No, Ezra… Liberals and conservatives don't think alike
Asymmetric Stupidity
Paul Krugman, NYT, April 7, 2014, 5:05 pm
Ezra Klein’s new venture Vox is up, and so far, so OK — some fairly interesting pieces, and nothing like Nate Silver’s lamentable decision to make a professional concern troll his chief writer on climate. I am troubled by Ezra’s big inauguratory think piece, but that’s because I think the piece raises a genuine intellectual puzzle.
What Ezra does is cite research showing that people understand the world in ways that suit their tribal identities: in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread facts in a way that confirms their biases. And more information doesn’t help: people screen out or discount facts that don’t fit their worldview. Politics, as he says, makes us stupid.
But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans? I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.
(More here.)
Paul Krugman, NYT, April 7, 2014, 5:05 pm
Ezra Klein’s new venture Vox is up, and so far, so OK — some fairly interesting pieces, and nothing like Nate Silver’s lamentable decision to make a professional concern troll his chief writer on climate. I am troubled by Ezra’s big inauguratory think piece, but that’s because I think the piece raises a genuine intellectual puzzle.
What Ezra does is cite research showing that people understand the world in ways that suit their tribal identities: in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread facts in a way that confirms their biases. And more information doesn’t help: people screen out or discount facts that don’t fit their worldview. Politics, as he says, makes us stupid.
But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans? I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.
(More here.)
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