ABM
Happily Married In Music City, USA!
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2008
- Messages
- 31,865
- Likes
- 5,785
- Points
- 113
For all you edumucated types. 30 pages of sheer esotericism.
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/deliver...6015025091102019107088005105116078005&EXT=pdf
I scrolled to the end to see what the conclusion was. We appear to have a lot of the bases covered, here, in the S2 Forum. Might we even be considered a sort of microcosm of national/world views, as it were?
Like-minded people, engaged in discussion with one another, may lead each other in the direction of error and falsehood, simply because of the limited argument pool and the operation of social influences. I have suggested that the best response to this problem is to attempt to ensure against social balkanization and fragmentation, through mechanisms providing a “public sphere” that is used, at once, by people with competing perspectives on facts and values. If a general public sphere is unavailable or not feasible, it becomes all the more important to ensure that in the course of deliberation, people are exposed to a range of reasonable competing views. Of course it might seem hard to know what counts as a reasonable competing view without knowing what is actually right, and if we already know that, there might seem to be little point to deliberation. But short of knowing what is right, it is possible to know something about the range of reasonable candidates, and about who might learn from whom. Perhaps the largest lesson provided by group polarization involves the need to structure processes of deliberation so as to ensure that people are exposed, not to softer or louder echoes of their own voices, but to a range of reasonable alternatives. By itself, that lesson is very far from new; but an understanding of the potential effects of group polarization argues in favor of fresh thinking, and possible reforms, in many contemporary institutions.
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/deliver...6015025091102019107088005105116078005&EXT=pdf
I scrolled to the end to see what the conclusion was. We appear to have a lot of the bases covered, here, in the S2 Forum. Might we even be considered a sort of microcosm of national/world views, as it were?
Like-minded people, engaged in discussion with one another, may lead each other in the direction of error and falsehood, simply because of the limited argument pool and the operation of social influences. I have suggested that the best response to this problem is to attempt to ensure against social balkanization and fragmentation, through mechanisms providing a “public sphere” that is used, at once, by people with competing perspectives on facts and values. If a general public sphere is unavailable or not feasible, it becomes all the more important to ensure that in the course of deliberation, people are exposed to a range of reasonable competing views. Of course it might seem hard to know what counts as a reasonable competing view without knowing what is actually right, and if we already know that, there might seem to be little point to deliberation. But short of knowing what is right, it is possible to know something about the range of reasonable candidates, and about who might learn from whom. Perhaps the largest lesson provided by group polarization involves the need to structure processes of deliberation so as to ensure that people are exposed, not to softer or louder echoes of their own voices, but to a range of reasonable alternatives. By itself, that lesson is very far from new; but an understanding of the potential effects of group polarization argues in favor of fresh thinking, and possible reforms, in many contemporary institutions.
