> where reality demands thought and nuance and compromise, but the extremists can dissipate emotions and distract. Extremists do indeed do this, and surely do

> where reality demands thought and nuance and compromise, but the extremists can dissipate emotions and distract. Extremists do indeed do this, and surely do it more than others...but I think we should always be very careful of the mind's tendency to convert positions on a spectrum into a binary representation. A pattern that I propose can be observed on all social media including HN: if an article takes an abstract perspective upon politics (or any culture war topic), most people are pretty good at nuance and compromise....but if an article is discussing a specific, object level issue, it seems like the aggregate ability of commenters to discuss matters in a nuanced, non-biased manner massively decreases. If for the sake of discussion we assume this theory to have a non-trivial amount of truth to it, it seems to me that it would be useful to come up with some theories of how this phenomenon could be detected and managed, or perhaps even reversed through collective effort (leveraging the innately unique differing perspective of members, combined with our ability to be self-aware and highly logical if that state of mind can be achieved (which I believe could be achieved through an explicit process/reminders/etc)). Alternatively, humanity can continue doing exactly the same thing we are doing now, one aspect of which is using social media only for entertainment, suppressing discussion about using it to improve ourselves and the world, etc.