‘Tipping point’ makes partisan polarization irreversible in research model
news.cornell.edu
news.cornell.edu
The threat to society as it relates to the pandemic is all due to red vs. blue political in-fighting over how much responsibility and power the government should have for protecting its citizens. That plus the added threat of economic turmoil due to commercially onerous government mandates/policies/efforts to reduce X% (lockdowns, capacity mandates, rent moratoriums, etc.).
I just find it interesting that society is tearing itself apart over a problem that essentially solves itself over time regardless of our actions, meanwhile society is not tearing itself apart over a problem that does not solve itself over time (climate change) and where doing nothing will eventually have consequences of apocalyptic proportions.
Consider the past 2 decades. 9/11, the war on terror, the 2008 crash, the 2016 election, and most recently covid.
Have we recovered from any of these?
I don't think this story is about a society that's tearing itself apart, but one that is unable to handle or heal from traumatic events.
To be fair, the abstract is somewhat asking for it given this:
> Confronted with a deadly global pandemic that threatened not only massive loss of life but also the collapse of our medical system and economy, why were we unable to put partisan divisions aside and unite in a common cause, similar to the national mobilization in the Great Depression and the Second World War?
The world is complex and while trying to model that complexity is an interesting problem, this kind of statement (by a co-author) falls short of my expectations for rigorous scientific communication and vulgarization:
> “If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”
"Why isn't everyone a morally pure collectivist like me, and how can we fix that?"
And the answer is: because you're not morally pure, the "common causes" you want us to unite behind are exaggerated and collectivism has a track record of being far more deadly than the things it's trying to solve. But that answer wouldn't be ideologically acceptable to academia.
It's a bit like when we have AI papers that anthropomorphize their model by saying they benefit from "dreaming". This is true among the community of experts that actually work on the topic, it is simply irrelevant or downright misleading for a more "public" audience.
Likewise, many groups with minimal differences, i.e. group think, may still fight intensely over those small differences.
We no longer have differences in opinion, we have differences of reality. Climate Change, pandemics, January 6th... the list goes on and on now.
People only hate because it feels good to do it, righteous hate feels the best of all. There isn't a lot to compete with that feeling, except maybe actualizing one of the sadistic fantasies it creates. When your basic needs are taken care of and there's nothing else that is more intense in your life available to you, the little rush it gives you from hating those scumbags feels good and becomes a habit, and then it becomes as satisfying as having a cigarette or even a coffee in the morning, and so we seek out conflict. In nature fighting is expensive, so the conflict itself in many ways is also a luxury. The reason people are doing this is because they love it.They're going to do it until they realize they love it and then decide they don't anymore.
I've thought a lot about what beliefs people would need to change to mitigate the chain reaction we've set in motion, and there is no single one or cluster that makes much of a difference. We like this too much, and we're affluent enough to indulge it. While I have opinions on which ones would really help, barring a wave of Damascene conversions, I can't think of anything persuasive enough to change someones idea of self. It would require a viral idea that improved the quality of someone's thought in general, where through transmitting it you could raise enough boats to head off the imminent dark period.
Anyway, maybe we will just see what shakes out of a period of attrition.
This is the first I’ve heard of this. Do you have any references that dig into this time and context that you could share?
Fact is, a bunch of European countries refused to fight the Nazis, or only declared war on them right at the very end when the Allies had already defeated them. It's never widely discussed because it's kind of shameful for those states. If the Allies had fallen, so would all the neutral countries and they wouldn't have been treated well by Hitler. They let the Brits, Americans and Russians fight, whilst sitting back and waiting to be saved.
^love thy enemy
For me, the exclusion of Lawrence Lessig from political debates was a big indicator that things were already off the rails.
The first time I saw that in my adult life was the memorial service for late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone 20 years ago. The speakers turned it into a political rally. It was beyond distasteful. For some reason, it really stuck in my mind as the end of decency.
Everybody always says the liberal media is so powerful but I don't think it holds a candle to the right wing media's power to manufacture constant outrage. These live with constant popular uprisings manufactured by the right such as anti-CRT, anti-mask, anti-immigrant. The left has nowhere near that kind of power.
"Nevertheless, we make no claims about the model’s predictive accuracy. The model is highly abstract and remains to be empirically calibrated and tested. Nor can we assume that tipping points would obtain in radically different applications, such as affective polarization, voter polarization, or media polarization."
It's the adjectival form of the word "affect" in its noun sense, meaning "mood" or "feeling". This form is pronounced differently: A-fect (emphasis on the first syllable, with the vowel like in "rat").
"Affective polarization" is "people being polarized in how they feel about each other", i.e. animosity towards people in the other party. It's a technical term used by sociologists and not in common use, but it's not a typo.
Additionally,
“ We see indications of empirical validation in recent events. Prior to 2019, one might have assumed that a global pandemic would bring together those who disagreed on issues for which hot-button righteous indignation was a luxury that could no longer be afforded. Instead, mask wearing became a partisan crest that identified friend and foe on a partisan battlefield. Similar dynamics can be observed in the two impeachment trials of former President Donald Trump. In the first trial, evidence of collusion with a foreign government failed to exert the expected unifying effect. In the second case, an attack on the US Capitol initially elicited bipartisan outrage, followed by a reversal of position among Republican leaders in the weeks leading up to the Senate trial.”
“ In closing, our study should be viewed as a small, but important, first step. The sources of political and ideological polarization have been widely investigated, but relatively little attention has been directed to the possibility that the causal mechanisms are characterized by irreversible tipping points. The lack of attention does not reflect the low importance of the problem. The historical lesson from climate research may be instructive. As with incremental global warming (28), the dynamics of reversibility cannot be revealed with observational data tracking changes over time in the level of polarization. Instead, climatologists have relied on increasingly sophisticated and empirically calibrated computational models to show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of global warming can be reversed through the reduction of carbon and methane emissions only up to a critical threshold, beyond which civilization as we know it may be doomed. We extend the concern with an environmental tipping point to the study of polarization. The need for empirical calibration in our model calls for increased investment in the study of irreversible phase change, while our findings call for urgency in mobilizing remediation efforts before it is too late.”
Even slavery was abolished in the US and that seemed like an irreversible polarization.
Slavery was abolished, but you still have people flying confederate flags and arguing for slavery (in a more modern rendition)
But I have a feeling that's not what you meant.
Look, it's possible. It could even be what we need. But for it to work, we'd need wisdom and honest compromise, not sound-bite driven trench-warfare politics. Under current conditions, I see a low probability that it would work.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/31/us-democracy-mandatory-...
I don’t think these things reverse (time doesn’t go backwards) so much as settle as the last generation that held such beliefs dies off.
>80% followed religion in the US in ‘99. Now it’s <50%. Coincidentally about the same percent of support for conservative politics (not economics but the ephemeral civic life tradition or death type).
It’s how it goes; humans were the hard drives and CPUs of our economics until recently, and the costly in real terms old money network winds down with them. A lot of folks will feel disenfranchised, many rightly so, but also of lot rich folks today made it rich in an era of imploding pensions and gambling away others retirements, so if they get hosed, oh well.
In the end all will be forgotten and implicitly I think we know that so we just keep going.
Also, debt peonage was practiced for a long time after that [0, 1].
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/peona...
Not sure what can be done with media pushing disinformation for political reasons, any regulation there would risk violating the 1st amendment.
Perhaps, but its a risk the US took for decades (1938 - 1985) and the political climate was less divisive during that period. You can't say "nothing can be done" when things can and have been done that we don't do anymore.
And the justification for the doctrine extended the same way. It didn't regulate newspapers for example. Because the airways aren't privately owned, but rather leased from the public, the doctrine was considered more a regulation of this common space, than a regulation on speech on general.
I am not saying something like that is a good idea. I am saying that to throw your hands up and say nothing can be done is not accurate. A lot of times people say you can't regulate a thing because you can't regulate every possible instance. But by that logic we shouldn't have stop signs because people run through them everyday. Yet stop signs are important.
I don't think your statement is complete.
The polarisation is about truth. Is science true? Is what $Politician says true? Is $NewsReport true?
A common standard for honesty, education -- and maybe even decency -- seems to have disappeared.
The only real brake on some people's behaviour appears to be when they suffer socio-economic consequences. But being part of a large faction is an effective buffer.
Some of this unfortunately leaked into the narrative here in the UK, like the stupid idea that the reason we were failing was because our incompetent government couldn't achieve South Korean levels of mass testing - something which the media kept pushing even after their actual level of Covid testing fell massively behind the US and UK, and even after it became clear that their test and trace wasn't nearly as effective at controlling Covid as the media spin claimed.
I don't doubt that partisan propaganda spread as news is among the chief reasons the US is at war with itself right now, but you lose me when you pick the NYT as the chief culprit.
Similarly, they stopped comparing the actual per-capita level of Covid testing in South Korea and the USA when the US passed them and not only started using meaningless metrics like test postivity (the two countries had... very different ideas on who to test, which didn't include most people with symptoms in South Korea) but outright claimed it was a lie to say the US was now the country doing more Covid testing using the swapped metric. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few others too which I've forgotten about or just missed. Haven't really been following their reporting so much lately.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri...
At first it was "Sweden has become the world's cautionary tale", and "a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns".
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...
Then Sweden dropped to the bottom of the rankings in both Europe and the world for deaths. It did much better than the UK and America. Suddenly it's not got any lessons for the world anymore, and when it's mentioned at all it's only to tell us that for unclear reasons it can't be compared to anything except its direct neighbours. Then Baltic states did worse than Sweden so the narrative became, you can't compare to anything except a cherry-picked list of specifically Scandinavian states.
The media is a major, major driving force of political polarization everywhere, because it acts as a firehose of ideological propaganda. It's not even the stories you see that's the biggest problem. It's the things they know about but never tell you, in case it'd make you doubt your commitment to the journalist's ideology.
> AMISH COMMUNITY UNAFFECTED BY COVID-19 > Reporters asked a local community member how they have avoided the deadly pandemic despite interacting with known carriers. The man responded, "We don't have Internet or TV."
People who post in comments sections are a tiny unrepresentative subset of readers.
In my experience, the NYT comment section is mostly filled with garbage by partisans who cannot tolerate or process anything except that which fits their chosen perspective. For proof, just read comments attached to opinion articles by their token non-liberals. I don't think anything of value can be inferred from such a self-selected dysfunctional group.