Do We Have Friends With Whom we Disagree?

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• Consistent liberals un-friend (on facebook, etc) people who disagree with them on politics. People who're surrounded by a liberal echo-chamber and who disagree with it are quite familiar with this phenomenon and tend to keep quiet.

  With respect to the person you were talking to: do they really not have any friends who disagree with them, or do they merely not know which of their friends do?

• Visage: that is a great question. I suspect you might be on to something, that we sometimes suppress others from sharing their perspectives with us through negative reinforcement!

• You have found the biggest problem with social media politics. Both extremes view anyone who disagree with an opinion, or dare to point out any particular error, flaw, logical inconsistency, or (how dare you) hypocrisy in any political statement as basically being their polar opposite. A partial list of the labels applied to me in the last year :
  Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, Nanny-stater, Feminist, Misogynist, Democrat, Republican, racist, anti-white, Extreme capitalist, socialist. I am sure I am leaving some out.

  People see everything through the lens of their own politics. The more polarized and narrow that lens, the less of the big picture they see, and the less likely they are to even look at facts offered by people who disagree with them. At the extremes, political philosophy approaches religion, where dogma takes over for factual analysis and critical thinking. Social media makes the problem worse, because it allows people to easily shut out other views, and allows people to re-enforce half-truths, because nobody is allowed to question them.

• And the big question for us as a community: how do we fix it, or start to?

• Assuming tying political extremists to their chairs and making them listen is out.... You can try debating with them anyway. This is fraught with peril. You will likely annoy people. You will almost certainly have people unfriend you. And there isn't any guarantee you will get people to consider going beyond their preconceived notions and political dogma.

  On the other hand, saying nothing just allows the problem to fester. Extremists become more sure of their answers and of themselves, because nobody ever questions their positions. Full disclosure, on some issues I think the extremists are correct. But which extremists vary by the issue, and often none of them seem correct.

  In poker, there are times where one is supposed to make a less than optimal decision "for the benefit of future hands". Political debate is similar. Sometimes you need to argue, knowing you won't change anyone's mind, because you might make them at least consider why they believe something, to make them more receptive on some future issue. Occasionally it works.

• Chris, I'll argue that there exists an alternative. What if we don't argue? What if instead we try our best to understand the principles on which the person we're talking to bases their ideology, and find common ground? It's hard (cognitive dissonance is exhausting) but the entire mission of STC, as I've understood it thus far, hinges on this ability to respond to extremism with empathy.

• Bingo :) That's an awesome explanation.

  I think we also don't need to address extremism yet. The "juice per squeeze" factor on actual extremists is pretty low. The good news is that we can make almost all the progress we need to make by having this curious, thoughtful discussions with other reasonable people, knowing that reasonable people may act unreasonably out of the habits they've learned through how they've argued in the past.

  So nobody needs to be tied to chairs, I think ;)

  I really believe most people are hungry for more than screaming and grandstanding, and that us extending our hands to them, to hear them out, give them space to not be defensive, to make mistakes and not be punished, to noodle through together what's really going on--that they'll respond really well to this.

• I'll be honest, I usually restrict my interactions to trying to get people to stop distorting other people's positions, or outright lying. When talking with people who claim Obama was born in Kenya, or Bush freed Isis in 2003, or evolution is just a theory and shouldn't be taught.... you're not going to see a lot of common ground with rational people who pay attention to the facts.

  And mostly, the extremists don't want common ground and understanding. Take the Micheal Brown shooting. I saw a number of moderates, myself included, calling for more training of police and greater oversight to prevent excessive force, which meant nothing unless we also branded Wilson a racist, for which no evidence has been found (and he was recently cleared of any civil rights violations). For the extremist, it is not enough to acknowledge a problem, we also need to agree with their diagnosis and proposed solution, evidence or not.

• As you say in the STC mission statement - political dialogue is broken. The way we discuss politics is too black-and-white and partisan for most friendships to support real dialogue across political ideologies.

  This will, I suspect, become core to the STC mission. It's part of your job now to figure out not only how to foster compassionate dialogue, but how to actively incentivize people to discuss politics across ideological lines.

• Ahem our job!

• Er, busted formatting, sorry:

  Ahem! Our job!

• I think it's a bigger problem than merely who you are friends with. I feel like there has been a growing trend toward people failing to tolerate dealing with people who have different opinions. From boycotts of companies over the beliefs of the founders, to social media campaigns to get people fired over internet comments, to defriending people who disagree with you on particular issues. All seem to indicate a growing unwillingness to interact civilly with those who hold differing political opinions. I worry that this might become a huge problem as the willingness to tolerate different opinions in those you interact with is one of the key principles that allows society to function.

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