That is not necessarily a bad thing if it expands the Overton Window.
I don’t think even this is really enough. I used to be strongly anti-gun despite reading and debating with pro-gun people. Then I moved to Southern Utah and got to know some people who were passionate about guns, people who I trusted and liked. Since then I’ve understood better where they are coming from; I still lean anti-gun but that experience tempered my opposition.
Or think about someone who is anti-gay who then learns that a loved one in their family is gay.
Let’s drop the absurd pretense of false balance by pretending that liberal and conservative echo chambers are equivalent. I understand you’re trying to avoid the notion of being partisan yourself by suggesting that both sides are equally guilty and the creation of echo chambers is a natural effect of ideology, but come on. You miss the substance of the issue in pursuit of this false balance.
The rise of dissent-intolerant internet communities and having enough niche media that people can choose to get their information from whatever media reinforces their own biases has much more radically polarized the right than the left.
Fox News alone basically feeds views and opinions to millions of Americans. Saying “but MSNBC!!!” is exactly that sort of ridiculous false balance I’m talking about. No one watches MSNBC, and certainly they don’t treat it like some sort of gospel when anyone does. And even so, as journalistic integrity goes, they’re not even in the same league. MSNBC is slanted, but Fox News is a propoganda outlet. Fox News basically sets the table for political discussion in the US and feeds millions of people their exact talking points that they parrot.
Conservative talk radio is a huge thing, and it’s basically just repeating to people what they already believe to keep them in a state of constant enragement, while gradually working more of your talking points into the mix. There’s essentially no left wing radio, and what little resembles it isn’t nearly so radicalized and designed to keep you angry all day long, because there’s not really a market on the left for being in a constant state of paranoid crisis.
This isn’t innocent. There are monied interest using the right wing mentality to seek echo chambers to influence the opinions of millions of people to create their own political army of people to act against their own best interest. As an example, millions of Americans form the core of an army who’d be willing to fight to the death to make sure we don’t do anything about climate change even though it’s obviously against their own best interest. Organizations like Exxon and the Koch brothers industries sit down with Madison avenue advertising firms and try to figure out how to make people not only cool with fucking the planet over, but actively supporting them, and their answer is to use the right wing echo chamber media machines to keep conservatives in a perpetual state of enragement and steer that rage towards their own interests.
As an even more perverse example, there are millions of people who make less than $50k a year whose biggest political issue is that we don’t increase taxes on people vastly wealthier than them. They don’t even object so strongly to taxes that will affect them.
And all of those ubiquitous right wing chain e-mails - also designed for permanent paranoid enragement - who do you think writes those?
Finding your own preferred sources of media and information about the world is easier than it’s ever been. It was hard to be so polarizing as it is today when there were only 3 major TV networks and they all did a reasonable job of being balanced and having journalistic integrity. Chain e-mails couldn’t be disseminated so quickly. You couldn’t find internet forums dedicated to hating and getting outraged over the same stuff you feel.
Without a doubt, conservatives have embraced and clung to creating their own echo chambers with much greater tenacity and much greater closed-mindedness than any equivalent on the left. And their values tend to naturally line up with regressive interests of the monied elite, which makes it easier for them to co-opt the constant outrage of the conservative platform to serve their own interests. That keeps the right wing echo chamber funded, pervasive, ubiquitous, and on target.
You mean like the SDMB ?
Anyone from the political center and to the right is held in disdane here.
Ok, but the answer to question asked by the OP is obviously in the affirmative, which to my mind is only solved by dialogue and intellectual honesty, which your answer before ignored. I can understand someone fully, but that doesn’t mean I’m enclined to concede to a deal they feel is fair only because I’ll get a small fraction of what I want.
And why is that? It’s certainly not because there’s a policy of banning people who have right wing viewpoints.
It turns out that when there’s a left/right divide on an issue, the facts are often more in favor of the left. Climate change denialism doesn’t go well on this board. Is that because it’s a liberal echo chamber, or, because, you know, that’s reality?
Places that have a culture of open, intellectual debate and a willingness to accept reality tend to skew left (by US standards) because US conservatism as a movement is very “create your own reality”
That’s exactly why they form their own echo chambers, because their viewpoints cannot withstand scrutiny.
Expanding the Overton window almost certainly guarantees increasing the likelihood of catastrophically bad outcomes, like genocide. Especially given that we know ideological positions like communism and fascism are very likely lead to persecution and gulags, it is highly probable that other extreme political beliefs will lead to mass death. A policy of prudent avoidance would suggest treading slowly and cautiously when changing the course of society.
I think there’s a good chance that your own (presumably liberal) echo chamber is what leads to this conclusion. I don’t know how to prove it, nor do I know how you could prove otherwise.
This is just an example of exactly the sort of false balance I was referring to in my posts. You’re beginning with the presumption that two disparate political groups are equally well-reasoned, well-intentioned, well-motivated, critical thinking, etc. And so any difference they perceive between each other is just their own partisanship biasing them towards seeing their own side in a positive light, and the other side in a negative light.
But that’s a terrible assumption to make. Political ideologies are not something that you are randomly assigned at birth. They are not a random sampling of the population. We’re not comparing short and tall people or people with different colored skins and declaring we know they possess certain ideas and traits.
No, you either choose your political ideology, based on your own personal philosophy and biases, or one is programmed into you by being engulfed into it, in which case it forms your philosophy and bias, or some combination of both. This leaves the door open for the possibility that one ideology is more accurate and closer to reality than another. In fact, it almost demands it. What are the odds that two disparate positions which disagree on philosophical and factual issues are precisely balanced, and precisely equally correct? A negligible chance. And yet that negligible chance is what you’re banking on if you start your position from the cognitive bias of false balance.
Let’s imagine there was a message board created tomorrow whose goal was to be free of any sort of bias and inviting to people of all political opinions, to be a place where honest, rational, factual debate could take place.
Ideologies would clash, and the less reasoned, less factually correct ideas that don’t match up with the real world or with real human values would gradually be pushed aside by better arguments and facts. This hypothetical board would scare off people who denied climate change, people who derived their idea of reality from religion, people who argued that countries with single payer health care are disasters and that everyone was jealous of the US system, people who argued in favor of things like the invasion of Iraq. Pretty soon a whole swath of topics would be pretty much covered, with only a lone nut dropping in every once in a while to argue them - usually just to be linked to previous threads in which their ideas were completely debunked, or just a drop by copy/paste never to be seen again.
Lo and behold, that hypothetical board would pretty much look like what the SDMB does now. The SDMB is not a liberal echo chamber. Whatever liberal bias you see in it is the result of the exodus of people with reality-challenged views being repeatedly defeated in open argument. Cries of bias and hostility on the SDMB to other ideologies are just a way for people to justify to themselves that their debunked ideas aren’t wrong, they were just rejected by the liberal hive mind.
False balance is assuming both sides of an issue (or any side in a multi-way issue) has equal merit, and for you to believe that one is correct is just your own bias showing. It’s a weak position - not even that, really, but a cognitive bias. It’s actually easier to tell yourself you’re above the fray, and that both sides are equally wrong, but only you’re clever enough to see it. And it leaves you free from actually having to consider the merits of the arguments on a case-by-case basis. So it’s simple, satisfying, and makes you feel superior to those you criticize. It’s also wrong, and dangerous - it gives false support to the wrong side of any argument.
That’s the effect of echo chambers, not the cause.
When I really press people on their ideas, I find that they aren’t nearly as party-aligned as they profess to be. They might support position A over position B because party X supports it and they prefer party X over party Y, but in reality they’d rather have position C. Or maybe they are just totally uncertain and so position A is the default.
The trouble is that it’s difficult to keep a nuanced position when you’re embedded in a group. Even when there’s a diversity in opinion, you get this self-aligning effect where the group converges on the majority opinion on any given position.
And to be frank, people like you are a problem with your pigeonholing. Instead of investigating people’s real beliefs, you shut down the discussion before it starts. It has the effect of turning things into a shouting match, and hardening people along their party lines since they feel threatened.
Anyone with a speck of intellectual honesty has the obligation to seek out not just opposition opinion, but the best of that opinion, and address it in the most rigorous way possible.
That doesn’t mean that one has to put up with trolls, but if an argument is put forward with even a shred of validity to it, one should tackle the best form of it, and not the weakest.
Right-wing echo chambers may be a bit worse, on average, than left-wing, but neither side has any large pool of individuals willing to make this effort. The average liberal may have a better idea of the reality of climate change than the average right-winger, but both are getting their information from equally weak sources, and neither is really any more informed than the other. This, I think, is the true equivalence of the echo chambers.
This is ridiculous. People who believe in climate science are informed by climate science. They’re not listening to some left Rush Limbaugh (notice how there isn’t really one of those) who has made believing climate science one of their talking points out of fiat.
On one side, you have people willing to believe that the experts on the subject who’ve studied the problem for over a decade know what they’re talking about, and defer to them. On the other side, you have people who think science is a giant hoax and conspiracy by those pointy headed smart types, and you can totally listen to the Koch brothers on this one, because, I mean, I don’t want to feel bad about driving my hummer anyway.
Supposing you’re right, all you’ve demonstrated is that a truly open discussion forum will converge on something approximating mainstream liberal thought. It does not demonstrate that the typical liberal uses the same intellectual rigor to come to the same conclusions.
Even if “reality has a liberal bias”, people who did not reason themselves into that position are liable to come to incorrect conclusions when presented with a novel situation.
Do they? Have they read the papers? Verified the credibility of the scientists? Or did they just believe that because it’s what they heard from their preferred news sources?
Yes, if one does go through this process, one comes to the undeniable conclusion that climate change is real. If you believe it because that’s what you heard on NPR; well, you have a more accurate picture of reality than someone listening to Rush Limbaugh, but you aren’t really better informed.
Liberals are not completely immune from misinformation. The anti-vax stuff straddles party lines. This kind of nonsense can only grow in an environment with no intellectual rigor. Even if it’s less common than on the right, its mere existence suggests that large segments are not really thinking much about the information presented to them, and instead making emotional judgments. That NPR is a better news source than Fox doesn’t prove that their audience is thinking any more critically.
Raises hand.
Yes, but I still have to see an NPR report praising the anti-vaxxers.
Well, not all people does have the time to look for the proper information, but I have found that what one does prefer for sources of information can indeed mess one up for decades. One does have to learn to also inform oneself about the quality of the sources one uses.
Probably, but what’cha gonna do? America is in its own media bubble too. Society is atomized more than ever, people look for tribes wherever they can.
Personally I’m pretty lib, but I can’t imagine reading lib blogs seriously day in and day out. I mostly frequent politically dissident blogs even if I don’t agree with most of what they say, whether it’s libertarian, white nationalist, radfem, anarchism, conspiracy sites, whatever – anything but the usual boring gruel. I mean after awhile don’t you find “lol look at these dumb religious fundies”-type articles tiresome?
Cenk Uygur is the closest.
Choosing a news source is the most important step to being informed.
But there are a number of problems with your analysis. The most substantial is recentism bias—that is to say, either you are wrong, or very nearly everyone else in human history is. On an issue like gay marriage or transgender rights, for example, quite plausibly >99% of people to have ever lived hold views opposite you. Are you so enlightened as to know the real, objective truth? For centuries, wise men have been thinking that they finally figured out the secret—to theology, to philosophy, to statecraft—and time has proven most of them wrong. What makes you different?
Moreover, you fail to account for the fact that money can bias the set of available facts, which can bias the academic consensus on an issue (assuming of course that the academic consensus is grounded in reality, which is not always so). Suppose, for example, that Donald Trump were to spend a few billion dollars commissioning the finest studies the social sciences have ever seen on the costs and harms of illegal immigrants, while spending nothing studying the benefits of immigration. He could quite possibly change the consensus on border policy regardless of it’s actual merits. This isn’t a counterfactual or hypothetical; the highly partisan Pioneer Fund, for example, has influenced the academic consensus on race and intelligence through funding studies (like the Minnesota Study of Twins raised apart) in areas where they correctly predicted that the facts would support their preexisting conclusions.
You’re also incorrect on genopolitics, where evidence suggest that many political behaviors (though not necessarily choice of political party) are highly heritable.
Moreover, you ignore the importance of values in political debate. Without the same set of values, we can’t determine whether anything is good or bad. For example, a racist may support the Iraq war because he hates Arabs and wants to see America ruin their lands in the name of freedom and democracy. If you are Julius Evola, you may support the Iraq war (and all war) because you see warfare as an opportunity for the most powerful of men to transcend the limitations of society and acheive their full potential. A farmer in Nebraska may oppose attempts to limit carbon dioxide emissions because global warming makes his land more valuable. The list continues endlessly. Without the same values, agreement on policy is impossible.
As for your final argument, I would argue that preexisting factors little noted at the time of a board’s creation (especially the moderators and their political biases) affect the board’s long term outlook. For example, the community LessWrong was created as a similar experiment in rational discourse. A significant portion of their userbase decided to become self-avowed reactionaries and advocate for the return of monarchy, state religion, and homogenous ethnostates. And these people, just like you, believe they are dedicated to the pursuit of reason.
In the end, what do we really know?
Statements like this make you sound as stereotyping as the Fox News viewers you criticize. Just saying.
It’s stereotyping to comment (hyperbolically, obviously) on the lack of audience for MSNBC? What?
As do I, but I don’t think the SDMB is representative.
To make up some numbers, suppose that 1% of conservatives research their sources whereas 5% of liberals do. Does that mean that liberals are 5 times better? No; it means that the teeming masses of both groups are almost entirely uninformed.
No, but the Huffington Post does (as well as a lot of other pseudoscience).
I wouldn’t say that. I’d say that the news source is almost irrelevant if your policy is to verify the information and can ignore the editorializing. Fox and NPR cover the same basic events, but the former is likely to have put their spin on the event and screwed up some basic facts. This doesn’t matter if you go to the sources, though. NPR may be better, but neither one is really acceptable beyond a “this is something that happened in the world” level.
Choosing a good news source is a decent first step, but by no means the last step.