When Worldview Trumps Facts

What this episode covers

DAILY EVOLVER EPISODE 90               We started this week with a couple of quick items: first a comment on Brendan Eich, who was pushed out as the CEO of Mozilla (makers of the Firefox browser) because in 2008 he supported Proposition 8, the California voter initiative that banned the state from granting gay marriage. A quick poll on Tuesday evening’s call showed that the vast majority of the callers thought Mozilla’s actions were wrong.  I’m not so sure I agree. I guess I’m for a world without shaming, but till then I’m happy that instead of being shamed for being gay, people are now (in some circles at least) being shamed for being anti-gay. Once again, evolution is beautiful but not always pretty. The second quick item regards economic corruption. I often make the point that what we see in developed countries as “corruption” — powerful people colluding for mutual profit — describes 100% of the economy at pre-modern altitudes. Yet by the time we get to modernity this kind of corruption is criminalized (though, of course, far from eradicated). But what about post-modern corruption; is there anything new and different emerging?  I think we can see a perfect example in Flash Boys, a new book by Michael Lewis that exposes the practice of high speed stock trading, where savvy traders set up shop right next to a stock exchange in order get the millisecond advantage gained by proximity in electronic transactions. I think Time Magazine sums it up well: “More than ever, the economic injustices of the world are made possible by the unequal distribution of information.” DOES POLITICS MAKE US STUPID? In our first major story, we look at an essay published by Ezra Klein, How politics makes us stupid, in which he reported on a study done at Yale University by Law professor Dan Kahan who set out to answer a question that I think most of us have asked, particularly when we’re in a heated political disagreement: “Why don’t facts win arguments?” The researchers started by creating a neutral control experiment: first, they asked people to interpret a data set of four numbers that revealed the efficacy of a skin cream in relieving a rash. The data, presented in quadrant grid, showed the number of people whose rash got better and worse while using the cream, and the number of those whose rash got better and worse while not using the cream. So was the cream effective? As might be expected, the better peoples’ math skills were the better they did at the problem. Next the researchers presented a highly politicized problem: does a ban on concealed handguns increase or reduce crime? Using data sets similar to the skin rash question, (some showing a gun ban cutting crime and some showing a ban increasing it) peoples’ math skills no longer determined how well they did at solving the problem. Ideology did. Liberals and conservatives were both able to solve the problem — but only when it fit their ideology. In fact the better they were at math the better they were able to use the data to support their pre-established political positions. Those with strong math skills were almost twice as likely than those with weak skills to get the problem right when it fit their worldview. As Klein points out: “People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.” This partisan filter is at work throughout all political discourse and flies in the face of the conventional understanding of why we have political disagreements, which Klein calls the More Information Hypothesis, “the belief that many of our most bitter political battles are m...

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