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Pitched battlegrounds and echo chambers are both harmful to pluralism because they tend to dampen openness to experience and collapse high-dimensional growth sociability into low-dimensional conflict/cooperate sociability.
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The more time you spend with someone *not* trying to defeat or kill each other, the more trust capital accumulates in the non-conflict zone of peaceful, pluralist co-existence. If it continues, the original conflict ground can sometimes be reduced to a rounding error.
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Don’t want to be polyannish here. Obviously some conflicts are deep-rooted and I don’t expect to see Arabs and Israelis spend 4x as much time bonding over falafel and knock-knock jokes as they do trying to kill each other, or that doing so would solve everything.
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A basic huge distortion in the possibility space here is large impersonal institutions, strong class boundaries and entrenched cultures of manners.
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They all make it harder to be open to, find, and invest in, deep+NEW common ground to increase the dimensionaloty of mutuality. This is btw a subtle point. Finding common ground is not enough. You must CREATE *new* common ground.
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In fact seeking existing common ground is a bad idea because it rapidly degenerates to diminishing returns zero-sum matching-pennies games. “Oh you like green curry more than red curry, so do I!”
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A particularly tedious kind of common-grounding game is trying to find common acquaintances and then discussing them. “Do you know X?” “No, do you know Y?” “No, do you know Z?” “Yes!” Cue dull discussion of Z whom neither know very well or care for.
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Tldr: don’t debate, don’t seek common ground. Just try to keep the game going as long as possible exploring common NEW ground.
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Btw, do not fall for aspirational mutual growth trap where you try to find lofty new common ground together (“let’s go to classical music concerts together”, “let’s learn Python together”). Random low-brow shit works FAR better. Taco hunting this weekend, B-movie next weekend.
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In discworld Pratchett has the notion of “dungeon dimensions” where dark forces and creatures lurk. A parody of Cthulhu type mythology. Human sociability rests atop a much more positive sort of dungeon dimension space. You just have to dig to unleash goodwill monsters.
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