[dabbledash]

I guess it depends

Is climate change driven by human activity? Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism? Does rent control make housing more available?

The major political tribes are full of BS, because politics mostly isn't driven by disagreements about facts but by conflicting material interests. Partisans believe whats convenient.

[oblio]

> Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism?

I won't argue about the other two, BUT.

We have facts for contact sports and for speed and strength sports, we've had these facts for millenia.

For the vaccine one, we also have facts. You're more likely to win the lottery than to get autism from them. I think they're probably the same odds as dying from a potted plant falling on your head while walking but anti vaxxers don't seem to be wearing helmets everywhere, that's so weird...

[paulddraper]

> You're more likely to win the lottery than to get autism from them.

Citation?

[mewpmewp2]

I am not saying vaccines cause autism or anything, but where are you pulling your odds out from?

[dabbledash]

I don't think any of these are ambiguous. My point is that sometimes right wingers take the nonsense position and sometimes left wingers take the nonsense position. Neither side reliably follows the evidence or "believes the science" so glib lines like "reality has a liberal bias" are shallow and silly.

[tsimionescu]

The point of the phrase "reality has a liberal bias" is not "liberals never take a nonsense position", it's "more of the facts that liberals [just as tribalistically] believe in happen to also be true, when compared to conservatives".

That something like this might happen is not surprising. If you have two political groups and you assign both beliefs from a bag in a purely random process, odds are that one of the groups will end up with more true beliefs than the other, through no virtue of their own but through pure chance.

[seadan83]

How do you distinguish partisans from actual knowledge? The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same seems to have killed public discourse IMO. It is easy to label everyone as partisans.

To your questions, the best explanations for climate change are human causes (and with very considerable evidence).

Women have higher pain tolerances and greater natural buoyancy, they are greatly advantaged at long distance cold water swimming. Many other sports require physical size and/or strength - so it does depend. Vaccines have no evidence of _causing_ autism, and the big paper that made that claim was retracted. I don't know about rent control and do not know what data exists.

Yeah, the answer of, yes, and here is all the evidence just doesn't seem to fly. I feel that trolling and trolls, and science illiteracy just have simply won the day.

[immibis]

> The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same

FWIW, it's called the Firehose of Falsehood and the Soviets invented it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood