[darkkindness]

meta: Over these past four years I've seen a growing number of people interpreting the most nuanced, neutral statements as 'apologist', 'biased', 'lobbying', 'spam', 'politically motivated'. I don't think this has always been the case, especially on HN.

It's not just skepticism, that's for sure. How do I put it? It's like assuming there are sides when there are no sides. I'm curious, is there a word for this?

[brianpan]

Polarization has been happening everywhere not just HN and not just in the US. Othering is a related term.

See also: https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/partisanship/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/ideology/

[darkkindness]

I like this. Polarization is a pretty good characterization. People are just not treating neutral views as neutral anymore.

Food for thought: perhaps people treating everything as fake news is an unfortunate adverse effect of all the messaging about the dangers of not recognizing fake news.

[dredmorbius]

Splitting is a psychological phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

[smallgovt]

I think it's simply a result of outrage culture.

[darkkindness]

Thanks for your viewpoint.

As far as I understand, outrage culture is about shunning popular folks for their imperfect human morality. Could you (or someone else) elaborate on how this is related to this, well, let's call it erosion of neutrality?

[dunkelheit]

Reminds me of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

[darkkindness]

Thanks for the link, I was wondering if Scott touched on this. Seems to be an adjacent topic but it's relevant nonetheless.

my tldr of that post: in the context of ideological/political theory, mistake theorists are engineers who want results, conflict theorists are warmongers who want to win.

Perhaps seeing bias in everything is just one of those warmongering traits -- because trust me, it's really hard to win against a neutral point of view.

[DoreenMichele]

Eternal September.