Steven Pinker

It could be two people in some of the examples we've discussed.

It could be the entire country.

And there has been a segregation into two separate pools of common knowledge.

Everyone blames social media, and that probably has something to do with it.

But I think it's also cable news, Fox News, prior to social media had that effect.

You weren't

watching Walter Cronkite at the same time as everyone else was watching Walter Cronkite or Johnny Carson, and residential segregation, when you had educated people flocking to cities, leaving behind the less educated, when you had a decline in organizations that brought people together across the socioeconomic divides, like

the army in the era of the draft, like churches, like service organizations, like the Lions Club, like bowling clubs.

You stopped rubbing shoulders with people from different social classes.

Each one then hung out with people like them, and then the common knowledge that they shared started to grow disjoint.

Different cultures within the same country.

Within the same country.

Yeah.

That makes me feel like it's exacerbated by what I'll call the vituperative disposition of leadership right now.

I don't know what that word means.

I'm sorry.

What does that word mean?

Vituperative?

Vituperative.

It's very SAT.