I have an hypothesis, but first I’ll write what i see.
I don’t live in the US (i live in Israel, which is a cultural mimic of the US in many ways, with some delay), so for what it’s worth, i have an outsider perspective. most of the media i consume and the online forums i participate in are in English, so in that sense i hear a lot of what’s going on there. I am aware it means i might have a biased view since normality is rarely reported, but with that it seems that the US is far more extreme in this ideology then Israel, including the epistemic conditions. So yes, i think what happens now in the US is something special, and you’re not being an alarmist.
My hypothesis is this:
instead of seeing a degradation of epistemic conditions we’ve seen a polarization. Whether or not the epistemic conditions of the far left are some new low, there are also much more rationalists/skeptics and people who have a strong sense of epistemic and epistemic arguments.
Maybe part of the explanation is that since this new ideology had to fight far better epistemic then other ideologies in the past, they simply had to throw epistemics out of the window.
The process is similar to a “backfire effect”. whenever they got objections that were of an epistemic nature, then to keep their beliefs intact they had to polarize against those epistemic intuitions. since this sort of opposition was strongest in this time, the backfire was strongest in this time.
On the other end of the spectrum, their degrading epistemic conditions might have pushed the other side’s developing of better epistemics (see the IDW’s focus on norms of conversation and reasoning for example).
Hopefully this side of epistemology wins at the end.
P.S I recall seeing some graph/article that showed that in campuses, these problem aren’t of an equal distribution around the US, but very much centered around certain geographic areas (which if i was living in the US i would surly remember, but you can probably even guess.)
I have an hypothesis, but first I’ll write what i see.
I don’t live in the US (i live in Israel, which is a cultural mimic of the US in many ways, with some delay), so for what it’s worth, i have an outsider perspective. most of the media i consume and the online forums i participate in are in English, so in that sense i hear a lot of what’s going on there. I am aware it means i might have a biased view since normality is rarely reported, but with that it seems that the US is far more extreme in this ideology then Israel, including the epistemic conditions. So yes, i think what happens now in the US is something special, and you’re not being an alarmist.
My hypothesis is this:
instead of seeing a degradation of epistemic conditions we’ve seen a polarization. Whether or not the epistemic conditions of the far left are some new low, there are also much more rationalists/skeptics and people who have a strong sense of epistemic and epistemic arguments.
Maybe part of the explanation is that since this new ideology had to fight far better epistemic then other ideologies in the past, they simply had to throw epistemics out of the window.
The process is similar to a “backfire effect”. whenever they got objections that were of an epistemic nature, then to keep their beliefs intact they had to polarize against those epistemic intuitions. since this sort of opposition was strongest in this time, the backfire was strongest in this time.
On the other end of the spectrum, their degrading epistemic conditions might have pushed the other side’s developing of better epistemics (see the IDW’s focus on norms of conversation and reasoning for example).
Hopefully this side of epistemology wins at the end.
P.S I recall seeing some graph/article that showed that in campuses, these problem aren’t of an equal distribution around the US, but very much centered around certain geographic areas (which if i was living in the US i would surly remember, but you can probably even guess.)