If one's goal is to be as correct as possible, either at producing truth or making moral prescriptions, there is little reason to think an echo chamber is more

If one's goal is to be as correct as possible, either at producing truth or making moral prescriptions, there is little reason to think an echo chamber is more likely to be correct, and many reasons to believe it's likely a strong impediment. Echo chambers don't ideologically clean house, and vibrant merged discourse is anti-fragile. Weak or bad ideas can linger for a long time in an echo chamber, because of conflict avoidance, social pressures and the apathy of "sounds right, I guess" in an environment without any challengers willing to raise opposition to support their elimination. A vibrant discourse aggressively tears apart weak ideas of both sides, and creates an arms race to have good, hard-to-tear-down ideas which can pull people over. Echo chambers struggle to agree on base realities and in doing so ultimately polarize in a way that is harmful for society's core fabric. Research seems to indicate that the partisan polarization we're experiencing today was very strongly correlated with the rise of cable television [1], which allowed people to self-segregate into bias-catering echo chambers. Regardless of your view, I feel most would agree it is a bad thing to live in a democracy where 30% of the electorate believes the seated president won by voter fraud [2] as disagreement on this point being split on these growing partisan lines is a powder keg. Echo chambers in real life duplicate local conditions ideologically and morally, which is often bad. Ethnic cleansing, lynching, slavery, and other horrific abuses were at many points in history "how things were done around here", and while these are extreme examples, there's no reason to think that your local area "gets things right" just by nature of its proximity to you - the same social pressure towards conformity in these groups will likely apply at all levels, big and small, giving you opportunities to be wrong about all kinds of things. For someone who wants to be right or in the right, echo chambers are a losing formula. [1] https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/2012/wp1206.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/poll-61-republicans-still-believe-biden-didnt-win-fair-square-2020-rcna49630 https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/poll...