Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers • Hacker News Board

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#731

Post by anonfornoreason » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

jarjoura wrote: post #262

crazygringo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend the Economist . Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this. It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after the…

100% agree, but the problem I have with the economist is that it requires serious mental commitment to engage with their articles. The meat of the story is buried deep. The only times I find myself capable of reading are when I'm traveling or commuting. The issues come weekly with really interesting topical stories, so I always add them to my reading todo list, but they just pile up so fast. This past year and 1/2 of…

"the problem with this news source, is that it requires thinking to parse!"

Sorry for the jab, but I think this is our current political situation in a nutshell - surface level, emotional takes are the primary way people engage in news and thus politics. It's hard to engage deeply, but it's required in order to build your own narrative, rather than just take on someone else's.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#732

Post by dev_by_day » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #167

dev_by_day wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site is great for trying to get different takes https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news I used to do what you did(just read a bunch of major publications from differing political orientations) but also found issue with not being able to compare different perspectives easily.

Allsides is prominently featured in the article.

yes! I meant it more as a +1 to allsides but should have clarified that.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#733

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

mariodiana wrote: post #708

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend watching his TED talk. It goes into more detail, and expounds on the abstract underpinnings of both liberal and conservative morals. They're very different. The axes apply even outside America, consistently.

I'm a fan of Haidt and think his moral "tastebuds" (I think he makes that analogy somewhere) is an interesting model. I largely buy into it, but I found a really perceptive take in this short blog post that came out a few years back that's a bit more skeptical. https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2017/05/26/trump-as-...

I think this piece, referenced in one of the comments to the one you reference, is particularly on point:

https://crookedtimber.org/2017/01/22/protestandpolarization/

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#734

Post by rkk3 » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:53 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #568

hindsightbias wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF has recently made specific parking laws for churches Context matters. This is not a general xtian supremacy thing. It is a unique historical thing with SF AA Baptist churches whose populations were gentrified out of their neighborhoods. Their churches remained and they commute from all over the Bay Area to attend Sunday mass. Cops and neighborhoods accomodated this practice, but the latest generation of gentrifi…

To be clear, I do not live in that neighbourhood and I don't really mind the America-as-moderate-theocracy system in place. You won't see me whining about the Christian median parking. I have a motorcycle. SF's traffic doesn't bother me and the numerous curb cuts advantage me (cars can't park, but I can). However, the fact that this stuff happens repeatedly for Christian institutions and rarely (almost never, in fact…

> However, the fact that this stuff happens repeatedly for Christian institutions and rarely (almost never, in fact) for others is not something that escapes me.

Probably just because there are a lot of Christian institutions.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#735

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

ABCLAW wrote: post #715

throwaway894345 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's hard to understand? Picture a spectrum with three points labeled "left", "center", and "right" respectively. Each point is a "position", none of them are neutral (because they all exist on the spectrum).

Because the center has to be qualitatively different from the others in order to escape the cycle of critique presented in the original argument. Otherwise, why is critique of the center different from attacking the left or the right? Why would attacking the center be the "craziest narrative"? The OP's post has a hidden premise, otherwise it does not lead to his conclusion.

> Otherwise, why is critique of the center different from attacking the left or the right?

Presmably the OP meant "it's crazy to attack the center with equal fervor that one applies to the opposite extreme". E.g., leftists attacking everyone to their right as uniformly "far right", using language like "white supremacist" and "literal Nazi" to describe anyone who is not far-left, etc.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#736

Post by bart_spoon » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

mseidl wrote: post #294

fancyfish wrote: post #287

The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further l…

https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ For some funny times.

Replace "funny times" with "endless straw men" and you are spot on.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#737

Post by kthulutude » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #401

anm89 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…

Agreed. The center is the glue the holds the populace in check. We need these people. Once the center is eroded things will not go well.

Once the center is eroded things will not go well... for centrists. The idea that both 'extremes' are equivalently bad neglects the real differences in worldview that create a sense of political urgency. It's important to remember that this political urgency is a reflection of real social problems--for some people, the consequences are literally life and death.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#738

Post by wallacoloo » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

fancyfish wrote: post #287

The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further l…

> Another is that the opposing content can actually be merged. In many cases the content will cover different pieces of the same broad issue. Or the interviewees will present their opinions in a completely different fashion. Up to you to carry all this context in your head, or make simplistic summaries of viewpoints that don’t add much value beyond what is already commonly known.

If differently aligned parties cover different sections of a broad issue, then aren’t you gaining more knowledge by listening to more varied sources? V.s. listening to just one political angle that would give you only a narrow slice of reality.

Also, what is “commonly known”? I personally have found when taking in 3-4 different sources that the amount of common knowledge is vanishingly small! How many of the pro covid lockdown group know anything about the death rate for your age group? Or knew accurate ratios of outdoor v.s. indoor spread? How many of the anti-lockdown group knew these things? There’s a lot of things which should be common knowledge that really aren’t.

You can combat some of this by reading “both sides”. But if you’re doing that, doesn’t it sort of mean that you trust neither of your sources? Aren’t you doing extra overhead to sort out where each side is wrong/lying? Seems better to just find a source that you trust instead.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#739

Post by NaturalPhallacy » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

myko wrote: post #440

myfavoritedog wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fascist turn of the Republican party This is just projection from the Left that is working so hard to cancel anyone who steps politically out of line. They think that calling a group "Antifa" makes it anti-fascist, despite their tactics of violently terrorizing anyone with whom they politically disagree - even to the extent of their attacking journalists who simply document their activities. But somehow Republicans a…

> This is just projection from the Left that is working so hard to cancel anyone who steps politically out of line. To be clear, the leader of the conservative party of the US recently attempted a coup.

>To be clear, the leader of the conservative party of the US recently attempted a coup.

I simply can't imagine the level of bias and filter bubbled amount of media indoctrination it takes to say this with a straight face.

The party of "freedom and guns" showed up with 500,000 people, left all their guns at home, but "attempted a coup"? Utterly ridiculous.

This is what a coup looks like: https://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/field/image/scree...

Notice the number of guns vs. flags.

This is what a protest looks like: https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Jan_6_...

Notice the number of flags, and no guns whatsoever.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#740

Post by ghostpepper » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #684

ghostpepper wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any case, the Economist is not any worse than any other mainstream publication. Often they do pretty good reporting. But you absolutely must not rely on it solely especially for foreign reporting where you don't have bearings. I think this is perhaps misguided. It's not fair to the economist to compare an article on, eg. politics in Brazil, against the nuanced understanding that a Brazilian citizen would have, b…

I lived in Brazil for many years and read the local news closely. Whenever the Economist published an article on Brazilian politics, it was generally far superior and far more insightful than anything in the local press. Which genuinely surprised me. Remember -- most local news sources, whether in the US or Brazil, aren't nuanced at all. They're surface-level and sensationalistic. But while Brazil has a home-grown ne…

For what it's worth, I find the same is true of Canada. We have some decent news organizations but whenever there is an Economist article about Canada, I find the insights a bit deeper and the context more complete.