Friday, April 18, 2014

Politics makes us selective

Paul Krugman --

Not long ago Ezra Klein cited research showing that both liberals and conservatives are subject to strong tribal bias — presented with evidence, they see what they want to see. I then wrote that this poses a puzzle, because in practice liberals don’t engage in the kind of mass rejections of evidence that conservatives do. The inevitable response was a torrent of angry responses and claims that liberals do too reject facts — but none of the claims measured up.

What Krugman doesn't mention is that among that "torrent of angry responses" was the Yale Law School professor, Dan Kahan, whose research Klein had cited, explaining how Krugman had completely misunderstood his work.

UPDATE: In fairness to Ezra Klein, he returns to his original point and makes a decent attempt to extricate Krugman from his McLuhan-esque predicament.