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I don't understand how the title follows from the article. The main finding seems to be that low tolerance increases polarization, which is what one would intui

by js8 5y ago

I don't understand how the title follows from the article. The main finding seems to be that low tolerance increases polarization, which is what one would intuitively expect. (And it's actually known as the old folk wisdom, "do not feed the trolls".) Since polarized system will be less in state of conflict, they seem to conclude that having high tolerance for different opinion means more conflict, and that is worse? Do I read this correctly?

civilized 5y ago
I agree, very confusing. I think the gist is something like "people and news institutions from opposite poles avoid contact with each other when there's polarization, creating partisan echo chambers". Which seems to reverse the arrow of causation relative to what the headline suggests. Polarization seems to come first, then the news institutions become partisan so that they enter the cozy echo chamber of one side, rather than being exposed to fire from both sides in the no man's land in the middle. I have a lot of experience with Twitter and I don't think conflict is minimized there. There's definitely a lot of "interaction" between opposing sides. Mostly of the form "look at this stupid and evil thing the other side said, let's reaffirm our correctness and righteousness by mocking and attacking it". The reason there isn't meaningful interaction between opposing sides is because they both have caricatures of the other side that the other side rejects. A caricatures B, B rejects the caricature, A embraces the caricature all the more because it expresses the real truth that dishonest B refuses to admit, etc.
mikk14 5y ago
Let me try to clarify (one of the authors here). The focus of the title is on the news source. It is the news source that tries to avoid conflict in this model. Specifically, at each time step, they see they are getting flagged (attacked, receiving backlash, etc) and they try to minimize it for the next step. Differently from what the sibling comment says, this is not bred out from a pre-existing polarization. The starting point for users and news sources is to have a normally distributed opinion, where most of the people (and news sources) are actual neutral. Yet, for a certain combination of parameters, this is not enough and will end up with polarization. And unfortunately that combination of parameters is the one compatible with observed data. The reason why this happens links to a previous study [1]. Even absent polarization, it is the most central news organizations that receive most of the backlash because of some characteristics of the system (e.g. homophily: people naturally tend to be friend with people with similar opinion as them). This causes central neutral sources to spread more, and thus reach parts of the network that heavily disagrees with them. I will concede that the initial framing of my post is indeed confusing, because it seems that I'm talking about users avoiding conflict, while the paper is about news sources avoiding conflicts. I'll try to do better in the future. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2020.0020 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2020...

by js8 5y ago

civilized 5y ago

I agree, very confusing. I think the gist is something like "people and news institutions from opposite poles avoid contact with each other when there's polarization, creating partisan echo chambers". Which seems to reverse the arrow of causation relative to what the headline suggests. Polarization seems to come first, then the news institutions become partisan so that they enter the cozy echo chamber of one side, rather than being exposed to fire from both sides in the no man's land in the middle. I have a lot of experience with Twitter and I don't think conflict is minimized there. There's definitely a lot of "interaction" between opposing sides. Mostly of the form "look at this stupid and evil thing the other side said, let's reaffirm our correctness and righteousness by mocking and attacking it". The reason there isn't meaningful interaction between opposing sides is because they both have caricatures of the other side that the other side rejects. A caricatures B, B rejects the caricature, A embraces the caricature all the more because it expresses the real truth that dishonest B refuses to admit, etc.

mikk14 5y ago

Let me try to clarify (one of the authors here). The focus of the title is on the news source. It is the news source that tries to avoid conflict in this model. Specifically, at each time step, they see they are getting flagged (attacked, receiving backlash, etc) and they try to minimize it for the next step. Differently from what the sibling comment says, this is not bred out from a pre-existing polarization. The starting point for users and news sources is to have a normally distributed opinion, where most of the people (and news sources) are actual neutral. Yet, for a certain combination of parameters, this is not enough and will end up with polarization. And unfortunately that combination of parameters is the one compatible with observed data. The reason why this happens links to a previous study [1]. Even absent polarization, it is the most central news organizations that receive most of the backlash because of some characteristics of the system (e.g. homophily: people naturally tend to be friend with people with similar opinion as them). This causes central neutral sources to spread more, and thus reach parts of the network that heavily disagrees with them. I will concede that the initial framing of my post is indeed confusing, because it seems that I'm talking about users avoiding conflict, while the paper is about news sources avoiding conflicts. I'll try to do better in the future. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2020.0020 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2020...