[cousin_it]

I think many people don't really accept that there can be evidence on both sides of an issue. Once there's a critical mass of evidence on one side, each subsequent piece of evidence on the other side is kinda suspect and can be defeated by simple majority. It's a wrong way to think, but I'm sure my thinking on many issues is also like that.

[joe_the_user]

I think don't there's automatically evidence on "both sides" of a issue. I don't issues actually tend to have just two sides. For a given issue or situation, there can be one, two, five or ten plausible models.

The worst thing about having roughly two very polarized ideologies constantly visible in society is that the slightly more clever people wind-up expecting that "the truth is somewhere in the middle". In a given case, there's no reason to think that.

[noxer]

Its not just with evidence its more broadly that many people think the majority has to be right. Which gets worse when the majority actually assumes that. Its then enough to just assume that a majority opinion exists to actually create one. That leads to the "first" or the "loudest" opinion to become the majority opinion without even consider any evidences. You realize that the majority is often wrong every time you really really know stuff about something.