Boiled down to their barest essence (we will unboil them in a moment), these parts are as follows. First, our communities expose us to disproportionate support for our own ideas. Second, they shield us from the disagreement of outsiders. Third, they cause us to disregard whatever outside disagreement we do encounter. Finally, they quash the development of disagreement from within. These factors create a kind of societal counterpart to cognition’s confirmation bias, and they provoke the same problem. Whatever the other virtues of our communities, they are dangerously effective at bolstering our
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