I'm just a rando but here's my unprompted solution: treat your fellow citizens as fallible epistemic machines instead of unified, rational members acting freely

I'm just a rando but here's my unprompted solution: treat your fellow citizens as fallible epistemic machines instead of unified, rational members acting freely within a social contract. The solution to flat earthers (to pick a slightly less divisive topic) is not to engage them in logical debate, but rather help fix the systemic and personal issues that have lead them to develop such an obviously false belief. This obviously calls for some long-term sociopolitical changes to education and journalism (a deadly paradox of chickens and eggs...), but in the context of this specific conversation, I think it would call for finding common ground with your adversaries and working up from there via the Socratic method. You'll never convince someone who's not completely tuned-out to change their stance on an upcoming presidential election in a single conversation, but I think there's more room for agreement than is assumed. We all want to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, and we all intuitively agree that evidence is the basis of belief -- even something as cartoonishly evil as belief in racial supremacy is based in benign intentions corrupted by unclear/dishonestly-presented evidence, if you dig down deep enough. Practically, besides the Socratic method (framing the conversation as collaborative investigation rather than adversarial interpretation), this might mean asking some different questions than the burning ones we'd like to phrase. Beating around the bush, if you will. It's an incredibly frustrating task to be sure, but anyone who's worked with children knows that it's sometimes necessary. Perhaps; "Why do you think the election was stolen?" --> "I love Democracy, too, I just haven't seen any evidence of fraud that I've found convincing, yet; can we talk about specific pieces of evidence convinced you, and find where our disagreements begin? Maybe even quantify our levels of relative uncertainty on each?" "Why do you think immigrants are dangerous?" --> "I'm sure we're both proud of the Statue of Liberty and the freedom of action and belief it represents, and we would have never been large enough of an economy to meaningfully effect WWII with just the 13 colonies and their descendants. What are some policies you think could bring us back to that ideal? Are there any non-Americans in the world that you would welcome as compatriots today, and if not, what specifically do you think has changed?" Etc. This is admittedly just smuggling philosophy back into our discourse, so a lot of acquaintances or strangers will react with a gruff "shut up!" or "nuh uh, that's confusing", but I've found success employing it on family members. Again, people are trained to assume that they're continuous, unified, rational beings[1] so they'll resist any sudden shifts, but a path exists, even if it's a somewhat treacherous one. Sorry for the rant, this has been a central belief of mine ever since I was exposed to it by an incredible undergrad philosophy professor -- definitely check her work out if you found any of this intriguing: https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/1875/ https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/1875/ All of this is sadly moot for people who have been convinced that evidence isn't required because they have a personal infallible connection to a divine force that secretly controls the world. I, too, have no idea what to with those people! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#The_paralogisms_of_pure_reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#The_pa...