Comment by hiddencost
9 years ago
Maybe the quality of the political discussion is so crappy because we don't talk about it?
My experience is that one has to express their emotional relationship to problems and be aware of it before they can actually insightfully engage with problems; if people don't, they just introduce their emotional biases into their problem solving and pretend they're not.
That works in personal therapy. If you expect people in a thread of hundreds of partisan comments to have some kind of catharsis, please see r/politics.
It's too complex of a topic and too emotional to be discussed in a large group setting.
You make a good point, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion - think this is an area of open research - could we build UX for discussion forums that don't encourage and highlight shouting matches? I think the wide-open nature of twitter, for example, where everyone can immediately jump in on any conversation without context or consequences encourages such shouting matches and abusive comments.
There's a reason a one-on-one discussion is much likelier to at least be resolved in amicable disagreement and a greater understanding of perspectives, versus online "discussion" is often about vast hordes of people participating in one single "conversation" one comment at a time, while also trying to get upvotes.
I think it's quite possible to alleviate this, but requires getting over the simplistic per-comment upvote/everyone can comment on every thread model.
The primary reason for the immense difficulty is that casual political discussions are almost entirely wild speculation and conjecture. The topics are too vast and complex. Most people don't have the tools and understanding needed to have deep insights or meaningfully predict the actual impacts of different approaches. Throw in the emotional and tribal components, and it's not surprising that politics is a never-ceasing shitstorm.
This isn't true for every issue. Some things are relatively simple, like gay marriage for example. But the more obvious issues tend to get settled eventually, even if takes a few decades or centuries :)
It amazes me that I rarely see this discussed. Of course, I also fall in this bucket.