What do you call it? That thing where people get together, compare notes, and leave with everyone knowing more than when they arrived?
There are many low-odds high-damage risks, way too many to deal with them all individually.
There is at least one certain high-damage risk, that corruption will infect high-places and passivity infect low-places, and stupidity and paranoia will infect us all; that we will turn into squabbling children instead of mature adults, and resort to screaming instead of reasoning and learning from each other.
There is a big difference among risks, though: if we could solve the "reasoning together" problem, it would give us the necessary tools to prioritize and solve the other problems we face. Productive civil discourse and learning from dissenting voices can open our eyes.
We don't have that many more trillion dollars to spend defending ourselves from risks. We should select the few we plan to address wisely, not impulsively. I suggest that protecting civilized discourse and learning from each other should be in the short list.
Yet for all the emphasis on fundamentals, over time variously learning Latin and Greek, or music or Math and Science, we remain far from the ability to learn a thing or two from every person we disagree with.
We seem to not teach that it is easy, as a human, to be sure of things that turn out to be false, and to approach our certainty with a grain of salt, and at least civility towards those who come out on a different side of issues.
It should never be about "which side is right", but about what "we" can learn from "them", despite the "obvious fact" that "they" are "wrong" about so much. It's not a question of tolerating "them", it's a question of honestly accepting, despite all evidence, that maybe "they" might have some fact, some data point, some wisdom that we are totally blind to, and tolerating our differences while we work at while investigating what that actual news might be. And expecting the same from them.
"Put your heads together and come up with your best answer" should not be about one "side" dominating and trampling down the other until it "wins."
Learn how to learn at least one thing from each other! Not "I'm smart and you're either obviously evil or obviously stupid!"
"There is nothing I can learn from you" is not a statement about them-- it's a statement about a gap in your ability to "eat the meat and spit out the bones."
We don't seem to teach that in school. It doesn't seem to just flow from learning math and science or logic. It doesn't seem to have a recognized name we all agree on to refer to it. It's some kind of core value of civilization, a necessary factor in the totality of us having more wisdom than the brightest individual one of us.
