A Science-based Solution to Political Polarization

Since the birth of world wide web and social media, more and more citizens around the world are joining the political discussions over the internet. Political scientists have found that many political discussions on the internet are not very productive, and political opinions in many countries have become more polarized than ever. It is interesting to note that debates in natural science and engineering generally tend to converge to desirable solutions. This paper investigates how to turn an unscientific political discussion into a scientific debate and use the scientific methodology to reduce the political polarization. We show that the standard view + evidences methodology of a good political debate is not really scientific. Applying recent advances in social physics, we will analyze main causes of unproductive political discussions, and propose a few simple rules for conducting scientific political discussions. We conclude that every aspect of the scientific approach to a political discussion should converge in the same way as physicists and engineers working together to solve a physical problem. Politics is important. Life is short. Spent more time to argue politics with strangers on the internet, but do it scientifically and productively