[gadders]

The New Yorker can't help itself, can it? Reasonably fair article, but then suddenly veers into:

"When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration."

And:

"(They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)"

The thing is with studies like this is it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections." Ironically this also lets them avoid any introspection as to whether they may lose because there are defects with their policy positions.

[noetic_techy]

Exactly. Many times following the facts can paint BOTH sides as wrong, and those who espouse "follow the facts" often only mean "follow the facts I want you to follow and discard the rest".

[Barrin92]

> it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections."

it's pretty backed up by evidence (and honestly attending a Trump ralley), that the average voter of Trump is less educated, much more prone to misinformation, and simply holds a ton of trivially wrong beliefs about the state of the world.

That's without making a value judgement about the voter or saying they shouldn't have their vote which they should of course because there's no requirement for voting in a democracy, but it seems silly to pretend that such a thing as an uninformed group of voters does not exist, or even cannot exist because it would be offensive in a way.

Autocrats and corrupt leaders have banked on them throughout all of history, and measured, intelligent and truthful discourse is not always found in the majority.If we're concerned with truth then "they keep losing elections" or might makes right style arguments hold no value, in fact they're quite dangerous.

[war1025]

> It's pretty backed up by evidence (and honestly attending a Trump ralley), that the average voter of Trump is less educated, much more prone to misinformation, and simply holds a ton of trivially wrong beliefs about the state of the world.

This is just as true of your "average" Democrat. The "average" person is woefully misinformed about most things. It's probably safe to say that nearly everyone, myself and the majority of the HN crowd included, is misinformed about many things that aren't critical to our day to day life.

[Barrin92]

It's not as true and there's actually been studies on the particular voter behaviour in 2016, and belief in 'fake news' (as in literally made up stuff) was a strong predictor of defection from the Democratic to the Republican ticket, and there's solid psychological evidence why this affects conservatives in particular[1]

It's also very trivial to see if you eyeball the size of the market for misinformation. While there are some highly partisan left-wing media in the US, and there were some facebook pages targetting say, Bernie voters it paled in the market for the Trump base, literally by a magnitude or so in revenue. Which I think is very obvious too if one looks at the size of the audiences of youtube channels attracting those audiences or people like Alex Jones.

NPR in 2016 actually did an interview with one such 'entrepreneur', who actually tried to sell fake news to virtually everyone, but had very little success with liberal audiences.[2]

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/why-fake...

[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

[war1025]

For one, the two articles you linked are from liberal media sources. Of course they are going to find fault with conservatives.

More importantly, just because conservatives are more likely to believe a certain form of fake news doesn't mean liberals are immune to being misled. All it means is that conservatives are motivated by different things than liberals, and will therefore latch on to a particular flavor of things that confirm their beliefs. Liberals love confirmation bias just as much as anyone.

Find any random person on the street and ask them to explain why they hold the views they do. You'll quickly find that opinions are based on emotion and backfilled later with plausible explanations.