Comment by xg15
21 hours ago
> When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil.
Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.
The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.
So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.
> All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
I see your point — I think more than a couple Twilight Zone episodes that Serling penned explored the "monsters" that are within us.
But I disagree. Because I think when you are face-to-face you're more likely to see nuance in your option and others. "I hate gays!" you say. But then you find yourself chatting with your neighbor and his husband and have been thankful for them, on several occasions, for helping you get your car started in the winter, or whatever.
"Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....
> Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....
They are still racist pricks. The ones at church are just the “good ones” who do a good enough job of code switching - ie so the racists say “you’re not like most Black people”.
(yes I’m Black).
You don't win people over by singling them out.
You'll have to tell me then (I'm white) are the "nuanced racists" worse? Or are they on a learning curve?
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Prior to ubiquitous mobile Internet and social media, we had geographic boundaries around communities. Now those lines are being rapidly blurred, and there's bleedover in regional thought into some semblance of broader online community.
But the point is that the observation that the world seems nuts and a liberal city in the West feels cosmopolitan isn't necessarily wrong - the liberal West is a global minority. Illiberal views are the global majority. What did we expect when we started merging thought globally? And most of the world isn't even 'online' yet in sense they've joined these spaces, they're marginally connected based on how you measure it, or in their own regional spaces.
Or, online discourse has polarised opinion through The Algorithm promoting inflammatory, divisive content. In real life, when people talk, they see the other person as a human with more understandable motivations, and tend to find a lot more common ground.
So perhaps instead of "in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness"; "in real life, divisions turn out to be largely illusory (or more moderate; or more understandable) once you get to know someone".
Most people in real life only have deep conversations with like minded people. In the polite company you just don’t talk about politics, religion or other divisive topics.
There is no illusion about how most rural Christian Americans think about gay people, minorities, liberal west coast elites, Muslims, etc.
No illusion about how many of those people think about Christians too.
I'm in the second most liberal county in the Northeast US and I'd say on a frigid cold night and they called a Code Blue people who go to church are manning the homeless shelter while LGBT...IQA+#@?^! people are tweeting about how Sarah McBride is a sell-out. Then again, the people I know who go to to church are the people who've been to federal prison because they stormed the gates protesting a nuclear weapons faclity.
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How does the alternate theory work ? The evidence here suggests that instigation on social media is usually targeted and limited to a handful of accounts. If it were indeed the case that people are more real online and more towards the right politically, then we shouldn't observe this concentration. It would be more diffused.
> The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
It's an interesting theory, and I almost want to agree, but I can assure you that the same approximate percentage of extremist idiots exist in real-world NYC as online. If you doubt me, go to the fountain in Washington Square Park pretty much whenever, and you will meet them.
Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
>Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally? Pick a card and you'd have to squint to say most people are moderate on most issues.
Examples:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/11/18/global-support...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
OK, the first link was about free speech, and the third was about "support for authoritarianism". Of all the issues you could possibly cherry-pick, those are amongst the ones where I'd expect the most extreme polarization (Survey people if they like ice cream and puppies, and hate murder, while you're at it.)
As for the second one (about homosexuality), the article tells a fairly nuanced story about polarization across countries, with rising overall support, and a lot of countries...in the middle. That bar chart mid-way down the article looks exactly like what I'd expect.
> When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally?
Yes. The bigger the population, the more I expect to see a bell curve. Central limit theorem.
> Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
Moderate-ness is, more or less, a fallacy. People believe that since we have A and B that the correct answer must be somewhere in the middle - intuitively, you would think, somewhere really in the middle. Like if I want fried chicken, but my friend wants to eat-in to get something healthy, then the right answer is getting something out to eat that's somewhat healthy.
So, people who are unaware on issues are "naturally" moderate, because intuitively it seems to make a lot of sense.
But, not actually. If we just look at history, choose virtually any point, when are the moderates right? Almost never. The 3/5ths compromise was shit, for instance. Civil Unions? Remember those? Yeah, that was stupid and we should've just given homosexuals marriage. I mean, what were moderates saying during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s? I'll give you a hint... it was not good. Yeah, that aged like milk too.
You would think, given the history of failure that is moderate policy, people might be a tad hesitant to be moderate on an issue. You would think, they might dig deeper.
But no. We all have this idea that this point in time, and in this particular place, is unique. Our politics, now, are much different. No no, you see, it's not the same. This time we are right.
Of course, this is slightly better than social conservatism, which has a track record of always being bad. Forever. In every culture. Across the entire globe. But no guys, this time it's right! Never mind Confucianism or whatever, this is different!
Polling can’t even accurately figure out if people are going to vote R or D two weeks from the poll. Color me skeptical that public opinion polling in anything more complex is more accurate and not simply used to itself shape public perception and opinion.
Even polling “experts” like Silver regularly make huge misses on binary questions (his Florida bet) let alone stuff like the Selzer poll. It’s really hard to take any complex issue polling seriously. It’s a tough sell to convince me that sure, these binary choice election polls with a verifiable result (the election) are wrong, but totally unverifiable public opinion polling with possibly framed questions represent reality.
That's actually an indication that what I'm saying is true. Polls aren't sensitive to pick up the subtle differences that divide the two-party system in the USA.
For all that the people in the tails of the distributions want to believe otherwise, the difference between "red state" and "blue state" is a few percentage points, nationwide.
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Most people are fine, even online. As the article says, it's really just a small group that's completely out of control. Maybe people are a bit more direct and blunt over text, but that's a different thing than what the article is about.
We've all had that mad idiot ranting at the pub. You smile and nod and move somewhere else. What's his potential audience? Not so much. That same person is now Tweeting >500 times a day, replying to all sorts of posts with misinformation and (typically) vitriol and insults. All of these people are quite unpleasant in real life too (well, until they get Buzz Aldrin'd anyway).
> All of these people are quite unpleasant in real life too (well, until they get Buzz Aldrin'd anyway).
We just need to send them to the moon to improve a bit.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
Online discourse is a shard of a shattered mirror.