[glenstein]

>Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.

It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias".

I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts.

And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.

[quickthrowman]

I would characterize myself as left of center.

> 2004 election results,

GWB beat John Kerry in a fair election.

> efficacy of plastic recycling

Collecting plastic to recycle is almost certainly not worth the fuel and labor it takes, it gets landfilled more often than not. We’d be better off collecting only separated PET and HDPE and landfilling the rest.

> or dangers associated with nuclear power

Nuclear power is the safest method of power generation that uses steam or gas to spin a turbine.

[michaelmrose]

I think Nuclear power is an interesting case and can be usefully contrasted with say vaccine denial. The anti nuclear position is one that was certainly correct at someone point in time and retains many good arguments that require technical chops to untangle and requires one to come to many other technically challenging conclusions to come to the arguably correct position.

Vaccine denial requires one to ignore decades of fairly simple positions about which no expert credibly disagrees nor has in our lifetime.

It's like watching 2 packs of athletes some of which are failing to clear 1 meter hurdles whilst on the other side some are tripping on little nubs set in the floor.