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Idea Lab culture is built around the core notion that people and ideas are separate things. People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.
Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred.
Echo Chambers are places where you must watch what you say.
It’s the great catch-22 of our species: the biggest threat to humanity is low-rung humanity, and low-rung humanity persists because it has often been the best defense against this very threat.
People engaged in high-rung politics, without the burden of rigid attachment to any one ideology, can combine ideas from across the spectrum to form a nimble political superbrain that can respond in nuanced ways to changing times.
Low-rung morality distorts our capacity for empathy.
Golems play by Power Games rules—everyone can do what they want, if they have the power to do so.
When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is.
Extreme factions are like repellent magnets, and the more prominent they become, the more each party becomes defined as the place for people who hate the other party’s extreme faction.
Neutrality doesn’t mean portraying both political sides as equally good or equally right. It means portraying them as they are.
Presenting an inaccurate version of reality breeds misplaced anger and division and hurts our ability to move toward important goals—all
The reason I call disgust the scariest of all human emotions is that it’s a trigger for dehumanization, and dehumanization is the doorway to the worst things humans do.
Disgust fills our mind with a special kind of primitive fog—one that turns ordinary humans into psychopaths who can commit or condone unthinkable harm without remorse.
Moderation is not a full-blown philosophy proclaiming the answers to all our problems. It is, rather, a point of view, a plea for political sophistication, for a certain skepticism to total solutions. … In contrast, the extremist rejects the complexity of the moderate’s world. His is a state of mind that insists on dividing reality into two antithetical halves. The gray is resolved into black and white. Men are either good or evil. Policies are either Communist or anti-Communist.
