You’ll never win an argument if you and the other person can’t even agree that the sky is blue to begin with.
Polarization isn't just caused by 'fake news' or irrationality; it's a mathematical certainty when rational people have different starting assumptions. Even with perfect communication, two people can look at the same data and drift further apart.
Stable Polarisation despite Rational Communication: Recursive Social Learning with Diverse Priors
SSRN · 6440460
The presumption that increased connectivity fosters consensus-often idealised as the 'wisdom of crowds'-sits uneasily with persistent social polarisation. Many explanations attribute this pattern to irrationality such as cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, or algorithmic amplification. We show instead that persistent disagreement can arise even under fully rational communication. In a computational multi-agent model of recursive Bayesian learning, agents treat others' opinions as endogenously g