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by ern_ave 68 days ago
Great! So, let's start with your first study. Note this quote:

> it is possible that conservatives’ relatively low accuracy about political information is a by-product of the fact that issues used in forming this assessment were selected with an eye toward detecting misperceptions among the political group

That's definitely a way to bias a study against conservatives. It's good that this study claims it avoided that bias. But did it? They don't list the questions that participants were asked. I checked the list of supporting documents, and couldn't find it.

Without that list, I can't accept this source. Sorry.

If I went out and asked a bunch of Liberals, "did Trump say that Neo-Nazis are 'very fine people?'" I suspect that upwards of 90% of Liberals would answer "yes" ...and they would swear they heard him do it! You may (falsely) believe this yourself!

I could ask, "did Trump advise people to drink bleach?" and many Liberals would swear he did.

He didn't do either of those things. But many Liberals emphatically believe he did. I could very easily design a study that included only these sorts of questions - questions that Liberals will get wrong.

The only way to spot this bias would be if I included the questions in the study, so that you could vet them yourself. Without such a list, it is completely reasonable for me to reject your source.

Should I continue to the next one, or are they all like this?

2 comments

So you don't have an argument, you just reject sources that you either can't understand or don't like. Which is just proving the parents point.
> you just reject sources that you either can't understand or don't like

That's a lie. I rejected the source for a valid reason. You could try addressing my rebuttal.

If you don't want to accept sources you disagree with.

Then isn't that part of the problem?

The onus is on you, to tell me what would be acceptable sources for you.

You didn't really debunk any of these sources, just supplied some random sampling of your own creation. Interestingly, I have gone back and watched the full video of both of those quotes. He did say all of those things, but 'in-joking'. That is a common tactic. Everything he says can be re-cast as 'he was only joking'. The trick is, the right can always shift what was a 'joke' or 'not-joke', depending on the argument. Was it serious, or not serious? It really depends on shifting views, and the interpretation can change day to day.

I tend to agree liberals really piled on those examples too much, there were really so many better examples.