Re:Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-...
by godelski on Friday October 07, 2022 @03:25PM
(#33125791)
I don't think I see as much of a problem out of academic literature (there are clear problem groups though, not denying that), but more that the problem is how the information is conveyed to the population. Both the media perception as well as how radicals present information. I'm always reminded of John Cleese's skit on extremism[0]. When he lists the enemies of liberals and conservatives "moderates" are included in both. I think we see this a lot as we often paint people that are moderates as "on the fence." We see this with the popularity of subreddits like r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM[1]. With one of the top posts suggesting that centrists see "compromise" and "a little genocide" as okay.[2] But is this not the playbook of authoritarians (right or left)? To remove all nuance from the conversation. Centrists aren't people who go to the middle of divisive opinions, they just don't cleanly fit into either camp but pull elements from both. I think nuance is the most important thing we can do to fight extremism in either direction.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/top/?t=all
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/cw2bbh...
You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists.
And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve, and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrary 10% wide so most people are divided (45% on either side), and the second group decides that the center is an arbitrary 80% wide, so only a small number of people are extremist (10% on either side).
It's the same damn bell curve.