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by rangoon626 1994 days ago
Just wanna add that the left seems to believe what institutions and the legacy media tell them, at face value.

Many on the right use critical thinking, however they seem to believe that numbers and “science” can be spun into any narrative the gatekeepers want (whoever they may be).

Most of the schism really seems to be based on trust. Left trusts by default, the right does not. The left trusts that the government knows best, the right does not. The right believes in personal responsibility for running your life (not trusting it to any other party), the left does not, requiring collectivism and social programs.

3 comments

Yes, the left trusts “science”, broadly. That’s because when we see 99% of scientists in a field claiming something, we don’t pretend we know better than them. We respect science, we understand on some level the work that goes into good science, and so we aren’t arrogant arses.
> we understand on some level the work that goes into good science

Meanwhile people who are informed on the state of actual science say "50% of published research is false."

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

I mean, as the paper says:

> Second, most research questions are addressed by many teams, and it is misleading to emphasize the statistically significant findings of any single team. What matters is the totality of the evidence.

I think few people would refute this.

> What matters is the totality of the evidence.

If half of the evidence contradicts the other half would it be fair to conclude that we don’t know much about the things we have researched?

93% of surveyed geneticists and behavioral psychologists claim that the black-white IQ gap has a non-zero genetic component. Do you know better than them?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.0039...

I'm inclined to believe them, but not rule out the possibility it was their bias speaking. Historically doctors have believed a white woman's pelvis is better for child bearing, whereas a black woman's is better for hard labor. That has since been proven wrong. There is no discernable difference between the races in the pelvic area.

Regardless, the argument against discrimination is that one has no CHOICE what race they are born with. Because there is no choice, race does not reflect their invididual merits or lack thereof, and one should not be awarded or punished based on that factor alone. There is also significant variation within a race with regard to IQ or otherwise, that exceeds the difference of the mean value between races

> Many on the right use critical thinking [...] Left trusts by default, the right does not.

LOL. Only 4 percent of the nonreligious people who participated in the 2017 Baylor Religion Survey voted for Trump. 4 fucking percent.

https://www.baylor.edu/baylorreligionsurvey/index.php?id=942...

And what percentage of religious people voted for HRC?
From my experience, the right is terrible at judging who to trust (i mean most people are really). They mistrust the government for instance, and rightly so, for you should have a healthy distrust of the government. However, they then go and trust absolute quacks like anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Trump, etc. ???

I've seen some of the links shared in right wing forums (I used to frequent one a few years ago), and the sources they link scream "bullshit" to me, and not because I disagree with what they say. It's just that life experience of identifying what is BS and what is not necessarily BS. Some people just will not believe authority, but will believe the first thing they see that goes against mainstream.

Maybe unrelated, but there's actually largely even distribution of anti-vaxxers between left and right. It's not an issue split by political affiliation. You could say the same about conspiracy theorists, but it'd probably be more difficult to poll/test.
> trust absolute quacks like anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Trump, etc. ???

PR agencies send their love