Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "There Is No Extremism Problem on the Internet" video.

  1. "Extremism" is promulgated because it activates primal survival mechanisms. Popular wisdom has it that extremes are dangerous. And it's true. Extremes are unstable and uncharacteristic, and such features signal danger. The problem is, the middle has less value when the extremes aren't available to inform it. You don't know you're balanced until you can see both extremes about the same distance away from you. The degree of intelligence required to understand this is what I'd like to know: should I expect people of "average" intelligence to have this understanding already in their toolkit? What kind of knowledge is this? Without extremes, there can be no dynamic...could there even be life? I don't see extremity properly respected these days; it's more like it's seen as something to eliminate. If you manage to eliminate polarity, you'll have made movement a "non-starter"...
    1