I would guess that having better tests of malevolence, or even just a better understanding of it, may help with this problem. Perhaps a takeaway is that we should not just raise awareness (which can backfire via “witch hunts”), but instead try to improve our scientific understanding and communicate that to the public, which hopefully makes it harder to falsely accuse people.
In general, I don’t know what can be done about people using any means necessary to smear political opponents. It seems that the way to address this is to have good norms favoring “clean” political discourse, and good processes to find out whether allegations are true; but it’s not clear what can be done to establish such norms.
Thanks for the comment!
I would guess that having better tests of malevolence, or even just a better understanding of it, may help with this problem. Perhaps a takeaway is that we should not just raise awareness (which can backfire via “witch hunts”), but instead try to improve our scientific understanding and communicate that to the public, which hopefully makes it harder to falsely accuse people.
In general, I don’t know what can be done about people using any means necessary to smear political opponents. It seems that the way to address this is to have good norms favoring “clean” political discourse, and good processes to find out whether allegations are true; but it’s not clear what can be done to establish such norms.