Escape the echo chamber
<i>Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers. Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust. It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction</i><p>This makes it sound like Black undertook this &quot;reboot&quot; on his own, just by reading and listening.  That&#x27;s not how Black himself tells the story:<p><i>In 2010, I moved across the state and started college at this little liberal arts college in Florida, which was about three and a half hours from home</i><p>Okay, this was one step he did take on his own: he changed his environment.  But eventually he started talking to his fellow students.<p><i>And I would say, “This is what I believe about I.Q. differences, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years, here’s the journal that’s put this stuff together, I believe that this is true, that race predicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. differences in races.” And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and I’d say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold together and I’ll remove that from my ideological toolbox but everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn’t believe it anymore.</i><p>The whole thing (it&#x27;s a podcast transcript) is worth reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;the-daily-transcript-derek-black.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;the-daily-transc...</a>