Asklemmy

43942 readers

492 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Have you noticed an increase in political fighting? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by Thespiralsong@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I travel a lot, and talk to a lot of different people. I've noticed that while people certainly do have differing opinions, it's not as extreme as what I see online. I'm starting to feel like all this hate and division is manufactured. Has anyone else noticed, that when you actually talk to real people things are far less divided than various media would have you believe?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] bloop@eepy.express 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

@Thespiralsong @asklemmy look up "normal distribution" for details but.
The normal distribution of any opinion will naturally show that the largest number are BETWEEN extremes. As in, in the middle. So for the majority of people and the majority of issues people will find that half of their concerns are addressed by one party and the other half by the other party.
The most extreme views are just yelled the loudest.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago

But echo chambers and polarization can increase the standard deviation, bringing down the opinions in the middle. Now may topics might even be a bimodal distribution rather than a normal distribution.