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[ED NOTE: Editors discussed whether we should even run this story. I decided to take a chance. BUT, it's up to the community how this goes. Feel free to downmod comments that attack the *commenter* rather than *add* something to the discussion.--martyb]
Growing extremism can and has turned almost anything into a political struggle in which people pay diminishing attention to the topics and more to the 'tribal' group that they may be associated with. We've seen the effects on the functioning on the US congress, as well as in how laws on various topics have been playing out lately.
But the idea that without a center, things fall apart, may be more real than we thought, as this article at ScienceBlog about a Cornell study describes: https://scienceblog.com/527200/tipping-point-makes-partisan-polarization-irreversible/
It seems that up to a point, it is possible to reverse the polarization. Beyond that tipping point, it cannot. From what I've seen, the US is probably in the vicinity of that tipping point. The pattern described here sounds an awful lot like the period-doubling path to chaos, a mathematical construct in which a function that has a single stable state in one range of numbers starts developing two stable states, and then four, until stability is lost and the set devolves into chaos. If this reflection has any validity in the political or social realms, then we should also have seen the same pattern play out within discussions that turn to chaos.
Is there predictive power in this observation by the researchers at Cornell? If so, can anything be done to head it off, or are we all doomed to watch it play out?
Journal Reference:
Michael W. Macy, Manqing Ma, Daniel R. Tabin, et al. Polarization and tipping points [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102144118)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 14 2021, @01:49AM (2 children)
I dispute that. I think a key part of what make anti-mask, anti-vaccine political was the collective hypocrisy of the people advocating for these policies. Such as saying it's important that you social distance and shelter in place even for things like religious ceremonies, unless you're protesting the Floyd killing. If you want people to believe something is important, you need to consistently treat it like it were important.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15 2021, @04:29AM (1 child)
Why are you conflating the two groups? One side is the Democratic party/Governement establishment, the other is grassroots protesters. They are not the same thing, and what the protesters do or don't do doesn't reflect on the suits at all, because they aren't even the same organization.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 15 2021, @05:28AM
I'm not. The Floyd protesters weren't telling us what to do about covid.