-hatred-and-othering-of-political-foes-has-spiked-to-extreme-levels/

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

63 160 6 years ago

Tycho9• 6 years ago

According to the article, this phenomenon is most obviously manifested in the humorous expression “own the libs”, and not, say, by shrieking scaremongering about fascism and comparing the other side to the Nazis.

hartator• 6 years ago

Do you mean this article about political polarization is polarized against one side? :)

whodidntante• 6 years ago

Well, I know you are being sarcastic, but my initial impression of the article was that while I agreed with everything the author stated, I felt the author was no where as subtle as she thought she was in herself promoting this polarization by what was left out.

All of the examples were one sided (and imo true, with many worse ones left unmentioned), while there was no mention of the elephant - the world view that all members of a certain race are racist by definition, and that all interactions between races are, by definition, based on race, no matter what the context. How is this not demonizing the "other" ?

My fear is that what used to be disagreements over what rights an individual has (who to marry, what to do in your personal space, what if any deities to bow before, what you are able to do with your own body) have turned into disagreements over what framework we should use to govern our society.

Individual rights, imo, need to be respected, and can be done without infringing on anyone else.

However, the current undercurrent of how we should govern ourselves as a society (marxism vs capitalism) is something that we all, as a society, need to abide by, and that differences in these views, historically, has been settled through war.

Waterluvian2• 6 years ago

The interesting thing is that the claims about fascism at least have the possibility of being true while "owning the libs" betrays its own disingenuous purpose of not even trying to make a point other than winning against the other team.

Tycho9• 6 years ago

“own the libs” is satire, it’s not literally the political platform

dTal• 6 years ago

Well yes, there's a wide gulf between voicing concerns about conduct and rhetoric, and being combative simply for the joy of watching your opponent suffer.

empthought3• 6 years ago

One side has literal Nazis marching for it, yelling “Jews will not replace us,” though...

mnd9992• 6 years ago

I think most people on both “sides” find that unacceptable.

yaakov34• 6 years ago

And the other side attacked actual Jews with rocks and bottles recently. What, that's not "your side"? Neither are those guys "their side".

im3w1l• 6 years ago

Talk to people from the other party. But not about politics.

matwood5• 6 years ago

It's hard because so much has become politicized. The dominant item in many people's lives right now is the coronavirus either directly or indirectly, which unfortunately has also become political.

zo12• 6 years ago

I agree, we are all human after all. But that's becoming more and more difficult. The divide between the left and the right is no longer revolving around ideology, politics, regulation, laws, etc. It's now become a matter of "life and death", "racism" and "violence" for a large chunk of the Left (and to some extent more and more from the Right too if I'm being honest). The slogans that are emerging are being sponged by the individuals on the ground, and that is starting to make reasonable non-political discussion next to impossible.

I.e. You can no longer mention in-passing that you support certain parties/politicians/political-beliefs.

matwood5• 6 years ago

What I see anecdotally is that the left has become more inclusive, and the right as become more extreme. People have fled the right either to no party or to the center left. That leaves behind the extremes on the right which have become emboldened by Trump and their shrinking bubble.

It's like evaporating water out of a glass of salt water. The water left behind becomes more and more salty. If you have ever had a salt water aquarium you'll know that you don't add salt water back to the tank, but fresh water in order to balance out the evaporation.

You mention racism. The same people may have been racist before, but now they are ok yelling it out loud because the only people left in their bubble think the same way (Trump may or may not be racist, but he certainly stokes this fire). And this is why it's difficult, because if someone tells me they do not want black people living in their neighborhood, I'm going to tell them that's a racist statement.

bogwog2• 6 years ago

Make politics boring again.

api3• 6 years ago

Politics and government are definitely in the class of things we want to be boring. Interesting government and interesting politics were a major cause of death in the first half of the 20th century.

BurningFrog4• 6 years ago

They don't even live in the same area.

oneplane• 6 years ago

Ironically, a lot of the world has seen the USA do this to everyone else for a while too. Too a lesser degree to their anglophone friends of course but the rest of the world is alien and unlikable all the same (with just as little arguments as you see in the political divide).

I suppose one could argue that the isolationism/tribalism has simply expanded inwards as 'the rest of the world' has already been put in the 'other people/cultures' box and only internal boxing up of each other remains.

the-dude8• 6 years ago

I doubt the phenomenon has anything to do with the US in the ROW.

Here in NL, a NATO member, it has been primarily the 'left' which has been painting groups with different opinions as 'nazis' 'fascists' etc. Vegans describing other people as murderers.

I blame this culture for our last political murder [0] which already happened in 2002.

This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_Fortuyn

throwaway36994• 6 years ago

The left (at least, the internet left) do this here in the UK too. Twitter seems to think all Tory voters are rich white men who want the poor to suffer.

Now I don't know if I'm in a bubble, because when I leave the internet and talk to actual lefties in person we always find a common ground. Hell, I have a friend group containing both anarcho communists and globalist one-world government types.

api3• 6 years ago

That is true but a one sided take, at least over here in the USA. Here the right and the left seem to escalate in tandem. The extreme far right now calls anyone they disagree with a literal Satanic baby eating pedophiles.

This also identities the left entirely with Marxism-Leninism which is like identifying the right entirely with fascism.

morsch2• 6 years ago

How would you know that it's primarily the left (whatever that is) doing that in NL. Your own observations are not a good source for this, obviously.

vinay4273• 6 years ago

Vegans describing other people as murderers.

Well, this is literally true if you consider non-human lives. The danger I see is then not listening to and interacting with these non-vegans to develop a more nuanced perspective of the people on "the other side" who may not be very different after all. Stating a legitimate political or moral view alone is not (itself) what induces polarization, as I see it.

blablablerg3• 6 years ago

I am also from NL, and first of all, you are blaming a big and diverse group, the 'left', for unnuanced statements and regrettable actions of some individuals. Every group has its crazies. Doesn't mean the whole 'left' is like that.

Second, they may be right. Which groups with 'different opinions' are you talking about? Geert Wilders has been convicted for libel against ethnic minorities. And Baudet has said that he wants Europe to be mostly white [1].

Third, now overgeneralizing myself, the 'right' does the same thing too: calling people on the left 'profiteers', crazy and lazy hippies who wanto to avoid any labor, etc. In fact, you are blaming the political left in your post right now for the murder of Pim Fortuyn, based on vague and unsubstantiated claims. You are doing the same thing you blame the left for.

And lastly, the original ideals from the left are very much needed in this neoliberal climate where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The economic divide is growing. Even the VVD is moving towards the left, seeing that the capitalist race has gone too far. One example: the Netherlands has a very serious housing crisis right now caused by neoliberalism. From the credit crisis to selling and reducing out the social housing stock, investors only wanting to build high end apartments, etc. In the last debate about it, the VVD was advocating for a bigger role in housing, that ideal is tradionally associated with the left.

So please, don't polarize, overgeneralize and blame the whole left for murder and name-calling. Using your line of reasoning again, it is not like the 'right' is in a good place right now with their corona denial and Qanon conspiracies.

[1] https://www.ad.nl/politiek/baudet-verliest-zaak-tegen-buiten...

sleepysysadmin• 6 years ago

This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.

You hit the nail on the head. USSR's failure and realization that they only survived as long as they did because they stole everything from the G8 countries and had slave labour of gulags.

Add in China's 'special economic zones' which is basically China implementing capitalism in a safe way. This implementation of capitalism has enabled them to greatly boost their economy. Unfortunately causing hyper globalization.

Communism demise has lead to them been rebranded countless times now. Fundamentally the collapse of communism worldwide has created lots of frustration. Which is a feeling that's built in to the animal kingdom. The unfortunate reality of this frustration is that almost certainly will result in violence.

swiley3• 6 years ago

Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account.

Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to.

The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.

zo12• 6 years ago

On some level yes. But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions. That makes it dangerous to "ignore" and hope it goes away due to us all deciding to be reasonable and ignore the hateful and prominent voices that use social-media as a megaphone.

Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements:

Higher education

Lower Education

United Nations

Local government bodies

Charity Organizations

Sports

throwaway36994• 6 years ago

I do agree with you and I want the constant crawl of IdPol stop, but I can't help but feel this is part of the polarization aspect.

The internet is causing the growth of IdPol as well as the growth of the movement against it.

auganov• 6 years ago

But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions

It's very hard to be apolitical. Almost all behavior can be interpreted politically.

What has really changed is it's much easier to obtain information about an organization and the individuals involved. In the past you might have simply not known enough to peg someone politically. Hence the impression of neutrality. Today it's just harder to create this illusion.

bogwog2• 6 years ago

Social media might need to be controlled in the same way cigarettes are. At the end of the day, both are drug dealers. One of them sells nicotine, the other sells dopamine.

Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?

op03• 6 years ago

Its not complicated. There are dose response curves for everything once you start studying them -

https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxic...

https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-...

How did we build these tables?

Same process will apply to how much dopamine (and whatever else) you can keep giving a kid or a group of people over time without serious consequences

Whether that takes 2 years or 20 years more to tabulate, lots of people will take a hit thanks to their internal reward mechanisms being gamed.

BurningFrog4• 6 years ago

The various Wars On Drugs do not inspire.

According to me, they have at best been ineffectual, and more commonly made a bad thing worse.

I think/hope we're in a transitional phase of our civilization where we haven't figured out how to handle these new things yet. Over time, institutions will emerge. They always do, right?

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

It's fun because, just like cigarettes, internet has been 'sold'. It was a new eldorado of information and choice ..

It started slightly innocently but at some point it became a product.

Tycho9• 6 years ago

If it wasn’t for Twitter I would have literally no clue about the machinations of the intelligence agencies to undermine the president or the corrupt activities of the Biden family. Unfortunately the mainstream media outlets choose not to report or pursue a lot of stuff, and have an alarming habit of citing dubious statements from “the intelligence community” as legitimate evidence that resolves the matter.

swiley3• 6 years ago

twitter is a terrible tool for this. It's heavily censored and biased. You could have heard it here or from a decent journalist.

ForHackernews5• 6 years ago

Uh... is this a clever meta-comment about the kind of nonsense on social media? Poe's law seems to apply extra hard these days.

bsenftner4• 6 years ago

Wish this was a joke. Twitter is just an idiotic mess.

iso947• 6 years ago

I watched a documentary about how covid was caused by a khazakstani journalist finding out about the clintons eating bill gates’ child’s adrenal gland. that was more credible than whatever conspiracy you’re reading about.

laurent92• 6 years ago

The double problem is, we are isolated, often after various moves due to our studies and first years of work, otherwise because we diverge politically from other ex- or people in our family who, themselves, got polarized the other way. So deleting social networks would be a good thing, but we depend on them for out last human interactions on weekends and evenings. Even worse during confinement.

_iyig2• 6 years ago

Computer games with voice chat have helped me weather COVID cabin fever as an alternative to social media. Particularly in PvE MMOs, players are just there to collaborate and have fun, with no room for politics to intrude.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

I wish that were true. Social media cringe is just the symptom

codysan• 6 years ago

I'm not so sure that it's the cringe that is the problem. I think it's the notion that these social media platforms are acting as a lens for how a lot of people see the world.

navidfarhadi• 6 years ago

It’s possible to (mostly) avoid political stuff on those websites if one wants to, instead of refusing to use the sites completely. Just as an example, I rarely visit r/all, but I do visit specific subreddits that I’m subscribed to like r/privacy, r/pihole, and r/thinkpad. On Facebook, I never browse my newsfeed, but I am a member of a group for my apartment complex in the Stockholm area which lists local events and people selling stuff or giving away stuff in the community.

My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.

arkitaip• 6 years ago

It is virtually impossible on Twitter, I know because I've used every tool possible (tweet deck, lists, occasionally muting people, changing the feed layout) and it just doesn't work because (a) Twitter is designed to bleed content from one tribe to another (b), because people have one feed where they combine work, private life and politics and (c) the metrics Twitter use are based on designs that agitate and divide.

legulere• 6 years ago

How is a subreddit about privacy not political? It might not align to the two political parties in the US, but for sure I expect there to be an echo-chamber of people that value privacy more over other rights than regular people.

everdrive• 6 years ago

It’s easy to filter your reddit, and get quite boring results. (Who knows if that will change in the future, though? The old reddit interface could be taken away at any time.) But, Facebook and Twitter are a different beast. Facebook seems all the sadder since the groups can be quite good, and the prospect of staying connected with friends is obviously appealing.

ploika• 6 years ago

"Rivals are alien, unlikable, contemptible" could be a description of feelings in Northern Ireland during its worst days, long before the advent of social media. Poisonous rhetoric definitely made things worse, but the real damage was done by things like gerrymandering, unequal access to jobs and housing, and repressive one-sided policing.

From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.

nabla92• 6 years ago

People in social media spend several hours per day following politics but almost nobody of them is engaged in any real political work. They are engaging with politics to satisfy our own emotional needs and intellectual curiosities. That’s political hobbyism/consumerism.

It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow.

They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.

ecocentrik3• 6 years ago

Keeping informed has been always been a prerequisite of American democracy.

"wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government" Thomas Jefferson (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html)

Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. Low level engagement on social media might be about as impactful as filling a stadium to see a politician speak during a pandemic but high level engagement is really the only way to participate in American democracy right now. If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be training bots to disrupt the process by amplifying division and hate.

Sane politicians aren't going door to door these days or standing on crowded street corners. They're interacting on social media.

salamimonger• 6 years ago

This got me thinking. Is it ultimately better for people to be battling it out online, on social media, rather than actually fighting in the streets? Everyone will get to have their fair share of outrage and stress release(after amassing it online in the first place), but no one get's hurt. On the other hand, like you suggest, none of their struggles will produce anything real. Which got me thinking, was it better back then, when people actually had to fight it out in real life? Then there would be some kind of result, and people would be able to make changes to the society that they see fit. It was often bloody though, and one side losing meant actual death(s). But from that, there was progress - good and bad. The way things are now, reminds me of all the bureaucracies in the world that prevent things from getting done - good and bad. Maybe people are drawn to fighting it out online, because they subconsciously know there's nothing they can do in real life anymore. They are well aware of how little influence they actually have on the real world and the only outlet for fighting for their ideals is online, which mostly result in nothing but mental stress and pain. Another thing, I have this idea that after two sides fight in real life, sometimes they can gain an understanding or appreciation of each other. They see each other face to face, as real people, and both understand that they are fighting for what they believe in. Whereas online, there's none of that. You could be fighting against a bot, or someone across the seas who was paid to just start shit. And online, if you lose, you just move on to a new thread or a different forum. You never have to live with the consequences of losing.

netcan• 6 years ago

How do you see HN fitting into this?

I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds.

The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?

golergka• 6 years ago

As if there isn't as much polarization happening right here.

tomohawk• 6 years ago

Social media has served as an accelerant for identity politics. The two go hand in hand.

How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?

ecocentrik3• 6 years ago

Just deleting social media is not a solution. Divisive otherisum is an attack on the social sensibilities of the the last few decades and a lot of it is being promoted by bots. A better solution is to find ways to disrupt the bots creating or amplifying the hate.

Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

Please, they're not all made for this. Curating subreddits you follow will make reddit pretty much ok and problem free.

Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.

mc32• 6 years ago

That helps, but it’s impossible to avoid —even if you avoid partisan sites.

Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox.

Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).

Lendal• 6 years ago

Maybe we should do the opposite. Maybe we should all create thousands of Facebook accounts, with randomized profiles that promote random articles and AI-generated comments. Then that program runs on your machine whenever you're not using it. It would be opt-in, like SETI@Home. It could bring the whole world together in a massive community effort, with the feel-good focus of destroying-Facebook togetherness. I would call it Baseball-and-Apple-Pie@Home. Then we all sit back and enjoy the ensuing utopia of a clean, Facebook-free planet.

intended• 6 years ago

America had this issue before these sites came up.

Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment.

For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.

zackkatz• 6 years ago

My wife wrote a paper about this phenomenon. This happens in specific policy contexts as well as generally.

In political science, the phenomenon is called the “devil shift”, coined by Sabatier. Similarly, there is also the “angel shift”: you see people who agree with you as having more virtuous motivations.

My wife, Dr. Juniper Katz, wrote about these shifts in the fracking context: https://www.academia.edu/37275520/The_Space_Between_Demoniza...

ache72• 6 years ago

It is very sad that the authors of the article either believed in all these accusations against the Russians or are afraid to say that this is nonsense so that they are not accused of supporting the Russians.

I want to note that the Russian government also accuses its political opponents of being foreign agents, using the same rhetoric.

matwood5• 6 years ago

It's well known that Russian trolls/bots use fake personas on social media in order to sow discord. Are you arguing that's not done at all, or that there is no evidence it's done in the article specific instance?

Here's an article examining how it's done in relation to anti-vaxx.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/

bsenftner4• 6 years ago

Don't all governments to this to any other democratic government? This practice is as old as democracy itself.

syshum• 6 years ago

While it is true there are "Russian trolls" on the internet, (and it is true the every nation with a national intelligence operation does the same)

The problem occurs when EVERY opposition statement from "the other side" is dismissed as "your just a Russian troll as no real American would ...."

"Russian Troll" and "Russian Bot" have been become a modern day no true Scotsman fallacy used by people to dismiss anyone that dares disagree with them on public policy, or the role of government as being Russian disinformation

ache72• 6 years ago

These trolls really exist on Russian social networks, trying to refute any news from the opposition media. And some people (Russian enthusiasts) count and list these bots. But your article does not prove it to me, because some Russians are afraid of vaccinations and there are crazy paranoids in Russian social networks that convince not to get vaccinated, including vaccines that are done by Russian medicine - what do you think this proves? That Russian bots are trying to weaken their own nation? For me, these are not bots, but religious fanatics, religions often reject medicine. You may have noticed that many religions have denied the existence of COVID this year.

mnd9992• 6 years ago

Peoples willingness to line up behind banners, flags and slogans without bothering to look at what those politicians are actually selling baffles me. I think if people from both sides were willing to ignore that and just sit down and talk about what kind of county they want to live in they would find they have a lot more in common than they think. I think this is what the article is proposing, and I think I agree with it.

II2II• 6 years ago

Are people willing to line up, or are they being pressured to line up?

In many cases, a person's principles are clear from what they say and do. That being said, a refusal to align one's self with a movement is often construed as supporting the other side. There are many reasons for refusing to align: a preference for independent thought, a realization that ideological movements change, an understanding that one's own principles shift (while labels often stick), or simply not buying into some fundamental points. None of that seems to matter when issues are polarized.

BurningFrog4• 6 years ago

We are an inherently tribal species. It's in our DNA.

konjin3• 6 years ago

I think I'm starting to realize why sport was pushed so hard until the 00s. It is complete nonsense that you can get your tribalism out on without impacting any part of your life. Imagine how much better the world would be if people checked game scores instead of tweets.

throwaway133372• 6 years ago

Politics and sports are often linked.

From chariot races to football clubs, real politic change happens through sports.

Here's an account of the famous chariot race riot in ancient Constantinople:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

Humans will make an identity group worth dying for over anything.

bassman9000• 6 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

cozuya2• 6 years ago

There is no reasonable discussion to be had with people that deny science, deny inclusiveness, promote racism, accept white supremacy, and refuse to condemn violence against groups they don't like.

ryandrake• 6 years ago

Remember, the other side is saying the exact same thing: "There is no reasonable discussion to be had with people that deny freedom, want to take away guns, promote socialism, accept killing babies, and refuse to condemn enemies."

Nobody is willing to even come to the table anymore because of how totally wrong and evil they see the other side as. Which is kind of the point of the article.

the__alchemist• 6 years ago

The article goes into specifics, but the general premise is as old as humanity. The subtitle: "The new political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable and morally contemptible"

This is tribalism at its core. It's baked into us for evolutionary reasons that helped us survive, but is now a detriment.

throwaway133372• 6 years ago

Yes, the problem is obviously media and social media stoking up tribalism and rage.

No, the problem will not solve itself by simply telling the public to think more critically.

These media and social media companies are incentivized by engagement metrics - which becomes money through ads - to destroy society via enraging their user against one another.

The algorithms that measure engagement and then feed it are the tools of our destruction.

This is not intentional on their behalf but an emergent result of what they've optimize for.

It's something that seems to be happening throughout the west - not just America.

This monster is probably our biggest existential threat today. The question is how do we stop it?

lazyjones• 6 years ago

This is just an escalation of the "groupthink" pervasive throughout the more progressive circles. Every 100 years or so it seems to explode into a full civil unrest/conflict or war.

IMHO it indicates that we, as a species, are built/evolved to exist in small tribes and cannot cope with large societies or crowds.

beervirus• 6 years ago

“Deplorable.”

plaidfuji• 6 years ago

A 2018 study had people who were partisan get exposed to some information on the other side. So if you’re Republican, you get to see what Hillary Clinton is saying, or if you’re a Democrat, you’re exposed to what Donald Trump is saying. And that actually made it worse.

The messenger matters just as much as the message. People on both sides carry strong Bayesian priors associated with Trump and Clinton, as well as with most major news outlets now, so they’re predisposed to assume words coming from messengers of “the other side” are inherently untrustable or malicious.

A more interesting study would be to expose partisans to identical content (an argument for something wonky, like trade policy or entitlement reform) through venues that otherwise look like their ideological stomping grounds, and watch how quickly people from both sides would agree.

Another part of the problem is that many of the current polarizing topics (gun control and abortion come to mind) are rooted in fundamental moral differences that don’t allow for rational discussion of the middle ground. Either the government can take guns away or it can’t. Either people can terminate a pregnancy or they can’t. Slippery slope arguments dominate these conversations and make people afraid to give any ground.

This is actually why I see promise for an AI tool like GPT-3 (or -6 or -7, more like) in politics. Prompt it with content from both sides and see how it answers debate questions. Maybe it would just learn how to give political non-answers. Maybe it would just lead to the politicization of AI, which currently enjoys healthy distrust from both sides. Or maybe people find that they’re more comfortable trusting a machine than a human from the other side.

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

I searched the article and was unable to find the phrase "basket of deplorables." That's puzzling, because it's a really stellar instance of the very action the article discusses.

Certainly, you can get a very wound-up contingent of people anywhere who will work themselves into hysterics, call people murderers and Nazis (and then of course jump to how moral it is to punch them), but it's rather different seeing a statesperson succumb to that kind of thing was a little startling. The article missed an opportunity there.

vehemenz2• 6 years ago

Polarization means the increased tendency to see the worst of the “other side.” But how can we honestly talk about the assymetry of today’s polarization without the analysis being accused of being political? After all, “Nazis are bad” is hardly a poltical statement.

pibechorro• 6 years ago

By design. Illusion of choice. Divide and conquer.

markvdb• 6 years ago

For some fresh breath and broader perspective, much of post war western Europe was extremely polarised between religious and non-religiuous (liberals, but especially socialists).

You may want to watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Camillo_and_Peppone#Films as an accessible example, but everyone from Western Europe speaking to people who were adults between 1940 and 1960 will dig up countless stories.

Here's some of mine:

- Near where I work, there's a tiny village. Until recently, there were two competing music bands: the "mice" and the "rats". One group was socialists, the others catholics. By 2010, both were largely composed of octogenarians and dying. But don't think they'd ever play one note together!

- After WWII, my grandfather, being very poor and having been in the resistance, had a right to financial assistance. He never claimed it because his wife was catholic and the resistance group he participated in was socialist. Claiming his benefits would have been social suicide.

- My mother's aunt was a catholic nun, and one of the nicest and most welcoming people, widely respectd by all in the village were she lived. Once, she went to the funeral of a local farmer, a socialist. Her going to that funeral was quite out of the ordinary already, to put it mildly. On her return, she said: "He was a socialist, but a very good and decent man."

civilized4• 6 years ago

Headline: we're so polarized! How awful wrings hands

Body: Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad

I don't even have a problem with a certain amount of contempt for Republicans, or at least their politicians. It's just, if you pretend to be concerned about polarization in the abstract, you might try harder to pretend to be concerned about the ways in which both sides contribute to it. If you only know about the specific ways in which conservatives or Republicans are bad, or "more bad", you're unable to overcome your partisanship in a search for the whole truth.

If you want to learn about how the left contributes to polarization, you can start by having a look at Matt Taibbi's or Jesse Singal's Substack.

scrollaway3• 6 years ago

The word "republican" appears 6 times in the article. The word "democrat" 10.

civilized4• 6 years ago

Did you read the article, or just count the word mentions?

chaganated• 6 years ago

This is a sociology op-ed by a journalist for an ideologically-charged stats rag (538) being published in a science magazine.

I would appreciate it if tree people would stick to their trees, and stop (erroneously) extrapolating every minuscule change in the sap into a chicken-little prognostication for the entire forest.

I like liberals, I like conservatives, but one type I cannot abide are these preening, midwit, overcredentialed, underperforming, doomsayers.

It will all be just fine.

meekmind• 6 years ago

Disengaging from social media or encouraging others to disengage on it's face appears to be the well-meaning advice of someone genuinely concerned with their own mental health and the mental health of others. For many this is precisely the correct course of action.

But, the vocal minority and ideologues aren't going to disengage. If all those who recognize illusion refuse to retain territory in the cultural and political dialog then the social media landscape would only be populated by the uninitiated and those who seek to initiate them into echo chambers. Those who have discernment enough to be frustrated by the hypocrisies and bias on social media are precisely the people who can de-escalate and bring more balance, reason and rationality to it.

The problem is then that the moderate voices are drowned out, censored, or out-right abused off the platforms (if not by actual people, but by droves of carefully coordinated bots). That leads to a larger discussion of the role of these platforms in societal discourse (or as the town square) and their woefully inadequate protections of free speech and privacy.

specialist• 6 years ago

Editorial references this OC:

Political Sectarianism: A Dangerous Cocktail of Othering, Aversion, and Moralization

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/political-sectarianism.pdf

Same topic, list of authors match, recently published, near match on title. I'm pretty sure this is the paper referenced. For the love of the FSM, why can't people use links?

Skim reading this paper, it appears complimentary to other reports. Will read in full shortly.

Polarization isn't just one thing. It's the result of everything mushed together.

Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a terrific summary, synthesis of the research. Connects so many dots. Physical sorting (urbanization) promotes polarization, faceted identities are now super identities, nationalization of media begat the nationalization of our politics, the massive political reorg fallout from LBJ's Great Society ending the Dixiecrat's strangle hold on southern states (aka Nixon's Southern Strategy), and many more.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Polarized-Ezra-Klein/dp/1476...

Klein doesn't much touch on social media in this book. Some of his podcasts episodes are relevant. Two underreported factoids popped out for me, First, how the landscape changed from blogging to social media. Second is the elephant in the room about the algorithms and how most critics are guilty of conflating speech with signal boosting.

(I have my own thoughts about social media, shared piecemeal thru my comment history. No thesis or narrative yet, sorry.)

Whatever the evil of social media today, eliminating it outright (not gonna happen) would only mitigate some of the toxicity and definitely won't unwind polarization.

TMWNN• 6 years ago

Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?

New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible

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