I have enjoyed WaitButWhy articles in the past but with this new series the author seems to have spent a huge amount of time, energy and words coming up with ideas that aren't that new. I keep skimming through them waiting to find the big point.
People are quick to say "polarization happened because..." or "people hate the opposite political party because..." or "people only read news they agree with because..." and each of the pieces might be useful but I think seeing how those pieces are fitting together and compounding is also useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Aristotle)
None of this is new. At all. The echo chamber is just louder now. Plato and Aristotle were obsessed with this shit, and they are the two most widely-read voices from antiquity. This is literally the value of a "liberal arts education" (small l liberal unrelated to the right / left spectrum). Philosophers have been writing about this stuff in similar terms since writing was invented, and probably talking about it before that.
More modern philosophers have written more approachable versions, but the ideas are as old as we as a species can remember.
I'm going to guess his next chapter is about how money ruined the media and politics, which is "why you shouldn't write about these things" -- because the people with the loudest voice have the most to gain from the polarization of the media. Again, this is pretty obvious. The loudest voice becomes the only one you hear in an echo chamber.
It was insightful the first time I read it from Socrates and Aristotle. But at this point it should be common knowledge for anyone interested in philosophy (literally: the study of knowledge).
As far as I can tell, other writings on the topic haven't had any noteworthy effect in rectifying the problem.
Do have any insights on what we should do about the situation?
As far as I can tell from reading history, it's always been like this. We just haven't had a massive mutually-destructive war in anyone's lifetime to remind us why we should work together. Old soldiers are the best anti-war advocates there are. Because I'm pretty sure that's where all this is headed.
At the risk of sounding glib, this style of thinking sounds a bit too much like the proverbial "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" I mean seriously, while lots of people are drawing attention to these old issues with a modern twist, has anything really been tried to fix them? Perhaps it's going to take some time to get our act together at the political level, but is there anything stopping communities like this from putting on our thinking caps and seeing if we can come up with some new and useful ideas?
As it is, candidates in the middle can't get elected. Two dominant parties is an entirely predictable result of FPTP voting. Approval voting (or ones that tend to elect the Condorcet winner, which also should be the first choice of the median voter) would solve 90% of the problems cited in this article.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/1...
http://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/a...
And I'm not convinced "multiparty" is what we want. I think we'd be better off if parties had far less significance. Special interest groups? Sure, they'll exist. People who advocate for, say, bigger vs smaller government, more or less military action abroad, antitrust vs laissez faire, etc. But they don't have to nominate individual candidates...that's really only needed when you have a system that has vote splitting.
But bambataa did not refute anything from the article, just saying that it doesn't contain anything "big", without actually reading it. I think that's a fairly different situation than the one you used as a example.
It would more be equal to "You can't criticize religion if you haven't read anything about it", which I think it fine. You have to at least understand what you are critiquing, otherwise you're basing your arguments on something that you could have misunderstood.
Many of these concepts are widely accepted, to the point that if you don't agree with them yet you never will.
Since you seem at a loss as to why this article is so successful -- maybe you should ask yourself what you're missing. It seems to me you haven't mastered the author's talent of addressing deep problems in an uplifting way that draws others in.
For example, do you have any suggestions on what the OP is missing, or could you explain why the article is "so successful" in your opinion?
Since I also didn't get why this article needs to exist (I can imagine how much time the author spent on it, only to present what to me are numerous well known issues and a couple unfounded assumptions), I would love to know what the OP and I are missing.
My point is (and I'll spell it out for you too, since I think it may apply) -- knowing the right thing is usually much much much much less important than being able to get other people to understand the right thing.
This article is good because it does the 2nd. There is no lack of unhappy people decrying problems, the world has no use for that.
The world does have use for people who can inspire differently-minded people to focus on (and find joy in) fixing a common challenge.
It's hard to say. I told you what it seemed like you wrote and explicitly asked what the point was, hoping there was more to it than just an series of insults.
You responded with this seemingly independent comment, which is fine, but very different in content than your initial comment. Because of that, it's not surprising that I would have missed the point of your initial comment if in fact both of these comments are attempting to convey the same information.
> My point is (and I'll spell it out for you too, since I think it may apply) -- knowing the right thing is usually much much much much less important than being able to get other people to understand the right thing.
In my opinion, it depends.
Getting people to understand what you're saying when you're wrong isn't helpful at all.
If you do have something original and helpful to say, it is important to convey that information in a manner that others understand.
If you're saying something everyone in your audience already knows, it doesn't matter if you're personally understood or not, because the position is understood by default.
Unfortunately, I put this article in the last category. I am legitimately questioning whether I learned a single new thing of value from reading that entire article, and questioning whether anyone in the audience of that author wouldn't already know this information.
> This article is good because it does the 2nd.
In case it isn't obvious already, we disagree here. I don't think it gets people to understand much of anything, because I don't see any point to the article (which I read in its entirety for the record). To me, it's a compilation of generally well known issues, personal anecdotes ranging from amusing to distracting, and theories that don't seem to have much backing them up. I ended the article wondering why the author (who I respect) spent so much time and effort compiling commonly known information that has been repeatedly analyzed and presented elsewhere, and when (if ever) there would be a point to this series of articles.
You've stated twice now that this is a great article. I'm asking you why you feel it gets people to "understand the right thing", because it didn't have that effect on me.
> There is no lack of unhappy people decrying problems, the world has no use for that.
I'm not sure if I agree with that, and I'm not sure what use there is for extremely long-winded descriptions of the status quo.
> The world does have use for people who can inspire differently-minded people to focus on (and find joy in) fixing a common challenge.
What is that common challenge here?
The best parts I could find that addresses this are in the conclusion...
> Maybe instead of focusing on how politically active the most extreme people are, we should be asking ourselves why those who hold “more complex views” have become so inactive.
This seems like a very good question. To me, the article pointed out plenty of reasons for serious concern about the way the winds are currently blowing, yet in my experience the typical response to this perspective is a collective yawn. Perhaps the author takes it too much for for granted that readers will intuitively recognize the risks that come along with this sort of climate, or maybe he's still just laying ground for something to come later.
> When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting, people kept saying the same thing to me: Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else. Anything else. It’s just not worth it. It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society.
This also seems interesting, and seems consistent with my observations. People of all political stripes seem to absolutely love anything that gives reasons to hate on their respective out-group, but any suggestion that there's plenty of guilt to go around seems to get a much chillier reception. Of course, "everyone knows this" - but how many of those who "know this" also have the ability to detect this behavior in themselves, in real-time, when the topic is not the abstract nature of this human behavior (as in this thread), but rather an object level discussion about a specific culture-war matter? Next time you encounter such a thread on HN, pay attention for the behaviors described by the author, and judge for yourself.
> It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society. I ended up going with some combination of both of these things: society’s current situation and why it’s an especially bad idea for me to write about it—and how those two things are related. This chapter focused on the first item: society’s current situation. But the second item—about how incredibly ill-advised it currently is to write about that situation—is the item we need to look hardest at. That’s where we’ll go in the penultimate chapter of The Story of Us.
It sounds like he has more to say on the matter, hopefully future installments get more into ideas of what people can do at the individual level.