We all can agree situation and potential solutions are complex beyond imagination, but there is one place, one long term action that could solve most of this to some degree - proper mandatory education, based on proved science. Learn kids critical thinking, rather than raise another obedient generation who doesn't think for themselves and picks up a narrative from some place and then just sticks with it. Learning more soft skills at school (at which most teachers suck, but that's another topic), psychology, why people behave as they do, biases, how our childhood affects us all etc. I think generally our schooling systems globally need big rehaul, but for topic discussed, I can't imagine what I mention it wouldn't bring some improvement.
Teaching with current level of science as hard baseline is already a place where some western countries like US fail (ie evolution vs creationism topic).
I don't think the change I mention is in direct interest of many governments, so its more like a pipe dream and an additional burden on parents to drill this into their kids.
I would de-emphasise pop psychology, and more emphasise:
- clarity: while not everything has a right or wrong answer, but lots of things do
- robustness: it's okay for people to disagree with you, and also for you to be wrong and learn from it
- reason: avoiding the standard fallacies
- agreeing to disagree: individuals you know/interact with and your relationships with them are more important than abstract tribes you may or may not belong to
I've been saying the same, but sometimes I doubt something like that could be implemented. "Based on proven science" doesn't work for most things social.
How do you teach someone to self-analyze and understand where their problems are actually coming from? To question their own conclusions and rethink what they know?
Still, it's possible to improve the current education system, by a lot. The current "learn this, don't ask why" doesn't work, and to make it worse, parents can be just as uninformed and stubborn as their kids, so they'll come to school raising hell over their lil' precious' bad grades.
As I understand it, this is essentially what various specialties bucketed under “therapy” work to understand and practice ethically and safely. “Give all schoolchildren therapy” sounds a bit radical but I imagine there are ways to scale it that would be 100x more valuable than the typical curriculum.
> proper mandatory education, based on proved science
In the case of political discourse, that may improve the case around some 'fringe theory' concepts which add fuel to the fire, but it's not going to stop the core 'fire', which is driven by philosophy/ethics/metaphysics.
People need to be able to break the 'fourth wall' in these debates in order to question their philosophical biases, and empiricism-as-answer-to-all-problems is also a philosophical bias - eugenics was seen by many as 'scientific virtue' in the 1920s, as one obvious example
Teaching is one group of people trying to instill their ideas/understanding to others. There's always an authority to decide what should be taught, and it's power will be abused. Resorting to just proven science may limit these abuses but will leave you without social sciences/humanities altogether, because they almost never operate with properly (from scientific pov) proven things
1. Scientific and rational debate are first class citizens in online communication
2. No speech limitations should be placed on online discussions unless it deviates away from rational debate.
3. Newsfeeds are sorted by popularity AND scientific accuracy.
4. All opinions about an issue, article, or topic are categorized and mapped on a spectrum. Meta data for quick analysis: how does my opinion compare to my peers?
This is the most extreme hot take I’ve ever read on hacker news. You made me verbally laugh. No one should ever be “deplatformed for life”. What utter garbage.
At the very least we should require that people learn the basic tenets of modern science: that war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is power. That would go a long way towards curbing extremism.
Well, the lefties just realized it was satire, so they memoryholed my original comment. As long as they thought I was being serious they upvoted like crazy.
I hope I still, before I'm banned, managed to demonstrate that it is nigh impossible to tell the difference between the most extreme satirical absurdly totalitarian opinion, and actual "progressive" thought these days. And now they have both chambers.
Teaching with current level of science as hard baseline is already a place where some western countries like US fail (ie evolution vs creationism topic).
I don't think the change I mention is in direct interest of many governments, so its more like a pipe dream and an additional burden on parents to drill this into their kids.