The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic).

Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).

In evolutionary psychology, there is a distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. So, the proximate cause for pursuing sex is that orgasms are intensely pleasurable. But the ultimate cause is that pursuing sex leads to better reproductive outcomes, so we evolved the ability to orgasm and, thus, a motivation to pursue sex.

I think you are arguing in terms of proximate causes. Somebody desires a neutral news source so that they feel like they are accurately informed about what is going on in the world. I don't disagree with this. Most people genuinely want a neutral news source. But the weird thing is that they do not actually consume a neutral news source, even though it is trivially easy to figure out that your news source isn't neutral. All you have to do is read the other side's preferred news source.

To explain this seeming paradox, I am arguing in terms of ultimate causes. I think that this failure to reason accurately about the neutrality of news sources comes about, ultimately, because news consumption is not only about informing yourself, but also to a large extent about reaffirming the righteousness of your in-group. And I think that the appearance of neutrality is critical to enabling this self-deception to occur (because a person is much more convincing when they actually believe the position they're arguing for).

Thus my insistence on what you referred as pedantic: people don't actually want to consume a neutral news source, they want to believe that they consume a neutral news source. And not 'want' in the proximate sense that they know that they are deceiving themselves, but 'want' as a shorthand way to describe the ultimate cause for the prevalence of this self-deception.

1. I stated the proximate cause.

2. You disagreed, because you wanted to use "want" to describe ultimate rather than proximate causes.

3. Now you're agreeing with the proximate cause I stated and still insisting on your ultimate cause.

Do you see why this might be considered pedantic? You disagreed with what I said based on a meaning of the word "want", when in fact the way I was using the word "want" is correct?

The problem with ultimate causes is that because they're further away from the effect they're describing, so it's fairly difficult to establish a causal relationship.

Sex and reproduction have a well-developed constructive theory (evolution) around them--the causal relationship is believed to be true because evolution predicts it and also predicts a wide variety of things which we know to be true. But even so, evolution can be difficult to tie to phenomena--for example, it takes a fairly deep understanding of evolution to understand how evolution is compatible with homosexuality.

I can see how your ultimate cause might cause the phenomena we're discussing, but that simply means that the hypothesis is viable and worth testing--it doesn't yet indicate any evidence for your hypothesis. So again I'm still saying: you haven't provided any evidence for what you're saying. You may have evidence for your assertion, but you certainly haven't presented it.

Even if you have evidence for this: how is insisting on an ultimate cause a response to my original point? I said that "Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral." The point being that we shouldn't trust that news sources are neutral or even trying to be neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. Even if you're right, your jumping in to disagree with completely irrelevant information was, frankly, rude.

I'm not sure at this point whether I believe you intended to talk about ultimate versus proximal causes, or if you're just smart and managed to come up with that after the fact as a way to not have to admit you were wrong. Either way, I'm not going to respond to further comments on this thread.

> I think we're arguing past each other and I think that is my fault.

I'm sorry that I caused you to feel like I was being disingenuous (or however you would describe your emotions), but I was truly just trying to reconcile and understand our disagreement.

Also, the speaking about evolutionary forces in anthropomorphic terms like 'want', etc. is pretty common. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins at one point goes into a lengthy digression of why this is a useful way to talk about evolutionary processes and what exactly is and isn't meant by this manner of speaking. Realizing that me doing this was the primary source of our disagreement was what prompted my last comment.

But anyway, I agree that this conversation is getting long in the tooth.

Good day to you!