“EA tools don’t apply.” It’s hard to conduct Randomized Controlled Trials on “prevent fascism.” It’s hard to quantify tractability. It’s hard to build clean cost-effectiveness models on complex social dynamics.
Well, you can do RCT on individual-level phenomena (e.g., here’s work on interventions to reduce affective polarization and how, apparently, it doesn’t actually help much reduce opposition to democratic values: https://files.osf.io/v1/resources/7evmp/providers/osfstorage/60af42edf099fd008d8caacd?action=download&direct&version=1) and then model their efficacy using “complex social dynamics”, which of course exist within computational social sciences. While it’s not ideal, it’s certainly better than going by one’s gut or narrative interpretations of anecdotes, etc.
If this was my area of research, I would put money on adapting the psychological literature that was developed to understand Islamic radicalism a decade or so ago to now understand extreme-right radicalism, as they have actually very similar audiences.
Also, just to make sure you can connect this idea with the relevant psychological literature, “collective illusion” is typically referred to as “pluralistic ignorance”, the term Allport & Katz coined in the 1931.
Just to add 5 cents on:
Well, you can do RCT on individual-level phenomena (e.g., here’s work on interventions to reduce affective polarization and how, apparently, it doesn’t actually help much reduce opposition to democratic values: https://files.osf.io/v1/resources/7evmp/providers/osfstorage/60af42edf099fd008d8caacd?action=download&direct&version=1) and then model their efficacy using “complex social dynamics”, which of course exist within computational social sciences. While it’s not ideal, it’s certainly better than going by one’s gut or narrative interpretations of anecdotes, etc.
If this was my area of research, I would put money on adapting the psychological literature that was developed to understand Islamic radicalism a decade or so ago to now understand extreme-right radicalism, as they have actually very similar audiences.
Also, just to make sure you can connect this idea with the relevant psychological literature, “collective illusion” is typically referred to as “pluralistic ignorance”, the term Allport & Katz coined in the 1931.