Show HN: Mest – Place to talk with those you disagree with

There are two problems I see with this.

I had 3 conversations.

ME: Hi Other side: Hello

That's it. stopped working

Everyone needs to break out of their own bubble to some extent, though other equally misinformed people may not be the best source.

My advice is to read the most informed, reasonable representatives of different viewpoints you can find, and then see why they disagree. Often people will play fast and loose with the facts in order to convince people they consider less educated, but when directing their words towards those they consider their peers, they will be more honest.

An example from the right is the many economists who should know better refuse to distance themselves from the idea of the "Laffer Curve", the idea that you can raise revenue by lowering taxes. Even though they know the Laffer Curve is bullshit, they don't want to refute it because it is a useful rhetorical tool.

An example from the left is that most moderate liberals agree that black Americans commit much more crime (EDIT: I meant "per capita", personally I think a reasonable reading of this comment as a whole would take that as implied) than white Americans. However, they don't want people to hear this fact except in the context where it's already agreed that the main cause for this is structural factors (i.e. a cycle of poverty, crime and lack of education). So in liberal circles this fact is "obvious" and "uninteresting" since the real question is how these structural factors operate. And yet at the same time, outside liberal circles this fact is considered "racist" and liberals do nothing to clarify that it is in fact true.

I think modern transportation and communication have contributed to our increasingly divided society... by extending our interactions over larger areas, those tools allow us to naively fall into our own physical "filter bubbles".

Modern transportation contributed towards physical obesity. Technology became so efficient and so cheap that we became isolated from physical reality... we have to work out in order to stay physically fit.

I propose that modern communication has had a similar impact. We've been binging on the conflict-free interactions we enjoy, but we haven't been eating our veggies or working out. This is a mental "obesity epidemic".

We drive between similarly minded social gatherings. We keep contact with similarly minded people by calling them. We're in constant communication with our social groups with little time for disruptive ideas to slip in... each of us is deeply connected to our pocket of the world, but many of us are equally disconnected from the rest of the world.

It means "manure" in Dutch :)