Ordinary Banana

establishing epistemic peerhood, aka sliding into people's cognitive DMs

thinking about this more - you have to signal "I'm a good person" or "I'm one of us" to have influence

and in order to do that you have to "choose a side" and hit maximum half the population

so weirdos like us can't hope to avoid backfire effect with most people, can only hope to influence a tiny %

iirc backfire doesn't happen for non-invested positions. If you can reframe issue as unfamiliar, could help

one problem is all of the social science research related to the effect is suspicious and probably wrong

it's sad that psych isn't better. and that's coming from an economist.