Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…I’m Holly Richard. I’m an intern at the House of Representatives. Do you believe Facebook and Twitter, where people create their own newsfeed, has led to possibly confirmation bias, and has led to people choosing more extreme views of political ideologies such as socialism, nationalism, Marxism? Perhaps. Though I would also say that the traditional two-dimensional political spectrum is a strange and contrived thing, too. It’s the result of a very messy process of coalition building between parties. I mentioned reasons to be pessimistic earlier. A reason to be optimistic as a fan of democracy is that you are seeing voice given to quirkier ideologies that are no less intellectually coherent in the kind of Democratic versus Republican axis that we have in the United States. I believe in the notion of a filter bubble, where people surround themselves where they’re getting like information and not confronting themselves with unpleasant facts, necessarily. You saw that a lot during the 2012 election, where the polling was a lot more straightforward than it is this time around, and people still were cherry-picking data to tell themselves that Romney might win. You saw Democrats doing the reverse, by the way, in the 2014 midterms, more or less. But yeah, as someone who’s a critic of media, I think the way people consume media is important, and has probably fairly large effects on our politics. Last question.…

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