> Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.

When half the country disagrees with the other half as to who that is, I'm not sure "clearly" is the right word to use.

And if you don't entertain the possibility that it could be you, it will be you.

> When half the country disagrees with the other half

Nearly 48% of the electorate did not vote for either major party candidate. The two parties are both very much minorities. There aren't simply two sides to every story.

There's actually significant ideological diversity within each of the two major parties, though there are certainly attempts by powerful people on both sides to stamp out any dissent.

There is a distinct anti-correlation between the people who think CNN is full of liars and the people who think Fox is full of liars. The truth is that they both are, but that is the real minority opinion.

And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.

> And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.

That's not a thing I said.

I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil. The enthusiastic party voters are a subdivision of the minorities. Indeed many votes are more defined by what they're against than what they're for.

> That's not a thing I said.

Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.

> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.

But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.

My point is that from the perspective of someone outside of both tribes, there's no reason why one has to accept the conclusion that each of those tribes is equally enlightened or ignorant. I realize of course that they disagree with each other on a number of issues, but... so what? I'm not evaluating them as a member.

To a member of one of the tribes, that tribe's beliefs are obviously the correct ones. To an outside observer, you have to evaluate the individual beliefs.

Is the best policy to combat climate change a carbon tax which is refunded to the population, or a WPA-style "Green New Deal"? According to most economists it's the former, according to AOC it's the latter.

School choice programs have a strong record of giving low income families with children in failing public schools a better alternative, but public school teachers unions are a large Democratic voting block and major campaign donors, so they have a perverse incentive to oppose such programs even when they're succeeding, e.g. by shutting down the popular one in D.C.

Immigration has a multifaceted economic effect. High skill immigration tends to bring domestic economic benefits, because the immigrants spend much of the money in the domestic economy and pay more in taxes than they consume in services. Low skill immigration tends to have the opposite effect, and to suppress wages for unskilled labor or increase unskilled domestic unemployment. If you combine the two the total effect is positive, because the former effect is larger. But the Democratic party has a stronger incentive to promote the latter, because unskilled immigrants from socialist-leaning countries are more likely to vote for Democrats, so they regularly conflate the two and adopt policies that promote the latter, even if it harms the domestic population.

You can undoubtedly find some Republican to argue that all immigration is bad and some Democrat to argue that a carbon tax would be a good answer to climate change, but there remains much wrongness on both sides. The filter bubbles show people who live on one side or the other the reasons why some subset of the other side is wrong and not the reasons why some subset of their side is wrong. It creates an impression that isn't true.

Even the premise is basically nonsense. If one Republican says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change is a hoax, does that mean Republicans are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because it is real? We know which one will be on CNN. If one Democrat says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change will cause human extinction in twelve years without a Green New Deal, does that mean Democrats are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because humans won't go extinct if we don't immediately raise taxes to 75% and spend the money on government windmills? You know which one will be on Fox.

I'm not even talking about policy. I'm talking about basic factual matters.

Start with something simple: the in-person attendance and TV viewership of the President's inauguration. This is completely irrelevant to policy and has no long-term implications whatsoever. Yet somehow it became a major "partisan" controversy, when it was never controversial in the past for Presidents of any party. Of course crowd size estimation isn't a perfect science, but this particular controversy had nothing to do with science. And if you're going to tell me the problem there was "both sides", I'll have to disagree.

This is just one example of extreme reality denial. What makes it notable is again that the dispute was of no particular importance in the grand scheme, and yet reality was still vehemently denied.

I mean, this kind of shit comes right out of George Orwell, where the test of party loyalty is how you can make yourself believe things that are obviously false.

What was the attendance at Lincoln's inauguration? FDR's? Who knows. Who cares! The only person who truly cared was Donald J. Trump himself. But Republicans have been primed to take anything critical of what he says as a partisan attack by the "liberal media". Every fact, no matter how trivial, is now a political controversy.

You're supplying an instance of Republicans denying reality, but nobody was claiming that they never did that.

The issue is that they both do it. For example, the left made quite a kerfuffle about "Trump" separating families at the border, but the truth is the separation policy was preexisting and what changed was only how many detentions there were when he started to detain everyone crossing the border illegally. They also like to play word games, like saying "no existing policy of separating all families crossing the border illegally" which is intentionally misleading when what changed wasn't the separation of those in detention but rather the detention of everyone crossing the border illegally.

Which isn't even to say that family separation was a good policy, but the persistent implication that it was a policy established under Trump is ridiculous and politically-motivated.

> The issue is that they both do it.

No, that's not the issue. That's never been the issue. As I said much earlier:

"Everyone is wrong about some facts." "However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts."

There's neither time nor space here to numerically compare mistruths of the 2 major parties. I would just like to see acknowledgment of the general principle that 2 groups of people can be ignorant in some ways while having very different levels of ignorance. For example, compare high school children and elementary school children. Generally speaking, high schoolers have a lot more knowledge than grade schoolers, and yet high schoolers still have quite a bit of ignorance. The 2 groups are not at all equal. This is a very common situation, and "both sides are wrong about things" is not a useful description of that situation.

It’s less dramatic than you might think. For example, both Republicans (82%) and Democrats (91%) trust scientists: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mis... (Even that question is politically loaded. “Science” is a spectrum, and as the reproducibility crisis shows, they’re often wrong. Conservatives by definition are more likely to be skeptical of people who say they have new insights into age-old problems, while liberals are by definition always looking for new approaches and don’t mind much when they don’t pan out. So this 10 point gap isn’t either bad or good, necessarily.)

Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.

Left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias takes this on in the context of climate change in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri...

He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.

> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”

> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.

The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...

> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.

There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)

Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow. I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.

The IPCC report received plenty of criticism. The report summary left out some of the more alarming findings [1] (which were conveniently not addressed in your reason article) and there was valid criticism about the consensus model that was used[2].

In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.

I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/world-... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-climate-repor...

The large uncertainties in climate modeling have only been getting smaller, as we've made progress on estimating cloud feedback lately. Fundamentally, there is a lot of guesswork (aka parameterizations) but these are all tuned with as much data as we can get. Projections made in 1980 and 1990 have been pretty accurate so far, and show the warming world we live in now, so it should count for something.

But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.

Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.

I think it's telling that conservatives seem to have shifted from sowing doubt regarding the very existence of climate change to now "there's no point, it's already too late!". The primary goal of status-quo remains.

> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science

Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?