Rachel Lauren

People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.

Because while Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred.

Idea Labs can simultaneously respect a person and disrespect the person’s ideas. But Echo Chambers equate a person’s ideas with their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same.

People engaged in high-rung politics, without the burden of rigid attachment to any one ideology, can combine ideas from across the spectrum to form a nimble political superbrain that can respond in nuanced ways to changing times.

High-rung political thinkers will disagree about what’s morally right and wrong as vigorously as they disagree about what’s factually right and wrong. But whatever their conclusions, they apply their moral standards consistently—to themselves, to friends, to strangers, to foes.

But the Us vs. Them mindset distorts our morality, generating one set of standards for Us and another for Them.

When dangerous dissent does manage to enter the golem’s airwaves, it’s handled by the second line of defense: the social pressure of Echo Chamber culture.

A common practice is what we might call trend-anecdote swapping. It’s simple: If you come across an anecdote that supports the narrative, you frame it as evidence of a larger trend to make it seem representative of broader reality. Meanwhile, if there’s an actual trend happening that really is representative of broader reality—but it’s a trend that

McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position.