This is exactly why a lot of people don't discuss politics at work. You first sentence also kind of assumes that the side that believes the world is on fire is correct. It would probably be beneficial to allow the discussion of politics at work if the side that believed the world was on fire was indeed always correct, but sometimes they aren't, and what then?
I personally would prefer, for example, if someone didn't try to convince me to do something to save my immortal soul, regardless of how ardently they believe that my immortal soul needs saving.
I was trying to avoid wording the above with any bias one way or the other - presenting both sides in their self-promoted light... The problem is that I think it's unclear when the world is on-fire or not and when you feel that a discussion isn't world ending it might just be that your thoughts are trapped in a bubble and you're having difficulty empathizing with the reason why the other side thinks the world is on fire. Certainly the world isn't on fire in every conceivable way, but evaluating whether a problem warrants a discussion or not is already a potentially opinionated decision.
The question is how much of that needs to be hammered out at work.
Part of the problem may be that we've tied the workplace so intimately into our lives that it's cramming out activities vital to the civilization's health, like participation in local civic, religious, or charitable organizations, where such topics are generally not only welcome but often the rasion d'etre.
Employees have a very understandable impulse to do something to influence social health for good, and if work becomes the only place where such an impulse can feel effectively fulfilled, it's no surprise that political discussion spills over irrespective of management dicta.
Rather than decreeing political discussion off-limits, maybe Google could consider something like reorienting and/or resurrecting 20% time to focus on allowing employees to effectively practice good citizenship, rather than using that time to generate new IP for Google to hoard.
The problem is that mass shootings are effective terrorism — people freak out about them. But they're not a significant cause of death by any means.
Just a random comparison:
200 per year for mass shootings.
3,536 per year for drowning not related to boats.
332 additional per year for drowning related to boats.
70,000+ per year from drugs (largely opioids).
https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...
A lot of people have real trouble contextualizing statistics and videos because they can't really conceive of how many people there are. This makes it really easy for motivated media activists to manipulate opinion by heavy reporting of particular incidents, while ignoring trends that are killing literally hundreds of times more people.
Gun control? THAT's your example of the world being on fire?
If nothing is done about it 12k Americans a year will die, that isnt really going to have much of an effect in the long run for the vast majority of us. There are plenty of actual "world on fire" debates you could have used, including:
* Climate change
* Nuclear proliferation
* Antibiotic resistance
* Aquifer sustainability
* AGI
* Dystopian trends
* Dysgenic trends
Things that are on the actual "this has potential to kill or drastically reduce quality of life for billions of people" level (even if some are pretty far fetched in my view).
"World on fire" topics do exist, and for some reason they aren't the ones that result in toxicity.
What's at question is the way people treat each other and approach these topics, not their actual positions (half of people think there's a huge problem while the other half don't believe there's a problem)--which is what you're discussing.
As you’ve done here.
“I’m emotional about something that might happen to my child, look at these dead kids!” while refusing to address their point — guns used for self defense and civil freedom — isn’t having a discussion, and isn’t a way to reason about a complex trade off in society. It’s using dead children as a grotesque banner for your emotional manipulation.
Maybe if you want a discussion, try having one?
I feel like the gun control debate is particularly relevant - whenever a shooting happens one side calmly says "This is unfortunate but unavoidable given the cost to freedom we'd need to pay to remove firearms - please stop trying to use a tragedy politically" while the other side says "How many times does this need to happen before you realize 12,000 Americans died from this last year and I don't want my kid to be one of them."
Here's an issue where I think half the side thinks the world is on fire and the other is content - without getting into the merits of either side I do think it's unreasonable for the anti-gun control side to continue to argue against having a discussion for the sake of decorum. This is a divide we need to resolve.