[somenameforme]

The reason echo chambers are dangerous is precisely because of the lack of dissent. Imagine politics is little more than a math problem. The actual answer is 0, but one group insists the answer can't be any smaller than 43, and another group insists there's no way it can be large than -51.

Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check.

Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...

[pjc50]

So does that mean it's "dangerous" for Jews not to have someone following them around debating their right to exist? After all, their continued existence might be a mistake, and their erroneous insistence on survival merely in-group virtue.

[deadpannini]

No, but it is _very_ dangerous to Jews for those people to be isolated, never have their ideas challenged, and miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints

[acdha]

It’s also dangerous if those ideas are widely circulated to people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.

What this comes down to is the level of good faith at play: hearing dissenting ideas is good if you’re in a place to take them seriously and the dissenter is being genuine and willing to discuss them in good faith. If those aren’t true, it’s not a win: nobody benefits from giving a liar or propagandist a podium and someone who can’t agree on some kind of objective baseline won’t be able or willing to adjust their beliefs.

[deadpannini]

> people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.

You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?

I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.

Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.

[acdha]

It’s more the people who might get pushed to the next level as they get positive reinforcement and, especially, as more moderate people leave because they’re tired of dealing with the zealots.

Extremists don’t care about disagreement – they’re there to talk, not listen – and if they see a few fellow travelers they’ll start to tell themselves their position is mainstream.

[ufmace]

> Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]

This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.

[somenameforme]

If they formed a normal coalition government, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But they did not, and could not. They couldn't get 13% of the other 63% of people to side with them, even in exchange for shared political control!

And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.

[watwut]

37% is quite a lot of support tho. It is not majority, but it is a lot in multi party parlament system. Second most popular part got 21%.

Yes, those elections were violent and also final step to power was under threat of violence. At this point, nazi were already clearly violent. Their first steps after getting power were creation of concentration camps for opposition.

[pixl97]

Violent elections... well this is deeply disturbing for the US.

[MandieD]

Having spent most of my adult life in or near Nuremberg, I am dreading this upcoming election back home, in large part because the various possibly-armed, self-appointed ballot drop box/poll watchers who have been marinating in conspiracy theories for the last several years is just a little too reminiscent of one of the displays at the Dokumentationszentrum in the 1918-1933 section.