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A 2020 Cato national survey found that self-censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.
Additionally, nearly a third (32%) of employed Americans say they are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known. (These results are particularly notable since most personal campaign contributions to political candidates are public knowledge and can easily be found online.)
But when Armani Salado, the author of the fantasy book The Old Universe and co-founder of a multi-media company called Forbidden Origins, tweeted a question, asking everyone what radicalized them, many answered it and allowed the internet to have an honest discussion on a sensitive topic that's becoming increasingly avoided.
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C. Thi Nguyen, who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, however, warns that radical polarization within a society fails to get its members to the heart of the issues they're facing.
And he thinks that echo chambers, which occur when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside, are the real problem.
"Echo chambers isolate their members, not by cutting off their lines of communication to the world, but by changing whom they trust," Nguyen wrote. "And echo chambers aren’t just on the right. I’ve seen echo chambers on the left, but also on parenting forums, nutritional forums, and even around exercise methods."
#4
Jason K 1 year ago
As a parent of a special need child, New Jersey school systems offer speech, occupational, and physical therapies as a part of their school day. They have dedicated ABA classrooms with very low teacher/student ratio (my son's is currently 2/5. A lot of the anger at US services is out of ignorance, including parents not knowing what is actually available for their own children, which is obviously sad.
#5
Awesome At Being Autistic 1 year ago
Didn't you know that it's a sin to be poor in America? All good religious people should shun the poor, it's what Jesus would want. /s
According to legal scholar and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, the main cause of polarization is that internet technologies have created a world where people don't often encounter the other side anymore.
"Many people get their news from social media feeds. Their feeds get filled up with people like them - who usually share their political views," Nguyen explained.
"What’s going on, in my view, isn’t just a bubble. It’s not that people’s social media feeds are arranged so they don’t run across any scientific arguments; it’s that they’ve come to systematically distrust the institutions of science," Nguyen said. "Echo chamber members have been prepared to face contrary evidence. Their echo-chambered worldview has been arranged to dismiss that evidence at its source."
"They’re not totally irrational, either. In the era of scientific specialization, people must trust doctors, statisticians, biologists, chemists, physicists, nuclear engineers, and aeronautical engineers, just to go about their day. And they can’t always check with perfect accuracy whether they have put their trust in the right place."
#10
v 1 year ago
Look, through an honest lens, at the treatment of various peoples through the roughly 250 life of the U.S. and it quickly becomes evident that what America says it stands for doesn't really ring true. In the literal founding document of the country it says that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal and the country has not, at any point in its history, been able to live by that simple and self-evident truth.
#11
A new UCL study found that people who hold radical political views – at either end of the political spectrum – aren’t as good as moderates at knowing when they’re wrong.
“We were trying to clarify whether people who hold radical political beliefs are generally overconfident in their stated beliefs, or if it boils down to differences in metacognition, which is the ability we have to recognize when we might be wrong,” said the lead author if the study, Dr. Steve Fleming (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology).
#14
Jessica Knight 1 year ago
Please stop downvoting this person. They have a right to their opinion :)
For the study, 381 people (in addition to 417 people in a second experiment that replicated the findings) initially completed a survey gauging their political beliefs and attitudes towards alternative world views. People on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum tended to have more radical views, involving authoritarianism and dogmatic intolerance for opposing views.
The participants then completed a simple perceptual task requiring them to look at two sets of dots and judge which one had more dots. They were then asked to rate how confident they were in making their choice and were incentivized to judge their confidence accurately with a monetary reward.
The experiment was designed to test people on a task completely unrelated to politics, to hone in on cognitive processes without any political motivations.
People with more radical beliefs performed similarly on the task to moderates, but they tended to give higher confidence ratings when they had made incorrect choices than moderates did. Radicals’ confidence in correct answers was similar to that of moderates.
A second stage of the study assessed how participants took in new evidence. After making a judgment on the dots task, participants were shown another set of dots as ‘bonus’ information about the correct answer, before making their confidence judgment. If they had made an incorrect choice, the next set of dots should have weakened their confidence in their choice – which it did for moderates, but not as much for people with radical political views.
#23
Sasha Kuleshov 1 year ago
"You have money? Good, after this you'll have none" - A health insurance company ._.
#24
Geoffrey Scott 1 year ago
I went around and around with a former cop, who retired and worked with me at his 2nd career. I asked did he (Floyd ) deserve to die for allegedly passing a fake $20? "No"..., and the cop that choked him dead was a training officer? "Yes".., and in your training, were you advised that if you held someone in that hold for too long you risked killing them? (eyes down) "Yes"
“An important point is that our findings held true among participants with radical views at either end of the political spectrum – radicalism appears to reflect a cognitive style that transcends political inclinations,” co-author of the study, Professor Ray Dolan (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research), said.
While it's admirable to stand up for your beliefs, it's important to empathize with others too, at least if we want to fix our problems (of which we have many).
#27
Lori T Wisconsin 1 year ago
In the US legal system the victim is often accused of causing the rape. She dressed or acted improperly, etc. Nobody has the right to touch a single hair on your head without permission.
#28
Sonja 1 year ago
True socialism is horrible though! It's just as bad as true capitalism. None of both works in its pure form. We need both at the same time, one regulating the other. If it's done right, you get Denmark. And they're much further forward on the road to a truly great place to live in for every citizen than any other country even though they to have still some way to go. Vut if we want a fair and great society to live in, we need to stop thinking in extremes. We need to stop looking for the perfect system. We need pragmatism and the willingness to look at reality and what brings the best results in every situation. If the best solution comes from capitalism, it has to be used, if in the next situation the best solution comes from socialism, then so be it. And I promise you, in most situations you'll need a little bit of both
#30
Sasha Kuleshov 1 year ago
Millions of unoccupied houses and millions of homeless people don't make sense :I
#31
Geoffrey Scott 1 year ago
BOTH our daughters were WIC kids, I worked full time plus LOTS of overtime and still qualified.
#33
#34
René Sauer 1 year ago
Wait, is this person saying they were 23 when they first heard of the holocaust? They were born 1945, So it was still a pretty fresh event o.O
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What do you think ?
deanna woods 1 year ago
I used to believe that capitalism was the only way, but now I realize that some socialism can really change a society around. People should not go bankrupt because of medical issues and this American healthcare system is incredibly broken. I would not care if my taxes went to someone else's healthcare as long as they were able to get help. I also used to be very pro life and then I realized that everything that I was being told about abortion was a lie. Abortion is a private matter between a woman and her doctor. Also, in some cases, abortion saves a woman's life. The talking point about babies being aborted at birth is absolute nonsense. That is not a thing that happens. If a woman carried her baby for nine months, she wants the baby. I also used to believe that anyone that didn't believe in God like I do were bad people, but now I realize that those same people will treat me better than the so called Christians. The most important thing that I have learned over the last three months
deanna woods 1 year ago
Is that people don't have to speak the same language to be able to communicate. Some of my customers can't speak English and we still make the transaction work.
Load More Replies... Bill Allen 1 year ago
Listening to Limbaugh and others intense, hateful campaign against Bill Clinton and then Fox News getting big convinced me that you can’t fight that much hate with kindness. And now Trump and his cult will kill you and laugh as they spit on your corpse.
Powerful Katrinka 1 year ago
I'm 64. Every year for the past 40 years, I've moved further left. At this point, I'm part of the "radical left" that conservatives vilify. You know who else would be regarded as a leftist? Dwight Eisenhower.
Gavin Johnson 1 year ago
Looking into the U.S. from the U.K. I often wonder what the hardcore Republicans would understand of our left wing politicians here. They’d think our ‘centre-right’ government is nowhere near the right and that both Democrats and Republican parties are right of our centre ground. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialists I do chuckle to myself, it’s just a word they use to scare people, much like they used Communism in the 60s-90s. Socialism of the heart is they way forward, treat your fellow human to some care and kindness 😀
Load More Replies... deanna woods 1 year ago
I used to believe that capitalism was the only way, but now I realize that some socialism can really change a society around. People should not go bankrupt because of medical issues and this American healthcare system is incredibly broken. I would not care if my taxes went to someone else's healthcare as long as they were able to get help. I also used to be very pro life and then I realized that everything that I was being told about abortion was a lie. Abortion is a private matter between a woman and her doctor. Also, in some cases, abortion saves a woman's life. The talking point about babies being aborted at birth is absolute nonsense. That is not a thing that happens. If a woman carried her baby for nine months, she wants the baby. I also used to believe that anyone that didn't believe in God like I do were bad people, but now I realize that those same people will treat me better than the so called Christians. The most important thing that I have learned over the last three months
deanna woods 1 year ago
Is that people don't have to speak the same language to be able to communicate. Some of my customers can't speak English and we still make the transaction work.
Load More Replies... Bill Allen 1 year ago
Listening to Limbaugh and others intense, hateful campaign against Bill Clinton and then Fox News getting big convinced me that you can’t fight that much hate with kindness. And now Trump and his cult will kill you and laugh as they spit on your corpse.
Powerful Katrinka 1 year ago
I'm 64. Every year for the past 40 years, I've moved further left. At this point, I'm part of the "radical left" that conservatives vilify. You know who else would be regarded as a leftist? Dwight Eisenhower.
Gavin Johnson 1 year ago
Looking into the U.S. from the U.K. I often wonder what the hardcore Republicans would understand of our left wing politicians here. They’d think our ‘centre-right’ government is nowhere near the right and that both Democrats and Republican parties are right of our centre ground. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialists I do chuckle to myself, it’s just a word they use to scare people, much like they used Communism in the 60s-90s. Socialism of the heart is they way forward, treat your fellow human to some care and kindness 😀
Load More Replies...
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