> Is this ADD-style, whoever yells the loudest, social and political system working well for anyone? How do we get past this?

As a guy with inattentive-subtype ADHD, I've long suspected there are fairly strong curb-cut benefits[1] to re-structuring organizations to work better for ADHDers. Might this be true of American political life? Initial suspicions:

1. Reduce the interface-complexity of government. Improve encapsulation. This may mean that government does _more_ in certain domains. I moved from the US to the UK in 2016 and the impact that a cross-cutting interface simplification like the NHS's "free at point of care" has just astounding. Income taxes over here are also much more clear, even if you are running a 1-person small business but especially if you are just an employee. I think is worth paying some higher monetary taxes if government can impose a lower tax on Working Memory.

For more on the idea of "Interface Complexity", see A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.

2. Improve baseline health outcomes with some more wholistic (yet still evidence-based) interventions. A broad swath of Americans are stressed and often sleep-deprived. This is not conducive to thoughtful decision-making. Or epistemically-sound interpretation of information.

3. Improve access to mental health care. A whole bunch of Americans are descended from people who...

A. were so excited by the prospect of extravagant wealth that they would abandon their community and kinship group to live and work among strangers.

B. belonged to physically (sometimes sexually) abusive households for multiple generations until 1865. And then they got married to people who grew up in abusive households. (some of my own family history)

C. escaped from abusive & traumatic situations and traveled across an ocean to a land of strangers.

D. were so willing to break with social norms (or join social-norm-breaking subcultures) that they would abandon most of their possessions and travel across an ocean to a land of strangers.

E. were so fearful about the prospect of a government, regional, or neighborhood conspiracy that they decided to move across an ocean -- before there was sufficient evidence for most people around them to try to flee!

Those who chose to come here weren't necessarily wrong. My wife's branch of their her broad family has a bias toward distrust and falls into group E. The rest were murdered by a massive German government conspiracy in the early 1940s. Some psychological variation is genetically heritable. Abuse gets passed down from parent to child (My maternal grandfather falls into group B and...yea...). Much of America's demographic history has acted as a giant filter some traumatized and scared people.

4. Reduce the social norms that promote catastrophizing. Currently, those who seek a return to specificity, clarity, or ask "is this reflected by the observable facts" in political discussions are often told they are pedantic, privileged, or tone-policing. We need a culturally-accepted way to return to a calm, measured way of thinking about policy -- not because policy is some intellectual game that doesn't matter. The stakes are genuinely life-or-death, because the stakes are life-or-death and that requires a calm mind with an eye seeking a clear understanding of a possibly-horrifying reality. It is good to be willing to say whatever will return to clarity and fact-focus with conviction and counter those who shame people for saying it.

5. Reduce the incentives to nuisance alarms in the news. Not sure how to do this.

6. Improve the number and quality of resources available for people of many professions to learn honest rhetoric and in particular to learn the how to clearly describe the "why" of their profession's policy recommendations. "Start with why" is the interpersonal version of well-regulated dopamine signals.

[1] https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-ma...