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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: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:34PM (12 children)
A comic based on real data. There are many such charts from many different sources, and they have slight variations. The overall result is the same though. In order to disbelieve the hockey stick, you have to ignore all the data.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:42PM (7 children)
Then where are the error bars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:52PM (2 children)
What is this, peer review? You're a comic, dude.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 12 2021, @06:23PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 13 2021, @01:26AM
lolbags
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @06:27PM (3 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 13 2021, @12:22PM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 13 2021, @05:01PM (1 child)
The point is you are an anti-science shill who uses pseudo science to sow doubt. You are the W O R S T sort.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 13 2021, @11:54PM
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 12 2021, @07:39PM (2 children)
Whoa now! Waitaminit! You're going to act like Al Gore's hockey stick was REAL DATA?!?!?!?! Even die-hard man-made climate change fanatics have disowned Al Gore's chart. If that chart had any relationship to reality, we should almost all be dead by now. It should be 100 degree F or more at both of the poles.
Any chart that resembles Al Gore's chart is a comic.
And, I thought you were being serious for awhile there. You fooled me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @07:42PM
https://news.yahoo.com/ocasio-cortez-world-going-end-150517060.html [yahoo.com]
This is the kind of moronic shit flowing from the mouths of liberals that make you all look stupid. Lay off the hyperbole, and stick to some kind of rhetoric that associates with reality from time to time.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 13 2021, @12:14AM
And 'ere ye go crazy again [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 13 2021, @02:59AM
>you have to ignore all the data.
No, you don't. You only have to ignore the data which disagrees with your point of view, like they always have done anyway. The fact that 99% of the data disagrees with their point of view this time is immaterial, all that other data wasn't collected by "their people" the ones they trust, the ones who tell them what they're paid to tell them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]