Announcement

Collapse

Civics 101 Guidelines

Want to argue about politics? Healthcare reform? Taxes? Governments? You've come to the right place!

Try to keep it civil though. The rules still apply here.
See more
See less

The State Of American ‘Fact-Checking’ Is Completely Useless

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • The State Of American ‘Fact-Checking’ Is Completely Useless

    The State Of American ‘Fact-Checking’ Is Completely Useless



    If media wants to challenge the context and politics of Republican arguments, that’s their prerogative. There are plenty of legitimately misleading statement’s worthy of fact-checkers’ attention. Yet, with a veneer of impartiality, fact-checkers often engage in a uniquely dishonest style of partisanship. And State of Union coverage gave us an abundance of examples of how they do it:

    Hyper-precision fact-checking that creates the impression that a Republican is misleading the public: For this, take Politico’s insinuation that Donald Trump was lying to the public about abuse of women at the border. During the State of the Union, Trump claimed “one in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.” This contention is only “partly true,” according to Politico, because a “2017 report by Doctors Without Borders” found that only 31 percent of female migrants and 17 percent of male migrants said they had been actually abused while traveling through Mexico.

    Whether Doctors Without Borders’ scary statistic is accurate or not, is one thing. Trump, however, was being called out for asserting that “one in every three” illegal immigrants has been abused attempting to cross the border rather than “33.333 percent of women”––probably a rounding error in the poll. It is almost surely the case that every past president and every politician has used “one-third” or “one-half” rather than a specific fraction, and walked away without being fact-checked.

    Fact-checking subjective political assertions: The New York Times provided a masterclass in bad faith fact-checking by taking political contentions offered by the president and subjecting them to a supposed impartial test of accuracy. In his speech, Trump called the illegal border crossing “an urgent national crisis.” The New York Times says “this is false.” Why? Because illegal border crossing have been declining for two decades, they say. Customs and Border Protection agents, they go on to explain, had arrested around 50,000 people trying to illegally cross the southwestern border each of the last three months, which was only half of the arrests they had made in comparable months in the mid-2000s.

    Even if those numbers correct, there is no way to factcheck urgency. After all, a lessening crisis doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a pressing one. We’ve seen a steep decline in gun violence over the past 30 years. Would The New York Times ever “fact-check” a Democrat who argued that gun violence was an “urgent crisis” of public safety? Of course not. But this fluctuating standard allows journalists to “fact-check” any subjective political contention they desire.

    If I claim that socialism is the greatest threat to American freedom and prosperity, I may well be right. I may have a lots of historical and economic evidence to back up my assertion. You can argue that I’m wrong. You can lay out statistics that attempt to prove me wrong. You can call me crazy. But you can’t produce an unbiased “fact-check” to establishing that my opinion is conclusively false. You’re just writing an op-ed piece.

    Partisan talking point masquerading as a fact check: “FACT CHECK: President Trump praised the record number of women in Congress, but that’s almost entirely because of Democrats, not Trump’s party,” NPR tweeted, correcting the record on a statement that president never made.

    Here’s what Trump said:

    “And exactly one century after Congress passed the Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in Congress than at any time before. That’s great. Very great. And congratulations. That’s great.”

    Trump was offering his rundown on the state of the union, not the Republican Party. It’s true that presidents take credit for all the good things that happen under their watch. Trump is no exception. In this rare case, however, Trump didn’t even take credit for electing the female politicians. In fact, he congratulated them after they broke out into cheers over his comment. Some people have argued that the NPR’s piece was providing context to the president’s comment. Perhaps. Still, their nitpicking created the impression that somehow Trump had misled the public. He did not.

    Fact-checking meant to obscure actual facts: The Washington Post’s fact-checking page offered a number of egregious examples of outright misinformation. In one of them, reporter Meg Kelly claimed that, “Abortion legislation in New York wouldn’t do what Trump said.” There are a number of words in her post intimating that Trump lied about the New York and Virginia late-term abortion bills, but none of her words debunk Trump’s core contention. Ramesh Ponnuru has a good rundown here.

    Here’s what Trump said:

    “Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful, babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world. And then, we had the case of the governor of Virginia where he stated he would execute a baby after birth.”

    As I’ve noted before, the biggest clue that you’re about to read a deceptive fact check on the abortion issue is an author mentioning that “only” few abortions of viable babies take place. “Indeed,” Kelly writes, “only 1.3 percent of abortions — or about 8,500 a year — take place at or after 21 weeks, according to 2014 data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Guttmacher Institute.” This number, as Ponnuru points out, is almost surely low. Whatever the case, Trump never claimed “most” abortions were post-20 weeks. Whether 8,500 or 15,000, thousands of viable babies are being aborted. No fact-checker would ever point out that only .0001 percent of legal gun owners commit crimes when talking about more firearm restrictions (and, yes, that’s an approximation).

    And yes, the president bit of rhetorical flourish to say that babies can be “ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth” because, actually, they can be poisoned or dismembered in the mother’s womb moments before birth. Both the Virginia bill, which was tabled, and the New York law allow, just as Trump says (in his blunt language), for the termination of infants who survive the abortion procedure. Absolutely nothing in The Post’s “fact check” debunks the president’s contention that in New York, and elsewhere, abortion on demand until crowning (and after) is now legal as long as the woman and a doctor decide that the baby is stressful in some way to the mother. How often it happens is up for debate. What the bill says is inarguable.

    Update: Factchecking a truthful statement by demanding that Trump highlight information that has absolutely nothing to do with his contention. As an astute reader points out this PBS fact-check of a Trump tweet from a couple of weeks ago. I’ve noticed this genre, as well. In it the president points out that a reputable Marist/NPR/PBS Poll had shown that his approval rating among Latinos had risen to 50 percent, an increase of 19 percent over a year’s time. After confirming that, yes, Trump had been precise in his assertion regarding their poll, PBS spends around 700 words taking Trump to task for failing to highlight other negative information in the poll. Will this be a new standard for all politicians?

    The state of American fact-checking is dreadfully misleading. There’s no reason for conservatives to give its authors the deference they seek.
    The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

  • #2
    Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
    The State Of American ‘Fact-Checking’ Is Completely Useless



    If media wants to challenge the context and politics of Republican arguments, that’s their prerogative. There are plenty of legitimately misleading statement’s worthy of fact-checkers’ attention. Yet, with a veneer of impartiality, fact-checkers often engage in a uniquely dishonest style of partisanship. And State of Union coverage gave us an abundance of examples of how they do it:

    Hyper-precision fact-checking that creates the impression that a Republican is misleading the public: For this, take Politico’s insinuation that Donald Trump was lying to the public about abuse of women at the border. During the State of the Union, Trump claimed “one in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.” This contention is only “partly true,” according to Politico, because a “2017 report by Doctors Without Borders” found that only 31 percent of female migrants and 17 percent of male migrants said they had been actually abused while traveling through Mexico.

    Whether Doctors Without Borders’ scary statistic is accurate or not, is one thing. Trump, however, was being called out for asserting that “one in every three” illegal immigrants has been abused attempting to cross the border rather than “33.333 percent of women”––probably a rounding error in the poll. It is almost surely the case that every past president and every politician has used “one-third” or “one-half” rather than a specific fraction, and walked away without being fact-checked.

    Fact-checking subjective political assertions: The New York Times provided a masterclass in bad faith fact-checking by taking political contentions offered by the president and subjecting them to a supposed impartial test of accuracy. In his speech, Trump called the illegal border crossing “an urgent national crisis.” The New York Times says “this is false.” Why? Because illegal border crossing have been declining for two decades, they say. Customs and Border Protection agents, they go on to explain, had arrested around 50,000 people trying to illegally cross the southwestern border each of the last three months, which was only half of the arrests they had made in comparable months in the mid-2000s.

    Even if those numbers correct, there is no way to factcheck urgency. After all, a lessening crisis doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a pressing one. We’ve seen a steep decline in gun violence over the past 30 years. Would The New York Times ever “fact-check” a Democrat who argued that gun violence was an “urgent crisis” of public safety? Of course not. But this fluctuating standard allows journalists to “fact-check” any subjective political contention they desire.

    If I claim that socialism is the greatest threat to American freedom and prosperity, I may well be right. I may have a lots of historical and economic evidence to back up my assertion. You can argue that I’m wrong. You can lay out statistics that attempt to prove me wrong. You can call me crazy. But you can’t produce an unbiased “fact-check” to establishing that my opinion is conclusively false. You’re just writing an op-ed piece.

    Partisan talking point masquerading as a fact check: “FACT CHECK: President Trump praised the record number of women in Congress, but that’s almost entirely because of Democrats, not Trump’s party,” NPR tweeted, correcting the record on a statement that president never made.

    Here’s what Trump said:

    “And exactly one century after Congress passed the Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in Congress than at any time before. That’s great. Very great. And congratulations. That’s great.”

    Trump was offering his rundown on the state of the union, not the Republican Party. It’s true that presidents take credit for all the good things that happen under their watch. Trump is no exception. In this rare case, however, Trump didn’t even take credit for electing the female politicians. In fact, he congratulated them after they broke out into cheers over his comment. Some people have argued that the NPR’s piece was providing context to the president’s comment. Perhaps. Still, their nitpicking created the impression that somehow Trump had misled the public. He did not.

    Fact-checking meant to obscure actual facts: The Washington Post’s fact-checking page offered a number of egregious examples of outright misinformation. In one of them, reporter Meg Kelly claimed that, “Abortion legislation in New York wouldn’t do what Trump said.” There are a number of words in her post intimating that Trump lied about the New York and Virginia late-term abortion bills, but none of her words debunk Trump’s core contention. Ramesh Ponnuru has a good rundown here.

    Here’s what Trump said:

    “Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful, babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world. And then, we had the case of the governor of Virginia where he stated he would execute a baby after birth.”

    As I’ve noted before, the biggest clue that you’re about to read a deceptive fact check on the abortion issue is an author mentioning that “only” few abortions of viable babies take place. “Indeed,” Kelly writes, “only 1.3 percent of abortions — or about 8,500 a year — take place at or after 21 weeks, according to 2014 data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Guttmacher Institute.” This number, as Ponnuru points out, is almost surely low. Whatever the case, Trump never claimed “most” abortions were post-20 weeks. Whether 8,500 or 15,000, thousands of viable babies are being aborted. No fact-checker would ever point out that only .0001 percent of legal gun owners commit crimes when talking about more firearm restrictions (and, yes, that’s an approximation).

    And yes, the president bit of rhetorical flourish to say that babies can be “ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth” because, actually, they can be poisoned or dismembered in the mother’s womb moments before birth. Both the Virginia bill, which was tabled, and the New York law allow, just as Trump says (in his blunt language), for the termination of infants who survive the abortion procedure. Absolutely nothing in The Post’s “fact check” debunks the president’s contention that in New York, and elsewhere, abortion on demand until crowning (and after) is now legal as long as the woman and a doctor decide that the baby is stressful in some way to the mother. How often it happens is up for debate. What the bill says is inarguable.

    Update: Factchecking a truthful statement by demanding that Trump highlight information that has absolutely nothing to do with his contention. As an astute reader points out this PBS fact-check of a Trump tweet from a couple of weeks ago. I’ve noticed this genre, as well. In it the president points out that a reputable Marist/NPR/PBS Poll had shown that his approval rating among Latinos had risen to 50 percent, an increase of 19 percent over a year’s time. After confirming that, yes, Trump had been precise in his assertion regarding their poll, PBS spends around 700 words taking Trump to task for failing to highlight other negative information in the poll. Will this be a new standard for all politicians?

    The state of American fact-checking is dreadfully misleading. There’s no reason for conservatives to give its authors the deference they seek.
    I have mixed feelings. Yes - I think a lot of fact-checking has become hyper-detailed and nitpicky. When I look at pages like this one I find that they mix actual outright lies with nitpicking with "disagreements." As a consequence, they have become useless to me to post as "look at these" because the "Trump defenders" will jump on the disagreements and nitpicks and use it as an excuse to dismiss the entire list. And I don't have the time/inclination to sort out the actual lies from the nitpicks. So...

    - 31% versus 1/3 - I agree it's a ridiculous nitpick.
    - socialism is the greatest threat - I generally agree - it's an example of Trump hyperbole and an unprovable/unrefutable statement
    - killing live babies - it disagree - it's an outright lie (or at least amazingly negative assumptions) that seems to be a main theme of many on the right at this time.
    - more women serving in Congress - a marvelous example of implied credit-taking. He would have been more honest to say, "and the Democrats have put more women in Congress."
    - 58,000 non citizens voting in Texas - a lie he is repeating from the right-leaning media
    - There's never been so many border apprehensions in our history - a lie, as determined by data from the CBP itself.
    - At the request of democrats, it will be a steel barrier instead of a wall - a lie, no such request was ever made.
    - We had the exact same (family separation) policy as the Obama administration - a lie (widely pushed by many on the right) - Neither Obama nor Bush ever had such a policy.
    - Democrats oppose any effort to secure our border - a lie (widely pushed by many on the right) - they oppose his wall; they are for border security in pretty much all other forms

    I could go on - but you get the idea. Trump's lies and hyperbole are a function of who he is - he has done both as long as he has been in the public eye. I find him to be a consumately dishonest man - far more dishonest than any politician I can remember in my lifetime.
    The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

    I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

    Comment


    • #3
      Fact checking has become relatively pointless in modern America because for the most part only liberals are interested in truth. For much of the conservative audience it is irrelevant whether a statement is truthful or not, so fact-checking it isn't something that appeals to them. As Stephen Colbert famously noted, they prefer "truthiness" (what feels right to them in their gut) to fact-checked truth.

      Studies I've seen of conservative and liberal groups on facebook found that a false news post into a liberal group would average about 4 comments before someone fact-checked it and pointed out to others it was false, while false news posts on conservative groups were typically never fact-checked by the commenter in the group if it aligned with their ideology because fact-checking just isn't something US conservatives are typically interested in doing or place value on.

      Alternatively you can see their disinterest in truth in the fact that they've chosen to nominate, then elect, then support and approve of, a man who tells multiple lies per day, at a rate unparalleled by another other political figure in any country in modern history. If they had any particular concern about factually false statements/claims being an issue they obviously wouldn't have done that. So telling people who obviously aren't interested in truth or falsehood that Trump's statements are factually false, isn't going to get you very far.
      Last edited by Starlight; 02-06-2019, 05:50 PM.
      "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
      "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
      "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        Fact checking has become relatively pointless in modern America because for the most part only liberals are interested in truth. For much of the conservative audience it is irrelevant whether a statement is truthful or not, so fact-checking it isn't something that appeals to them. As Stephen Colbert famously noted, they prefer "truthiness" (what feels right to them in their gut) to fact-checked truth.

        Studies I've seen of conservative and liberal groups on facebook found that a false news post into a liberal group would average about 4 comments before someone fact-checked it and pointed out to others it was false, while false news posts on conservative groups were typically never fact-checked by the commenter in the group if it aligned with their ideology because fact-checking just isn't something US conservatives are typically interested in doing or place value on.

        Alternatively you can see their disinterest in truth in the fact that they've chosen to nominate, then elect, then support and approve of, a man who tells multiple lies per day, at a rate unparalleled by another other political figure in any country in modern history. If they had any particular concern about factually false statements/claims being an issue they obviously wouldn't have done that. So telling people who obviously aren't interested in truth or falsehood that Trump's statements are factually false, isn't going to get you very far.
        I was going to call you on the emphasized part as an overstatement - but I did a bit of digging and what you are saying aligns with a lot of what I am finding in terms of studies. But there was one comment in one article that caught my eye. It noted that liberals tend to be less religious, generally, than conservatives. As a consequence, they lean more heavily on science and the scientific method. Conservatives have a greater dependence on "revealed truths." So if science calls a long-held religious belief into question, the liberal will tend to discard the religious explanation for the scientific one. Conservatives will tend to discard the scientific explanation for the religious one. After all - can god be wrong?

        I suspect that is a significant over-simplification - and I'm sure there are a lot of nuances from person to person. But I also suspect, as you move further out on the spectrum - it becomes more and more of a characteristic. It provides a possible explanation for many positions held by evangelicals, and certainly provides an explanation for the affinity of so many for Trump.
        The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

        I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
          I was going to call you on the emphasized part as an overstatement - but I did a bit of digging and what you are saying aligns with a lot of what I am finding in terms of studies.
          Exaggeration is my favorite rhetorical device, but I do try to base my statements in fact (I am a liberal, after all )

          It noted that liberals tend to be less religious, generally, than conservatives.
          There's a lot of things that correlate. One of the major correlations is a core personality trait called "Openness to [new] experience". On one extreme of this trait lies the autistic person who curls up in a ball rocking back and forth muttering "too much change" if anything at all in their life changes, and on the other extreme are thrill-seekers who travel constantly from countries to country to experience new things. But on the more normal/central parts of the openness-to-experience spectrum lie the people who are psychologically less well equipped to cope with and desire change and tend to on the whole fear and avoid change and prefer that things generally remain the same or don't change too much too fast, whom we call "conservatives", and the people who are psychologically fine with or enjoy a quite a bit of change and enjoy new experiences and new challenges in their lives, whom we call "liberals".

          This personality trait of openness to change/new experiences, correlates with a large number of things including intellect, education level, food preferences, and religious views.

          As a consequence, they lean more heavily on science and the scientific method.
          As an aside, something I have very much learned from doing science is that people's assumptions and guesses about how the world "should" work are often, or even usually, not accurate. If I had a nickel for every time someone in my scientific research group has said "I predict the outcome will be A" another said "I predict B" another "I predict C" and the outcome was Z and we say afterwards "hmmm, we hadn't even thought of that as an option", I would be a rich man. What I have learned time after time is that people on the whole are not actually all that great at predicting/guessing truth, and so instead we have to empirically study the world to find out what is true and what isn't. That is one reason I have so much contempt for philosophies like libertarianism who say effectively "I have this great idea for what I predict will be a wonderful society based on my really simplistic understanding of economics, and though I admit that pretty much no society in world history has ever used this system, I just know it's going to be great!" Similar it's why I fact-check basically everything I see and read.

          Conservatives have a greater dependence on "revealed truths." So if science calls a long-held religious belief into question, the liberal will tend to discard the religious explanation for the scientific one. Conservatives will tend to discard the scientific explanation for the religious one. After all - can god be wrong?
          This is true, but I think irrelevant. Nowhere in the bible does it say "thou shalt vote for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 American election", yet white evangelical voters turned out in record numbers for Trump and 81% of them that voted, voted for him. Similarly, "thou shalt hate Democrats", "Lock Her Up!", "nobody should be allowed to have an abortion" aren't in the bible, yet it seems an overwhelming percentage of white evangelicals support those views. So I don't think you can appeal to their tendency to believe "revealed truths" as an explanation for why they believe things that aren't revealed truths.
          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Starlight View Post
            Exaggeration is my favorite rhetorical device
            What an understatement!
            The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
              What an understatement!
              I mean it kind of goes without saying that I'm not half as bad at saying "All conservatives are X" as a lot of conservatives on this forum are when it comes to them saying "All socialists/liberals/leftists/libtards are X", but I do enjoy feeding back some of their hyperbole to them occasionally with them as the target. It's amusing to see how much their throw their toys out of the cot when someone does once to them what they daily do to others.
              "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
              "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
              "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                Fact checking has become relatively pointless in modern America because for the most part only liberals are interested in truth. For much of the conservative audience it is irrelevant whether a statement is truthful or not, so fact-checking it isn't something that appeals to them. As Stephen Colbert famously noted, they prefer "truthiness" (what feels right to them in their gut) to fact-checked truth.
                It’s amusing how you claim liberals care about facts while quoting Stephen Colbert, the same one caught editing interviews of his opponents or lying about his interview intentions. So much for caring about truth.

                Studies I've seen of conservative and liberal groups on facebook found that a false news post into a liberal group would average about 4 comments before someone fact-checked it and pointed out to others it was false, while false news posts on conservative groups were typically never fact-checked by the commenter in the group if it aligned with their ideology because fact-checking just isn't something US conservatives are typically interested in doing or place value on.
                Facebook is filled with the dumbest of the dumb, but again it’s funny to watch someone say this that than immediately quotes a known con artist that has been called out on his interview edits and false intentions.

                Alternatively you can see their disinterest in truth in the fact that they've chosen to nominate, then elect, then support and approve of, a man who tells multiple lies per day, at a rate unparalleled by another other political figure in any country in modern history. If they had any particular concern about factually false statements/claims being an issue they obviously wouldn't have done that. So telling people who obviously aren't interested in truth or falsehood that Trump's statements are factually false, isn't going to get you very far.
                As opposed to lying Hillary Clinton, who lied every time her lips moved. The lack of self awareness among many liberals is always amusing.
                "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
                GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                  I was going to call you on the emphasized part as an overstatement - but I did a bit of digging and what you are saying aligns with a lot of what I am finding in terms of studies. But there was one comment in one article that caught my eye. It noted that liberals tend to be less religious, generally, than conservatives. As a consequence, they lean more heavily on science and the scientific method. Conservatives have a greater dependence on "revealed truths." So if science calls a long-held religious belief into question, the liberal will tend to discard the religious explanation for the scientific one. Conservatives will tend to discard the scientific explanation for the religious one. After all - can god be wrong?

                  I suspect that is a significant over-simplification - and I'm sure there are a lot of nuances from person to person. But I also suspect, as you move further out on the spectrum - it becomes more and more of a characteristic. It provides a possible explanation for many positions held by evangelicals, and certainly provides an explanation for the affinity of so many for Trump.
                  I'm sorry. I missed where you have shown that you are relying on science in anything in this thread. Are you talking about use of the scientific method with its control of all parameters and with its repeatability or are you talking about opinions repeated so often that you take them to be scientific truths ?

                  When you joined the forum, I expected more sensibility from you than now being demonstrated.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                    I was going to call you on the emphasized part as an overstatement - but I did a bit of digging and what you are saying aligns with a lot of what I am finding in terms of studies. But there was one comment in one article that caught my eye. It noted that liberals tend to be less religious, generally, than conservatives. As a consequence, they lean more heavily on science and the scientific method. Conservatives have a greater dependence on "revealed truths." So if science calls a long-held religious belief into question, the liberal will tend to discard the religious explanation for the scientific one. Conservatives will tend to discard the scientific explanation for the religious one. After all - can god be wrong?

                    I suspect that is a significant over-simplification - and I'm sure there are a lot of nuances from person to person. But I also suspect, as you move further out on the spectrum - it becomes more and more of a characteristic. It provides a possible explanation for many positions held by evangelicals, and certainly provides an explanation for the affinity of so many for Trump.
                    I’m sorry, but I’ve discovered that most liberals know a lot less about science than they think and form their opinions based on what they are told.
                    "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
                    GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by mikewhitney View Post
                      I'm sorry. I missed where you have shown that you are relying on science in anything in this thread. Are you talking about use of the scientific method with its control of all parameters and with its repeatability or are you talking about opinions repeated so often that you take them to be scientific truths ?

                      When you joined the forum, I expected more sensibility from you than now being demonstrated.
                      "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
                      GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                        Exaggeration is my favorite rhetorical device, but I do try to base my statements in fact (I am a liberal, after all )

                        There's a lot of things that correlate. One of the major correlations is a core personality trait called "Openness to [new] experience". On one extreme of this trait lies the autistic person who curls up in a ball rocking back and forth muttering "too much change" if anything at all in their life changes, and on the other extreme are thrill-seekers who travel constantly from countries to country to experience new things. But on the more normal/central parts of the openness-to-experience spectrum lie the people who are psychologically less well equipped to cope with and desire change and tend to on the whole fear and avoid change and prefer that things generally remain the same or don't change too much too fast, whom we call "conservatives", and the people who are psychologically fine with or enjoy a quite a bit of change and enjoy new experiences and new challenges in their lives, whom we call "liberals".

                        This personality trait of openness to change/new experiences, correlates with a large number of things including intellect, education level, food preferences, and religious views.

                        As an aside, something I have very much learned from doing science is that people's assumptions and guesses about how the world "should" work are often, or even usually, not accurate. If I had a nickel for every time someone in my scientific research group has said "I predict the outcome will be A" another said "I predict B" another "I predict C" and the outcome was Z and we say afterwards "hmmm, we hadn't even thought of that as an option", I would be a rich man. What I have learned time after time is that people on the whole are not actually all that great at predicting/guessing truth, and so instead we have to empirically study the world to find out what is true and what isn't. That is one reason I have so much contempt for philosophies like libertarianism who say effectively "I have this great idea for what I predict will be a wonderful society based on my really simplistic understanding of economics, and though I admit that pretty much no society in world history has ever used this system, I just know it's going to be great!" Similar it's why I fact-check basically everything I see and read.

                        This is true, but I think irrelevant. Nowhere in the bible does it say "thou shalt vote for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 American election", yet white evangelical voters turned out in record numbers for Trump and 81% of them that voted, voted for him. Similarly, "thou shalt hate Democrats", "Lock Her Up!", "nobody should be allowed to have an abortion" aren't in the bible, yet it seems an overwhelming percentage of white evangelicals support those views. So I don't think you can appeal to their tendency to believe "revealed truths" as an explanation for why they believe things that aren't revealed truths.
                        So about that relevance. Consider this: "revealed truth" is an authoritarian model. It depends on the "supreme being" to reveal the truth, which is then adopted wholesale. Of course, I (and you?) believe that "supreme being" is a combination of words written by men long dead, the song of the herd, and the "inner voice" I suspect we all experience as some part of our subconscience gives us an "alert." There is a strong correlation between conservatives and authoritarian models. It is how many view parenting, structure their religions, derive their morality, etc. Trump seems to me to be a strongly "authoritarian" figure. So perhaps the gravitation is a natural fit for many on the right? It also explains the admiration for "strongmen" types.
                        The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                        I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by carpedm9587 View Post
                          I was going to call you on the emphasized part as an overstatement - but I did a bit of digging and what you are saying aligns with a lot of what I am finding in terms of studies. But there was one comment in one article that caught my eye. It noted that liberals tend to be less religious, generally, than conservatives. As a consequence, they lean more heavily on science and the scientific method. Conservatives have a greater dependence on "revealed truths." So if science calls a long-held religious belief into question, the liberal will tend to discard the religious explanation for the scientific one. Conservatives will tend to discard the scientific explanation for the religious one. After all - can god be wrong?

                          I suspect that is a significant over-simplification - and I'm sure there are a lot of nuances from person to person. But I also suspect, as you move further out on the spectrum - it becomes more and more of a characteristic. It provides a possible explanation for many positions held by evangelicals, and certainly provides an explanation for the affinity of so many for Trump.
                          Not that your "analysis" here is biased and self-serving or anything.
                          Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
                          But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
                          Than a fool in the eyes of God


                          From "Fools Gold" by Petra

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
                            Not that your "analysis" here is biased and self-serving or anything.
                            Feel free to find the studies that refute it.
                            The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy...returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King

                            I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglas

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              yep, it's like that list of Trump lies that is on the web. I think Oxmixx linked to it once.

                              Most of it is hyper-literal nitpicking on figures of speech, hyperbole or numbers of things mentioned, or pure opinions.

                              Comment

                              Related Threads

                              Collapse

                              Topics Statistics Last Post
                              Started by little_monkey, Yesterday, 04:19 PM
                              16 responses
                              94 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post One Bad Pig  
                              Started by whag, 03-26-2024, 04:38 PM
                              53 responses
                              282 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post Mountain Man  
                              Started by rogue06, 03-26-2024, 11:45 AM
                              25 responses
                              109 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post rogue06
                              by rogue06
                               
                              Started by Hypatia_Alexandria, 03-26-2024, 09:21 AM
                              33 responses
                              195 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post Roy
                              by Roy
                               
                              Started by Hypatia_Alexandria, 03-26-2024, 08:34 AM
                              84 responses
                              356 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post JimL
                              by JimL
                               
                              Working...
                              X