The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb

the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”... Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America... morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” ... that just doesn’t “get it,” ... not as intelligent as “us.”
But this holier-than-thou social media behavior is counterproductive, it’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse and if we want to consider online discourse productive, we need to move past this. What is emerging is the worst kind of echo chamber...
instead of genuine intellectual curiosity is the sharing of Slate or Onion or Fox News ... Sites that exist almost solely to produce content to be shared so friends can pat each other on the back and mock the Other Side....we prioritize by sharing stuff that will garner approval of our peers...
The solution... sacrifice your carefully curated social performance and be willing to work with people who are not like you... enter every issue with the very real possibility that we might be wrong this time.