Krugman being Krugman

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

"There's the great line, of course, about how his "lived experience" (see? I told you, he's doing empirical work!) confirms that motivated cognition "is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives.

...

That Krugman is too thick to see that one can't infer anything about the quality of partisans' reasoning from the truth or falsity of their beliefs is ... another element of Krugman's proof that ideological reasoning is symmetric across right and left!"

Comments

[goumindong.livejournal.com]

That is essentially what Krugman was saying. And Kahan refutes it by saying that small d democrats just listen to the big D democrats. Which is kinda pointless.

For instance I am not a physicist, so i tend to listen to physicists when they say stuff but i will be skeptical of the new things they say if it contradicts my past evidence. This is basically saying that by Kahan's test I would have an ideological bias rather than thinking rationally because I am not evaluating evidence on its merits but rather just going by what established physicists i already know have been saying.

But frankly i should not be evaluating particle physics information. I am not equipped to do so. The question of whether or not I am doing the right thing is not the question of how i update given new information its the question of whether or not the people I trust are trustworthy.