Clearly you’ve never tried to talk to someone on the liberal side about if what they want will actually work or produce an outcome that is desirable for the rest of the population! Hah.
SF is a prime example of when someone can use reason and argument and ‘helping others’ to convince people to do things that just don’t actually work.
Conservatives definitely have a bent that most intellectuals and folks in tech find offensive, and for reasons that are often due to fundamental differences in worldview and environment.
But a lot of the rational arguments for things going on right now, for those who have actual experience in the real world, are bullshit if you start challenging the assumptions. But that is hard, be will get you nailed. And frankly, no one like that is going to try to do that right now because it isn’t even about rationality. It’s a different set of beliefs and feelings with attached justifications.
But, any sizable group of people randomly selected will have similar differences. The reason we have social rules, is people have found over time when to talk and not talk about certain topics ,because for a society to function, we need to agree to some common ground and not actively antagonize each other over these fundamental differences.
Because you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and very, very few people have actually reasoned themselves into much of anything.
No amount of talking is likely to change anyones mind about these things.
For instance, I believe that the best way to resolve a problem is to talk openly about it, directly discuss the range of impacts this problem will have, discuss our own capabilities and successes/failures in resolving the problem openly, and then prioritize it against other open problems and likely risks.
That makes me great for engineering leadership it turns out. Near as I can tell, also emergency response.
It apparently makes me absolutely terrifying to a decent swath of the population, especially when they are screwing up and don’t know how to stop.
So I’ve learned that I need to not do this to certain people if I want them to not run away screaming. It also means I’ve learned some people are useful to partner with and some people are radioactive bad to do so with.
And in a society, especially a country so diverse and over such an area, that means picking which fights to have, and dialing back the rhetoric, but that requires both sides to do that.
If one side won’t, then it is a war. No one can maintain sensible boundaries with appeasement - which is fundamentally different than compromise.