The one critical difference between this experiment and the reality of the internet is the rat-in-a-box aspect. People are brought together and assigned to a group. Once stuffed into a box they begin to talk. Being of like opinions, they tend to reinforce each others' positions. But that's at least in part because they've been stuffed in the box together.
On the internet, going from group to group is trivialy easy. And people (surprise, surprise!) will gravitate to places where people agree with them and reinforce their opinions.
This is not polarizing, this is differentiating. And there is a world of difference between the two.
If instead of stuffing people in a box, you set up a model more like the Internet--say, a large reception hall with many tables, with people encouraged to table-hop and discuss issues. I think, after a while, that the atheist progressives will tend to gather at one table and the non-atheists at another, and the Ayn Randists will hunch over at a different place from the Left-Behindists--but there would be a constant action of people jumping from table to table. Trolling the opposition, stopping by the ecocatastrophists table, and so on.
I question how much such an experiment is useful, unless it takes into account the massive dose of authoritarianism it contains. People are sorted, stuffed in boxes, told to talk, and tested. People aren't rats, and they know that they're being manipulated. They're told what to talk about. (And they're given easy questions, too. I wonder if they were told to discuss Israel if they'd reinforce each other quite so much.)

If the point of bringing this up is to argue that political converrsation on the Internet is polarizing the nationm and that that is a bad thing--the experimenters pre-polarized the sample; they isolated the polarized sections; and they ordered them to talk about things they tended to agree on already. After all that polarizing by the experimenters, is it legitimate to say that it says much of anything about polarization in a non-coercive, non-binary situation?

Posted at November 12, 2007 8:39 AM in response to Colorado Springs and the Politics of Conformity

If you look at Japanese television, it's so much more violent than ours that it makes our biggest action flicks look like Teletubbies. (Watch "Hokuto No Ken"--Fist of the North Star sometime. And that's an oldie.) But the crime rate in Japan is minuscule compared to ours. I think there's three principle reasons: the first one is access to guns. The second is that we're an increasingly isolated society. We're still making the transition from a rural agrarian society to a dense urban one, and have destroyed our extended families in favor of mythical nuclear families, and are now destroying those. The third is that we're not really a violent society: sure, there's violent pockets, but huge swathes of this nation are absurdly peaceful. If we were really a violent society we wouldn't react with such horror at an eruption of violence. We like our violence fake and circumscribed. We like football--but let a player get injured? Everything stops dead as if we're in church. Our fantasies are violent, our everyday life extremely non--

--but we give people real guns. It's a bad combination.

Posted at April 17, 2007 8:44 PM in response to MY REACTION TO THE TRAGEDY AT VIRGINIA TECH

Of course, people seem to forget this period in Green Lantern's career...

Will does one very little good when you have no idea what your objective is. I've long asked, "What would victory in Vietnam have looked like?" And the same can be said of Iraq sevenfold.

This is why the raging id of the Right keeps slipping off message from 'freedom is on the march!" to "Kill them all!". They have no idea what the good outcome in Iraq is, except in negative terms: nobody shooting at us. And that's not a Nietzschean aspiration--though it is an Oan one.

Posted at July 10, 2006 2:50 PM in response to The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics

Did it ever occur to Some Writers™ that the situation isn't that we agree with Jack Murtha--but that he agrees with us?

Posted at June 28, 2006 2:37 PM in response to Murthal Infallibility?

I'm not saying the beginning of the twentieth century was a golden age--but it's better than what we've got now.

Maybe a bronze age.

And there's a lot--a whole lot--more to the era's journalism than 'Remember the Maine."

I would rather see William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and James Gordon Bennett slagging each other off, calling each other liars, and one-upping each other than the bored courtiers of the current media.

And let's not forget that the age of Hearst was also the age of Ida Tarbell.

Posted at June 20, 2006 4:49 PM in response to Technoutopianism

I think it's a bit of rhetorical escalation to call someone 'triumphalist' if they believe that the tool they are using is an effective one.

Rather than create a utopia, I think the blogosphere may not do more than return the state of public discourse to the level that it was at the turn of the 20th century--with dozens of newspapers in every major city, pamphleteers abounding, and rough-and-tumble yellow journalism being the order of the day.

But that sounds good to me.

Posted at June 20, 2006 10:09 AM in response to Technoutopianism

It's not, I believe, class, so much as class identification.

We have a whole class--er, set of pundits who've never covered dog shows for KPFT in No Corners, Iowa, or (more to the point) done a story about a tenement without heat on the West Side of Chicago.

The fact that Jimmy Breslin probably has a lot of money is pretty irrelevant.

Elevation to the punditocracy used to be a reward for years of service--and now it goes to Jonah Goldberg.

The problem is not so much, are they rich, but how do you get in?

I don't see a solution to this--short of the one that's already taking place: the level (if cratered) playing field of the Net. When you have access to everybody's opinions, why the hell should you choose those of Chris Matthews? He brings very little to the table-=not expertise, not experience, not style, not originality.

You don't have to identify with your income level if you've covered the police blotter for a while--actually look into the faces of people on the bottom.

Posted at June 16, 2006 9:25 PM in response to Class and the Press

It seems to me there should be a difference between an argument that arises out of religion, and an argument completely dependent upon religion. Also (or maybe alternately) there should be a difference between an argument from a religious position and an argument from religious authority.

Saying 'human life is sacred--and therefore abortion is wrong' is one kind of argument--and 'The Bible says witches should be killed' is another kind.

All philosophies have assumptions/tenets/axioms, and religions can be treated as philosophical systems--which is what makes ecumenical dialogue possible. (It also gives rise to the Coulterish 'liberalism is a religion too--and it's heresy!' fallacy.)

But religions aren't simply philosophies--and the appeal to authority is one of the big divergences.

You can say 'the divine purpose of human sex is procreation' and talk even with a Dawkinsite for whom it isn't--but who may agree with you--kind of. But arguing 'homosexuality is a sin--the Bible says so!' is not going to work.

'Jonah Goldberg is an idiot,' is, of course, self-evident.

Posted at June 15, 2006 12:12 PM in response to Fun With Political Philosophy

The problem with this is that people are talking about this boat as if it were the Titanic.

It's not. It's the Pequod.

And rearranging the deck chairs on the Pequod is, I think, an adequate description of planning a way out of the Iraq maelstrom without getting rid of that guy Ahab now.

Posted at February 27, 2006 7:31 AM in response to What is to be done about Iraq

One thing I think should also be emphasized is that, by allowing warrantless wiretaps to go on, we are in effect allowing anybody at the NSA to engage in surveillance on anybody at all for any purpose--like spying on a corporate official for insider financial information, celebrities for damaging gossip, or ex-spouses for revenge.

The reality of any system that allows a secret police is that it becomes rife with abuse from the top down. Even if you trust George Bush, do you trust every single member of the NSA surveillance team? And if you don't, what assurances or redress does anyone possibly have?

Are we to not only trust the President not to spy on, say, political opponents, but also that he will of course keep a phenomenally rigid hold on the surveillance process?

Even when he's on vacation?

Posted at February 7, 2006 9:58 AM in response to WHAT WE HEARD FROM THE ATTORNEY GENERAL