SoylentNews

[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]

gznork26 writes:

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)

Original Submission