Socializing your thoughts
Its hard to believe how many politically charged conversations I’ve been part of in last 5 years where people arguing have been 100% convinced that their favorite political party is right about EVERY social and economic issue.
It’s common to see political parties treated like sports teams. They have a very motivated fanbase which takes pride in cheering for their favorite team, celebrating their success and defending every failure they may have. It’s bizarre.
To quote Sam Harris,
“It’s pretty strange that knowing a person’s position on any one of these issues, generally allows you to predict their position on any of the others. This shouldn’t happen. Some of these issues are totally unrelated.
Why should a person’s attitude towards guns be predictive of his views on climate change? Or immigration? Or abortion? And yet, it almost certainly is in our society.
That’s a sign that people are joining tribes and movements. It’s not the sign of clear thinking.”
– Sam Harris
Political polarization, especially in US is not a news anymore but just to give you an idea of how polarized everyone’s world views have become, here is an interesting data. It’s a social graph representing retweet activity of people (represented as nodes), we can clearly see the world divided in two distinct social bubbles.
Anyone looking at this graph should be scared of what we have become.
Network graph of messages and their retweet activity across all political topics (gun control, same-sex marriage, climate change). Nodes represent a user who sent a message, and edges (lines) represent a user retweeting another user. The two large communities were shaded based on the mean ideology of each respective community (blue represents a liberal mean, red represents a conservative mean) Source.
Now it might be easy to blame this on Social Media, but the problem is much deeper than that. Here is some more interesting data from national journal showing the divide has been widening way before social media even existed.
Why is it bad?
Let us do a thought experiment. Let us think of financial markets where the price discovery happens based on demand and supply of a certain stock. Market collectively concludes the truth (price of certain stock) based on buy and sell signal from market participants.
Now let us imagine, instead of trading these company stocks, every single investor buys them indirectly via Index Funds. When you buy index fund, you buy entire market. If 100% of the market participants were to switch to index funds / passive investing (something that will never happen) markets will become completely inefficient. There will be no truth finding mechanism (price discovery), a stock of the company will no longer be tied to it’s performance. Markets will essentially break.
Similarly if everyone decides to think passively by socializing their thoughts to that of their favorite political party, There will be no truth discovery. The performance of political party in the elections will no longer be tied to their performance in the real world. It will be a broken system. There will be no incentive for them to improve.
If you made it so far, I’d urge you to not be that person, To not socialize your thoughts, but to build the muscle of critical thinking. You are not doing yourself any favor by being a cheerleader for a political party, and you are certainly not making this world any better. I’d like to close out by quoting Jordan Peterson.
“I’m not hearing what YOU think. I’m hearing how you’re able to represent the ideology you were taught. And it’s not that interesting. Because I don’t know anything about you. I could replace you with someone else who thinks the same way. And that means you’re not here.”
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