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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

This is all quite naive.

People flock to other people that make them feel the way they want to feel, and tell them what they want to do is okay.

People find these groups organically too, or form them themselves, through friend associations, not just by having them pushed.

A lot of people like to feel angry against someone (the other), as it gives them a sense of control and power. Joining others who are similarly aligned, also gives them the sense of belonging.

People who are in these states aren’t going to filter out their friends, or filter out the people telling them things they want to hear.

They’re going to filter out things that make them feel uncomfortable, or that they don’t agree with - like anyone who would stop them from going further down the rabbit hole!

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If the assumption is that as a consequence of allowing people to filter things themselves more, everyone will just get along, understand each other, and all political problems will disappear/people will become enlightened and cease to be ignorant, then yes, it's incredibly naive. This was the case made by people setting up these platforms without filters.

That's not my assumption. I think echo chambers are impossible to prevent and ignorance is something most people gravitate towards. I think many people are likely to find reasons to vilify and misunderstand each other until the end of time.

What I think is possible to curtail and is being ramped up now is viral conflict escalation. If active conflict is curtailed, that expands the amount of peace time available for actually effective communication if and when the opportunity arises over long stretches of time with a lot of effort. If you have an irrational hatred towards people with X quality/opinion because of bad information, are you more likely to become agitated and attack people if you a) people with X quality/opinion aren't visible b) people with X quality/opinion are unavoidable?

The ideal is obviously to get people to understand each other better, but I think we're seeing you can't just do that by superficially exposing everyone to everyone else. It requires a more sophisticated approach that respects people enough to have their own autonomy and seek out understanding and better information voluntarily through more personal interaction and influence.

There are natural forms of competency and organizational filters that allowed us to progress to where we are today and nudge people towards greater understanding of each other and cooperation which punish bigotry and unintelligent assumptions through natural rather than artificial consequences. Increased social cohesion and progress was not a top down process in the past and does not need to be a top process down now, and I think an attempt to manage global conversation is just as naive as the naive open global village kumbaya assumptions that got us into this mess. People's autonomy needs to be respected if you want them to consider a more enlightened perspective.

Near as I can tell, these ‘natural forms of competency and organizational filters’ are not natural, and never have been.

If they were, Nazi Germany would not have been what it was.

Also, baked into what you’re saying seems to be an assumption that if no one was prompted to start a fight, no one would fight. And that is true sometimes, with many people. But that is definitely not true of everyone, let alone everyone all the time!

The forms of social organization which are natural to us are easily directed towards hate of ‘outside’ groups, which can be easily constructed from any easily identifiable group of people with the right set of conditions. Even without prompting, it naturally arises based on visual identifiers and in many common environmental triggers.

In fact, near as I can tell, the only thing stopping larger scale movements of exactly that type is cultural memory of the death, destruction, and terribleness that results from it, resulting in active pressure against anyone trying to form a similar group. The ‘my grandfather fought a war against Nazi’s, you’re not going to be a Nazi’ type of memory.

Which fades with time, and isn’t natural to anyone?

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