My latest essay covers Yascha Mounk and Amanda Ripley on Ripley’s recent book.
Ripley says that one of the keys to getting out of high conflict is to disengage from conflict entrepreneurs. Stop following the conflict entrepreneurs. I would say to start following instead people like Mounk and Ripley and the Fantasy Intellectual Teams category leaders.
I support your efforts to raise the intellectual rigor of the dialogue, but can you please at least acknowledge how stacked the deck is even if the dialogue was improved?
This is the game as I see it:
A few Substack authors and the like vs. the MSM, social media and many corporations.
It’s David vs. Goliath all the way through.
Examples:
“Follow the science”
Wuhan lab leak
Cuomo vs. DeSantis
CRT
BLM
Voting reform
Biological males competing in female sports
In short, the media and those others that control who gets banned vs. promoted on various platforms get to set the dialogue. And, it has got much more to do with ideological power than with ideological quality or silly commenters on Twitter.
If you need a stark example, here is the treatment of Trump vs. that of Khamenei on social media.
https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1396880298445578241?s=20
“Imagine relying on SCIENCE! as your actual religion and then seeing every redneck from Kentucky be right about the origins of COVID in April of 2020”
From my Twitter feed…lol.
They are literally going to 1984 the earlier stance out of their minds.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994
In the David vs. Goliath battle I neglected to mention academia.
***
Less than 3% of responding faculty members at Harvard identify as either conservative or very conservative, according to a recent poll conducted by the Harvard Crimson.
The most depressing finding: Only 23% of faculty indicated that they would support hiring more conservatives.
https://twitter.com/a_centrism/status/1397734107505958912?s=21
Sometimes you really do have asymmetric insight. I think you could come up with a dozen things off the top of your head where there is an impassioned other side but for which you think they have absolutely no factual basis to stand on.
The halfway compromise between a stance with merit and stance without merit it one with less merit, not the wisdom of crowds.