> The ever-deepening rift between the political left- and right-wing has long been puzzling theorists in political science and opinion dynamics I feel like peo

> The ever-deepening rift between the political left- and right-wing has long been puzzling theorists in political science and opinion dynamics I feel like people who make this claims are in one of two camps. One is the camp that just wants to ignore that the 60s or 70s even happened, to refuse to acknowledge that the polarization we see now is extremely mild in comparison. The other camp believes that we can measure the polarization using some insane metrics that purport to indicate how polarized society is, but really just measure the opinion of the people collecting the metrics through increasingly inane measures, like literal telephone polling that attempts to extrapolate from "people who use landlines routinely and either are willing to answer unknown caller calls or don't have caller id" to "all people". The latter camp is extremely insidious and I implore you to remember the last time someone used metrics to prove something clearly false and assume that everyone is doing the same thing, just Gell-Mann amnesia is preventing you from seeing it.