craschworks

A friend recently linked to this article The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science — and Reality.

From the article:

“On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. “

My response:

More educated people know how messy science can be, and how often it is tainted by myside bias and groupthink. Remember when fat was the beta noire of nutrition? When soy was good for you? If we can’t even make authoritative statements about nutrition, where we can perform controlled experiments, how can be confident about what’s happening in the ecosystem?

Note the pejoratives the author uses: “idiot”, “authoritarian”, “denialist”. No recognition that science is provisional, that sometimes the minority position has proven correct, no assumption of good faith.

How many AGM believers have read the original literature? Or have the intellectual means to evaluate the claims of AGM researchers? Few people have the time, energy or inclination to investigate this issue in any great depth. I contend that most of those who believe in AGM do so because it is the accepted position of “their” side, not because they’ve done any better analysis than those they sneer at.

Conservatives and libertarians are not immune to this, of course. For example, here’s Dan Klein’s mea culpa for running a biased experiment that appeared to show that liberals were less economically literate:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/i-was-wrong-and-so-are-you/8713/

Jonathan Haidt show that people–of all political persuasions–make snap judgments based on their moral intuitions, and then marshall evidence post-hoc to justify their moral intuition. Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians moral intuitions rest upon at least 6 different foundations. Check out this summary of his research here:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/02/the-science-of-libertarian

Conservatives and libertarians oppose AGM research a priori because the proposed solutions almost always violate their moral intuitions. How often do you see AGM believers propose market solutions? They almost always call for more taxes, more regulations, more government power. Therefore, AGM unbelievers see government funded AGM scientists as ideologically motivated stooges for leftist politicians who want to use AGM as a bludgeon to increase their political and economic power. (For which the stooges will be well-rewarded, in the form of government grants and sinecures at government-subsidized universities). Think about how well received results from tobacco or oil company funded researchers are received on the left, to see what I mean.

If AGM believers proposed solutions that appealed to conservatives and libertarians moral foundations, rather than liberal moral foundations, I think they’d find much less resistance to the science.