Summary

An echo chamber is a space where all the voices sound like all the other voices. Do you live in a political echo chamber? Do all the voices you hear, family and friends, neighbors, co-workers, news media, etc., say (preach?) basically the same thing? Do most of your conversations end with head nodding agreement and wonderment--or worse--at how anyone could think anything substantially different?

If any of that is true, be aware that equally intelligent, equally good-hearted people, people who have also thought things through, just may have opinions 180 degrees apart from yours. With the same head nodding and wonderment in their opposite echo chambers.   

The solution is not to somehow drown out or belittle the other echo chambers, the different points of view. The solution is for everyone to open up to opinions that are all over the map. Change up your news sources, seek out those who will disagree with you. Challenge--at a core level--your own thinking. Always. The diversity that counts most in life is diversity of thought. And that type of diversity is getting negative mention, if any mention at all.

For the next 10 minutes, we will talk about what this means to us as individuals, and to the future of our republic.

Transcript

An echo chamber is a space where all the voices sound like all the other voices. Do you live in a political echo chamber? Do all the voices you hear, family and friends, neighbors, co-workers, news media, etc., say (preach?) basically the same thing? Do most of your conversations end with head nodding agreement and wonderment--or worse--at how anyone could think anything substantially different?

If any of that is true, be aware that equally intelligent, equally good-hearted people, people who have also thought things through, just may have opinions 180 degrees apart from yours. With the same head nodding and wonderment in their echo chambers.   

The solution is not to somehow drown out or belittle the other echo chambers, the different points of view. The solution is for everyone to open up to opinions that are all over the map. Change up your news sources, seek out those who will disagree with you. Challenge--at a core level--your own thinking. Always. The diversity that counts most in life is diversity of thought. And that type of diversity is getting negative mention, if any mention at all.

For the next 10 minutes, we will talk about what this means to us as individuals, and to the future of our republic.

The greatest chance of being in an echo chamber comes from living in one-party geographies.

Is it an accident that states like California and New York are predominantly progressive, and states like Texas and Oklahoma are not? Take a look at this electoral map. With four exceptions, all of the states in the contiguous 48 that voted one way or the other are in connected blocks. Of those four, Colorado and New Mexico share a border, and the other two, Minnesota and Illinois, very nearly connected.

Question: Did everyone of a like mind move to the same places, or is something else going on?

Answer: Something else. In the absence of differing opinions from a variety of sources, people will rely on the opinions of family and friends, co-workers and their favorite news sources and social media. Outside of family, all the sources will be selected more for comfort and absence of frustration than political reasoning, intellectual probity and diversity of thought. Not surprisingly, everyone will pretty much share the same opinions. Similar opinions from several sources reinforce each other and can easily be seen as a valid consensus. Caution: this is a false consensus, based on a clearly biased group of inputs.

Today’s Key Point: Living in an echo chamber is far more...