[criley2]

I didn't say that, but in order to prevent a "whatabout" or "false equivalence" attack, I will state up front: Conservatives are more likely to create, spread and fall for fake news than liberals.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

"Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates"

We can speculate as to why. In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is far more virulent on the right than left. Nearly every single left-leaning politician is pro-science and accepts the scientific consensus on a broad range of issues. Conversely, most conservative politicians are anti-science, reject scientific consensus on a broad array of subjects, and consistently parrot mythology in its place. In fact it has become extremely common for conservatives to dislike and distrust higher education, academia, and research all together. It is a common trope in conservative media to attack scientific research as "pointless" and "expensive" and to use religious leaders to discuss intellectual or scientific topics.

Any ideology which preaches anti-intellectualism and mythology over science, evidence, etc, is necessarily more vulnerable to being co-opted in other evidenceless subjects.

[mythrwy]

There is plenty of anti-science thinking in certain camps of the left as well.

Phone radiation, GMOs, nuclear power, dietary trends, mushrooms are conscious, the list of foo is pretty long if you look. Along with the anti-math, anti-logic, anti-historical evidence view of economics.

But I don't disagree there is a fair amount of right wing kookage spread about. Perhaps more than it's left wing counterpart.

For a long time I didn't really believe the "right wing" fake news thing was real. I'd never actually seen it. Then I visited my father in law who breathlessly informed us at dinner Obama was going to jail as they had proved his birth certificate was fake! Curious I looked at his facebook feed and almost fell over, it was almost all fake news right wing straight out of a parallel universe and really obviously nonsense for the most part. I don't know where he even found that stuff. So ya, it does happen. And I say that as a person who is very much not a leftist (nor a facebook user).

For whatever it's worth, I like to think of myself as a member of the "do what makes sense party". But we have few members and no groundswell and no formal organization it appears. Sadly.

[stephenr]

Being anti-nuclear doesn’t mean you’re anti-science, nor does questioning the value/cost/results of GMO foods.

[repolfx]

Indeed not, but I think maybe that's the point. There are lots of cases where you can disagree with the scientific consensus without being "anti-science", whatever that means.

Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science; they argue the risks are underestimated, the costs of waste are too high etc.

As for GMO foods, again, the scientific consensus is there are no health problems with them, which is why the anti-GMO argument tends to be of the form "but what if they're just so super long term problems that we haven't seen them yet" (a.k.a. the EU's precautionary principle on blocking GMO foods from competing with EU farmers).

Look at it the other way around - lots of climate change skeptics make deeply scientific arguments, typically pointing out errors or mistakes in papers, cases of previous predictions that turned out to be false and so on. That doesn't make them anti-science, it arguably makes them campaigners for better science.

[stephenr]

> Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion

What's the scientific analysis that says power plants have on average cost a metric fuck ton more to clean up than was ever expected or planned for, or that there is still no effective plan to get rid of the waste they produce?

See this is my point. I can admit that some scientists are no doubt pro-nuclear, and pro-GMO.

But you apparently can't admit that there are scientists who don't believe one or both of those things is net positive.

[repolfx]

Remember that fossil fuel burning power plants also generate a ton of waste and nobody has a realistic plan to clean that up either (beyond CO2 extraction or geo-engineering, neither of which are more plausible than nuclear waste containment).

It's easy to argue nuclear power sucks when compared to a theoretical ideal. When compared to forms of power that dump their problematic waste into the atmosphere where it's nearly impossible to get back, having the nasty stuff conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the continental shelf, doesn't seem like such a bad deal.

[stephenr]

> when compared to a theoretical ideal.

Renewable energy is not theoretical.

> nasty stuff conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the continental shelf

Your plan for highly radioactive waste is to put it in canisters and drop them into the ocean.. sure, what could possibly go wrong?

[repolfx]

I think you are being terribly naive, sorry. From the study you just linked to:

> Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics

Have you seen opinion polls of these two professions? They are overwhelmingly, and I mean more than 90% left-voting. Conservative academics have published a long list of stories about how they have been made unwelcome or pushed out. There are virtually no conservatives in academic or journalist circles these days.

So all your study shows is that if you ask a bunch of Democrats to make a list of "fake news" sites, they list out a lot of pro-Trump conservative outlets. What a shock. Anyone could have told you that - this isn't science and doesn't deserve a paper, it's just bog standard political mud-flinging posing as science.

This is the exact sort of behaviour that's driving a wedge between people: biased academics use the vague aura and automatic defence to science that they've inherited from prior generations to make absurd claims. Journalists who came straight from college and who retain an automatic deference to professors repeat whatever they say as "findings", conservatives who double check discover scientific fraud and call it out, then liberals go in for the double smear of claiming their opponents are anti-intellectual!

Speaking now as a foreigner watching from abroad, over the last few years I've watched as what looked like the entire American left descended down a crazy conspiracy theory of Trump being a Russian spy or collaborator. We now know that isn't true. How many millions or billions of Facebook posts must have been shared about the whole Mueller investigation, about the idea that Trump and Russia are connected in some way? And yet it's all false, it was a fiction invented by the media to get clicks and ratings. Stories collapsed left and right, even left-leaning journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi have since come out flaming the journalistic establishment because so many of the stories turned out to be false, and yet the left seem to collectively fall for it in a huge way.

So I am very skeptical about your thesis that there's a big difference in people's susceptibility to fake news, or how intellectual they are. You should be especially self reflective give you just cited a supposedly scientific study that makes extraordinary claims about voter intelligence yet is transparently nonsense - it's literally "we asked a bunch of Democrats to pick websites they disagree with, labelled them as fake news, and discovered Trump supporters share lots of fake news". You should learn from the conservatives and trust academia a bit less!