So here's an idea I don't have good words for, but it keeps cropping up. Imagine we're in Congress and a recently drafted bill is in revision. Let's say it's about transportation. That affects everyone almost equally, in the sense that we all absolutely need it for food and other supplies.
We can probably safely predict that Republicans and Democrats agree that there are transportation problems to solve, and that they're important. There's a call for bipartisan support for a bipartisan bill. That seems rational to most.
Also, we can probably also predict that Democrats are proposing more spending, and Republicans are proposing less spending, or even cutting existing expenditures. There's a stereotype of fiscally responsible conservatives and fiscally wasteful liberals. If history supplies evidence of that, it's certainly very mixed at best. For example, in recent times, Democratic control seems correlated with more robust fiscal decision-making, prosperity, and even balancing the budget. No doubt Republicans can point to evidence that says the opposite. I don't claim to know for sure.
These ins and outs are not my wheelhouse. But I think there's enough evidence for someone out there to have extracted more or less the right answer, whatever it is.
My point is not about which way that goes. But for the sake of illustration, let's say Democrats want to tax gasoline more and build high-speed rail lines and add bus routes, and Republicans want to allow more tollbooths and expand existing highways and set aside HOV lanes for the environmentalists. Both sides say they are trying to use what's there, expand throughput, and reduce emissions, while keeping a close eye on the budget.
Because Democrats expect Republicans to shoot down new spending, they go big on the proposals. Compromise comes later. They'll argue for exactly what they want up front, and make it sound more self-evident than the sun in the sky, except that it isn't going far enough. Republicans will be waiting for this by assembling a number of arguments for shooting it all down.
Maybe we could call this an arms race. That seems too vague. I don't have a good, more specific name for it. But here's a great cartoon of Microsoft when it had entrenchment problems. (Entrenchment, hedging, arms races, negotiation bids, and polarization all describe what I'm talking about, but no phrase with the precision I would like as to what, why, and how: the idea of taking specific opposition as a hidden assumption and the distortion that creates.)
You've probably seen it before. Critical detail: the imagined guns inside the bubbles, to which the actual guns are a response.
My point is that Democrats end up defining themselves as not-Republicans, and Republicans as not-Democrats. Any time any of them says anything, it has to be taken in the context of what they are not. Democrats often do not speak from the origin, but in response to what was just said. Not "gun laws need improvement" but "guns are slaughtering our children by the thousand." The same with Republicans. Because they can rely on their opposition to be there, and rely on encountering resistance, they get used to pushing harder. They go X amount one way, and the other side pulls them Y amount back. So a back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that any time they want to go X far, they have to push for X + Y. If they believe anything a bit, they suddenly have to believe in it absolutely, or it counts for nothing - or, worse, less than nothing, because people are weird about transparent uncertainty.
This leads to extreme or at least entrenched attitudes. Everything they say is within this tug-o-war context. It can't be taken at face value.
Yet it often is, even by them.
And we watch it and get involved and start to mirror this.
This business in Congress is not the only reason for polarization; we don't need a legislative body for that. There is something called Heider balance in social psychology that shows, in math, the basic reason for and mechanism of polarization. It isn't complicated. But the Congress image is one clear example of it: the common enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. The idea is in the Bible, but it lives deeper in the mind than recorded history, in instinct. People fall in with the party line so they aren't taken for the enemy. That's why polarization happens. It's a mathematical consequence when you apply those rules to a network. You get two camps. If things are tense enough, a war breaks out between the two camps. It's happened a million times - maybe a trillion throughout human and primate evolution. Maybe more.
But if we know that, we can alter it, maybe even adjust for it completely.
The point is we understand how it happens.
The better you understand a problem and its context, the closer you are to fixing it.
Here is my ultra-simple prescription:
1) There are MORE THAN two sides to every story.
2) Curiosity
