But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow their desires no-matter-what when buying goods or services and the same emotional mechanism is transferred into "buying in" an idea.

Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica).

> stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink

Yes, but with a caveat: an idea can be labeled "groupthink" and "too political" as a tactic to dismiss it easily.

Way before social media, there was short wave radio, then cable news which introduced the 24-hour news cycle, and entertainment-shows-disguised-as-news with their permanently outraged talking heads (think Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson).

Political polarization is older than social media, and it wasn't emergent - it was a deliberate political tactic and it worked well enough until the other side adopted it too. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma and both sides are now locked into a cycle of defecting - doing otherwise makes no sense, and there aren't many deescalation off-ramps.

Yes, it was widely reported in debates in ancient Athens and the Roman empire.

But I wrote "Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.", which is different.

Humanity has never seen before a billion-dollar industry generating user engagement by fueling online altercation.

Instant gratification, dopamine cycle addiction and all of that.

Human experiments being activities defined by the subject instead of the object make more sense. Can you have the human-involved experiment with just the objects occur naturally?

You cannot just leave the props lying around a college campus and get a Milgram's experiment replication attempt. You cannot just have a freezing chamber or scalpels to repeat the horrors of nazi Germany and Unit 731.

Plug as a founder: We are trying to balance things out on Polemix.co (invite code LV005) Launched 6 weeks ago, we bring together people from both sides of hot questions. The format is inspired from TikTok and consists of 30-second videos in which speakers answer YES or NO to controversial questions. The app’s goal is to break echo chambers.

If you are passionate about exchange of ideas, please shoot me your thoughts to [email protected] to have your view on social media outrage.

I don't know. It says they're 30-second videos- I imagine it'll consist of people prefacing their answer with "yes" or "no" followed by 30 seconds to elaborate. However, I think this will have the same problem that makes Twitter so unpopular with HN's crowd; Twitter is far too limiting in the length of a single tweet, so all that gets shouted out into the aether is an emotionally-triggering soundbite. That's a key part of what fosters such an echo chamber. It kills discussion and all you end up with are some very loud, angry tweets with no context or nuance.

I have no idea how Polemix plans on bringing more nuance to the political scene this way, but that's probably why I'm still a lowly non-founder/non-FAANG dev. I don't like to be negative or disparaging, but in my limited vision, this sounds like the love child of Twitter and Vine.

You're right, advertising and branding is, as you say, based on harnessing one's emotions, however an integral part of that process is also involved in converting those initial 'vague ideas'/notions into a solid worldview and it's this newly-developed worldview that causes its recipient/owner to actually believe in or act upon the idea. In essence, this is the basis of all propaganda; and, as we all know, in its most extreme forms it's both pernicious and very dangerous.

Probably the best—and certainly the most infamous—explanation of how one's worldview can be changed by carefully planned propaganda comes from a 1928 speech titled Knowledge and Propaganda. Tragically, this succinct and simple to understand speech comes from one of the most notorious and despicable persons of the 20th Century, and we only have to look to history to see how devastatingly effective the contents of this short message turned out to be: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54....

Naturally, the advertising industry would want to dissociate itself from this document as much as is absolutely possible but I'd bet many dollars to a brick that many in the advertising industry have read it secretly and understand its message extremely well. Why? Because it has form—when actually implemented its message turned out to be so overwhelmingly effective.

In a free market capitalist economy, advertising is seen and considered as being beneficial, and at one end of the spectrum, it probably is, but as we've seen recently, at the other end it can morph into dangerous propaganda—and, unfortunately, there is no clear demarcation point to separate the two. Given the fact that trillions of dollars are now tied up in advertising, and that serious things have been done in its name (Cambridge Analytica and those other recent assaults on democracy), I reckon it's now time that we stopped pretending that advertising and propaganda are separate entities when clearly they are not.

In my opinion, if we viewed them as both one and the same entity and then set rules accordingly, then we would have some hope of making progress.

get me right, language is deliberately abused to exercise power, to belittle others, by deliberately misgendering them or deliberately not using their academic title, etc.

However if I want to have a conversation about something of importance and my conversation participant is not there yet, should I not ignore misgendering or omission of academic titles or similar heckling from their side, simply to get into a conversation about the topic proper, and then, should the conversation participant surprisingly evolve into a conversation partner, then ask about pronouns, or academic title, or whichever language convention I prefer?

Why do I say this? If the other participant does not intend to evolve into a conversation partner, they will for lack of a better term jack off on heckling on the wrong pronoun or title or whatever it is that I may be asking for. I will never get to the core of what I want to discuss with that participant.

> people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way.

Or people have forgotten how to have a proper conversation, an engaged dialogue about topics they disagree on, at least in parts.

You're right about that and it scares me, especially so since the advent of the internet as everything is already there and in place to make it much easer to program them on a massive scale. My first experience of the wide scale nature of this phenomenon was in the early 1970s when almost overnight television stations changed from televising mostly game shows and old movies to pushing news full on. As news became the new 'paradigm' for judging ratings it meant that hyping up the news became commonplace—the more sensational news stories became the higher up the ratings went. This continued to escalate to the situation we now have, that is where TV stations regularly interrupt programs with news headlines and news grabs. As these interruptions have to be short, making them sensational and thus more memorable became quite an art form. (Of course, as sleazy tabloids also played out similar themes it became increasingly difficult to escape such practices.)

At the same time, good news reporters and news anchors became thin on the ground (because of stations' new policies, through their dilution in the new news cycle, and the new breed having different ethics to the previous generation). Excellent reporters such as Ed Murrow (and his 'Murrow Boys') and anchors like Walter Cronkite who knew how to balance the news eventually disappeared, so by the time the internet came along that priming to which you refer was ready grow exponentially.

[For those not acquainted to news as it once was (and as a reality check), here are several of Ed Murrow's broadcasts (there are many more on the web and I'd urge you to listen to a sample of them). I apologize in advance if the second one offends or upsets anyone as the subject matter is horrible but I've included it to illustrate how dramatically news reporting has changed over the past 70 or so years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qpgfH5imA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw ]

"people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way."

Right, that's why those in charge of media organizations have the important responsibility to present news objectively and not sensationally (unfortunately, in the competition for resources the dollar has won out big-time over ethics).

When I was at school, we were taught how to debate, and along with this training, we learned the critical difference between rhetoric and fact and how to tell them apart. From our class the teacher would select two teams at random and they would debate a proposition provided by the teacher. The proposition could be factual, fiction or hearsay, or some theoretical possibility: 'There is no such thing as a black swan' and 'Life exists both on earth and elsewhere in the universe' being two such examples. The teacher then assigned one team to argue in the affirmative and the other in the negative (the teams had no say or choice in which way they had to argue).

At the end of the debate the remainder of the class voted on which team won the debate and that was then followed by an analysis of what had taken place—both the remaining class and debaters had to separate rhetoric from supported fact, figure out subject from predicate, and so on. At later debates, the teacher would allow teams to debate topics that they actually believed or disbelieved but the same analytical process would follow afterwards.

I reckon my early debating experience at high school is the reason why I found my later encounter with the formal debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus at university so interesting, as I quickly realized that the debating techniques that we'd been taught at school were essentially the same as those that Socrates had used against his opponent.

What's very important to realize here is that we don't need university-level logic to teach kids how to develop decent 'bullshit' filtering techniques—techniques that they can then apply throughout life. Moreover, the subject can be made interesting for kids: casting Thrasymachus as a selfish villain who believes 'that justice is everyman for himself' and watching how Socrates not only systematically demolishes that premise but also counters it with the notion that 'justice is much more than just one's self-interest' , as it's not only interesting and can be used to teach kids about logic, rhetoric and false premises but also the narrative has a built-in moral dimension/argument that's essentially universal.

I believe it's of fundamental importance that we provide kids with a solid grounding in these matters early on in their education so they can think logically and reason things out for themselves. Because, as we've seen from horrific events in the 1930s in Germany (and others), great swathes of even intelligent people can succumb to false argument and determined propaganda (and as we now know, good and concerted propaganda is extremely hard to resist).

For the first two decades after WWII, it seems we attempted to get things right (witness the training kids at my school had (and my high school was nothing special, it was stock-standard ordinary and typical of many others)). Unfortunately, in recent decades, and at a time when it's needed more than ever, such training seems to have fallen by the wayside. I'm not sure how we should now tackle the problem either—given that most kids will have experienced and grown used to the internet long before they'll ever get any training in logic, rhetoric, etc. (that is if they ever manage do so at all).