Can we have a debate on Dunning-Kruger as it relates to politics?

Great Debates
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You’re still going on about the same thing despite, I thought, acknowledging earlier that it was misguided. To attack someone as you did and accuse them of some sort of appalling ignorance for asking a perfectly reasonable question – and that’s what this was, a question – requires an inexplicably hostile reading of their post. The appropriate way to make your point, such as it was, would have been to say that the passing comment about the likely origin of life is probably right with respect to its relationship with hydrothermal vents, which is quite a widely supported hypothesis, but not with respect to the crystals-as-genes hypothesis, which is possible but not widely supported and very difficult to establish empirically. It’s a total mystery to me why you would be so hostile about what is essentially a nitpick over a passing comment, to the extent of dragging it into a completely unrelated discussion as putative evidence of some systematic ignorance.

As for your concluding sentences, I don’t believe anyone has said that those voting differently than they do are mindless fucking idiots. What has been said is that there is abundant evidence that there’s more ignorance of basic facts on the right than on the left, most notably found in a general contempt for science and higher education, an outright rejection of scientific consensus on the environment and climate change in favor of political expediency, an alignment with religious nuttery on issues like biological evolution and abortion, and other counterfactual beliefs previously noted.

I suppose I’m biased and that makes me more more inclined to see things that way, but the objective evidence has been plentiful for years. It’s in-your-face obvious now with the remarkable individual currently occupying the White House, the one who told us that Obama was born in Kenya and his investigators in Hawaii had uncovered “unbelievable” evidence of it, who told us that climate change was a Chinese hoax, the one who lies daily about virtually every issue and rose to power on an edifice of demonstrable lies, and who has a 90% approval rating from Republicans.

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Sure there is. When Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt said that we don’t have to worry about the environment because the Second Coming is at hand, when Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe said only God can change the climate, when nutters all over say the Bible tells them that homosexuality is an abomination and a sin, and that abortion is a sin (and maybe contraception, too) because human life is God’s gift and it begins at conception, then those things are pretty definitive, and Republicans have historically been the path for religious nuttery to be enshrined in law. There are a few nutters who would actually like to see the Bible reflected in the Constitution, and while by no means all Republicans take that position, all who take that position are Republicans.

I looked at those polls and much of that conclusion is based on knowledge about the political positions of the two parties rather than knowledge of the issues themselves, although a few of the questions do touch on the issues. That kind of analysis is complicated, one of the complicating factors being the appalling lack of issues knowledge on both sides. There’s another very interesting factor regarding science knowledge. Even when Republicans have the same or greater science knowledge than Democrats, it’s much less likely to influence their beliefs and policies. Thus, as the cited article says, “it’s difficult to argue against the notion that the Republican Party these days are the de facto political organization for anti-scientific rhetoric.”

So, you can argue that “If we want to gain knowledge and improve policies we should take on our opponents best arguments” all you want but the fact remains that the US is embarrassingly the only country in the world to pull out of the Paris climate accord, the head of the EPA is a moron who publicly claims that carbon dioxide has no effect on climate, the head of the Department of Energy is a congenital imbecile, and the president himself states that climate change is a Chinese hoax. The administration is more like a bad parody than believable real life. Under Obama, the two Secretaries of Energy were a Nobel-winning physicist and professor of physics and molecular biology as well as head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an MIT nuclear physicist, and the head of the EPA was a Senior Leadership Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health where she taught a course on environmental leadership.

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Oddly - or perhaps not - I think the exact opposite is true. Liberals tend to prefer direct solutions to problems, and conservatives tend to have a more complex view.

For example price controls (e.g. rent control) are the simple solution to housing costs. The long term impact (a shortage of housing) is an indirect result which is not directly apparent.

“Let’s give poor people free stuff” is a simple and direct solution to poverty. Issues like paying for it are a bit more complex, and moral hazards are much more complex.

And so on for many other issues, e.g. taxing of corporations. (Of course, this doesn’t mean that every conservative who - for example - opposes increased social programs is motivated by a (relatively) sophisticated concern about moral hazards. But ultimately that’s what the competing arguments boil down to.)

I agree about this group. But this group is not necessarily the correct group.

Like if you swap out Trump and add in Paul Ryan, or take out Sean Hannity and put in Mark Levin, you would up the conservative score quite a bit. (I’m not familiar with some of the other talk show people - and even my knowledge of Hannity and Levin is pretty old.)

That said, there may be some difference in a random sampling of politicians at this time. It’s most likely due to the fact that the conservatives are currently in the grip of populist Tea Party sentiment, which tends to favor “outsiders” as opposed to professional politicians, and the former tend to be less informed about issues than the latter.

As for media figures, it’s probably influenced by numbers. The vast majority of media people are leftists, and the top performers on the left are a much higher percentile than those on the right.

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Wesley Clark: I don’t think it’s actual Dunning-Kruger that you’re seeing. I think the issue is not conservative politics but conservative Christianity. People for whom “discovering the truth about something” has been completely taken off the table, declared an invalid concept, replaced with “hearing from an approved authority”.

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Ironic considering this thread that you would fall for a fake quote from James Watt. If you consider all of religious reasoning in politics nuttery then I am sure you feel the same way about all the people using religion to try to set immigrationpolicy and other policies.
Despite all that belief in climate change under Obama, they never submitted the treaty to the senate so it could become law. It is no big deal anyway since the US is alreadyleading in the world in reducing carbon emissions and is likely to meet the emissions goals from the Paris accord, while 23 out of 28 European countries are likely to misstheir goals.

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When you were in elementary school, how did you pick teams for kickball?

I bet it wasn’t one kid who decided who went on his team AND the opposing team. Was it?

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Some of the quotes attributed to Watt turn out to be apocryphal, but I haven’t seen evidence that this one is. Doesn’t matter, though – do you deny that Watt was (a) a religious nutter, (b) incredibly hostile to the environment, and (c) a Dispensationalist Christian who believed that the Bible should serve a guide to public policy? How does citing a quote that may or may not be apocryphal but is closely aligned with a person’s actual beliefs and actions make me some kind of idiot under the influence of Dunning-Kruger?

As for your second question, yes, you would be quite right in assuming that I feel the same way about people appealing to religious nuttery in support of things that I favor as much as I do about those using it in support of things that I oppose. I believe public policy should be guided by reason, not religious nuttery. I suspect that Hillary and Pelosi were just appealing to the religionists in their constituencies.

Surely you’re aware that Obama ratified the Paris agreement without involving the Senate?

Surely you’re aware that emissions mitigation is a long-term process that started many years ago? It’s certainly not due to the current bunch of climate change denying lunatics like Scott Pruit or Rick Perry, or to Trump so far rolling back no less than 67 different environmental protections!

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The reason you don’t see as many conservatives on this board is that most of them just don’t have the time or patience to inform liberals of how slanted the media or the higher education professors actually are. As such their news outlets often omit facts or under-report the opposing point of view.

This board has its roots in Chicago, which is a democratic bastion with 10% county tax ( not state or federal ! ) that has a tough time making payrolls.

This problem is compounded by studies that show the left is actually far less tolerant than the right when it comes to socializing with the opposite point of view.

How many conservatives are here? Hard to say, but I saw a poll on who did you vote for, and Trump the last time I checked had zero votes with Clinton having the rest of them not so long ago.

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So your assertion is that the media and our institutions of higher education are extremely “slanted” toward a liberal bias. I would suggest that if you find that all those institutions that have historically served as trusted sources of information to free and democratic societies have such a terrible liberal bias that you disagree with the things they’re presenting as objective facts supported by evidence, that the bias may not be with the institutions but with you.

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The problem is we’ve heard conservatives tell us the media and academics are slanted left. The arguments just aren’t that persuasive. I can count on one hand all the times a professor said anything liberal. colleges make you liberal because you are exposed to diversity, you learn to think critically and you learn to reevaluate society and your role in it. Conservatism is generally a philosophy of traditionalism and rejection of out-groups.

And the left thinks the media is just as slanted as the right seems to. The left feels it is a pro-corporate group that is too timid sometimes.

I think part of why we don’t see conservatives is fear. We can be giant assholes to conservatives here, constantly assuming the worst of the worst are how all of them act. So they are either driven away or stay silent.

How does the board being based in Chicago have anything to do with it though? Also every large city is a democratic bastion.

I think part of the issue is just that this board attracts highly educated people who score high on personality traits like openness to experience. These traits make you more left wing.

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That’s a fair response, and I was well aware of it while coming up with those lists. That said… what figures on the left compare to Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/Coulter in terms of prominence and trollishness? What figures on the right compare with Stewart/Maddow in terms of prominence and honesty?

I mean, Obama vs Trump has to be a fair comparison. And after that, if you pick actual opinion leaders on either side, based on how much influence they actually have, I think you can’t help but end up with a list fairly close to the one I presented.

(If you have any alternative lineup, I’d be happy to see it…)

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I would say that, to a large extent, the conservatives have picked your list as their lineup for their kickball team.

I would be interested in hearing what conservative leaders are being listened to that would be “fair” comparisons to your list of Democratic kickball players.

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If you did not find evidence that the Watt quote is made up it is because you did not try hard. Watt was not a nutter, he was a mainstream religious believer, he cared about the environment, I don’t know if he was a dispensationalist but almost all Christians belief in applying biblical values to politics regardless of their feelings about dispensationalism. Dunning Kriuger applies in this situation because it shows that your actual knowledge is less than what you believe your knowledge to be.

It is interesting that according to your value being religious is more objectionable than lying about being religious in order to pander to the actual religious.

I am aware of that and my name is not Shirley. I am also aware that the constitution gives the Senate the exclusive right to vote on treaties and a treaty can not be ratified without the Senate.

That is still not my name, and I know that the primary reason that the US leads the world in reducing carbon dioxide missions is the growth of fracking and the switch from coal to natural gas. I also know that the Democrats are the group attempting to ban fracking despite its success in fighting global warming.

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If there’s a Dunning-Kruger effect in evidence here, it’s not on my part. D-K is not about knowledge of specific minutiae that may or may not be factually correct, but about the tendency of those with low-performing cognition to overestimate their own cognitive performance. But you knew that, right?

As for Watt, he was judged by TIME magazine to be one of the top 10 worst Cabinet members in modern history, among other things because of his tendency “to invoke religion as justification for his policies” and for consistently favoring development over preservation. IOW, what I said.

He cared about the environment, you say? Yeah, he cared so much that he was the subject of a recall movement and calls for his resignation;the Washington Post described him as an “ideologue” on a “crusade” who made coal executives “deliriously happy” and environmentalists so furious that they considered him “almost a devil-figure antagonist bent on turning around decades of preservationist gains”. :rolleyes:

That might be interesting if it were true and I had said anything even remotely like that. What I actually said was that religion should not inform public policy, which should be based on reason.

Well the thing is that it was ratified, on the basis that the Paris accord wasn’t actually a treaty and didn’t need Senate ratification. What I was really objecting to was your grossly misleading phrasing, “Despite all that belief in climate change under Obama, they never submitted the treaty to the senate …” as if Obama was really just pretending to care but never even bothered submitting it to the Senate. Gotta love that phrasing, “despite all that belief in climate change”! You know, and I know, that the Republican-dominated Senate was hostile to the climate agreement, as indeed they were hostile to climate science in general, and that if Obama had tried doing what you berate him for failing to do, it would have been futile and a waste of time. Instead, he took constructive action to actually ratify the climate agreement.

No, that’s not the “primary reason”. There were many different reasons going back many years, including a whole host of measures that Republicans vigorously opposed, like improved vehicle efficiencies, reduced fuel consumption in home and industry, reduced industrial electricity use, stronger clean-air regulations, and many other factors including a surprisingly strong contribution (19% emissions reductions) from wind power generation.

Switching power plants from coal to gas was indeed a big factor in emissions reductions, but only responsible for less than a third of the reductions, and there are many other ways to move away from coal, and many other incentives than fracking-driven gas supply to achieve it. Where I live, for example, coal power generation has been reduced to zero, and largely taken up by nuclear, hydro, and wind, with the old coal plants mainly being demolished rather than converted to gas. Fracking is an environmentally damaging activity fraught with many risks and is ultimately in pursuit of oil and gas, both of which have to be phased out anyway, so any “benefits” it has are incidental and temporary.

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You said that he said we don’t have to worry about the environment because the second coming is at hand. What he actually said was “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”" Which is the exact opposite of the view that you attributed to him. That is not specific minutiae that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the views he had.

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Let me just make three quick points.

  1. What James Watt said when called in front of the House Interior Committee in a very public hearing just shortly after his appointment, and what he believed and demonstrated by his environmentally hostile actions, were clearly two very different things. I’ve already noted this. Here’s more (emphasis mine):
    Greg Wetstone, the chief environment counsel at the House Energy and Commerce Committee during the Reagan administration, who subsequently served as director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, argued that Watt was one of the two most “intensely controversial and blatantly anti-environmental political appointees” in American history.
    James G. Watt - Wikipedia
    You will kindly note that the accusation of being “one of the two most … blatantly anti-environmental political appointees in American history” is not a subtle criticism, and would be very hard indeed to reconcile with your previous claim that “he cared about the environment”. It certainly raises the interesting question of who is misinformed here.

  2. IF – and that’s a very big “IF” – I’ve somehow been misinformed about what James Watt did or did not believe, contrary to all the abundant evidence previously presented, that is indeed a specific piece of factual information and is unrelated to the matter of cognitive performance described by Dunning-Kruger, whose definition still seems to elude you.

  3. I assume from the lack of any response to all the other things I posted that you accept my refutations and acknowledge your mistakes.

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Thats a fair criticism. Perhaps we don’t know what the first life form was or what it was made of. But self replication at geothermal vents is a valid hypothesis even if it isn’t proven as the cause.

There has been a political realignment, and people who score high on authoritarianism have moved to the GOP. As a result, the GOP as a whole is going to be more gullible and misinformed. Combine that with a very advanced media echo chamber where people can go their whole lives never really exposed to alternative viewpoints and yes, one side will have more misinformed people.

Say what you will. You can bury your head and pretend that ‘both sides are the same’, but they aren’t. The right has more authoritarians and they have a better echo chamber. Both these things can make people less informed.

Trump’s voters were mostly white. And if 86% of whites who score high on authoritarianism voted for Trump, then the majority of authoritarians voted Trump. The GOP has more authoritarian voters than the democrats. Authoritarians are more prone to compartmentalized thinking, dogmatism and use facts (and lies) selectively to maintain an emotionally comfortable narrative.

Was that always true? Not really. If anything, the democrats may have had more authoritarian voters 100 years ago.

Also take into account that a need to avoid gray areas can come up in more right wing philosophies, which would create the need for more black and white thinking. Although I’m not sure if that is across the right, or just among those high on authoritarianism

http://www.sulloway.org/PoliticalConservatism(2003).pdf

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  1. First you claim he said something he did not say and used that to explain his worldview. I am skeptical that you are able to discern his motives be looking at what he did. It seems much more likely that you two have different ideas of what it means to protect the environment and he was acting out of his ideas and not yours. The fact that an environmentalist has made hyperbolic claims about him is of no matter. Professional environmentalists are in the business of making hyperbolic claims in order to raise money from the gullible.
    2.Dunning-Kruger effect’s definition from Wikipedia “the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is.” Your inability to discern an obviously fake Watt quote and subsequent complete misunderstanding of his position shows that you don’t know what you are talking about in that context and yet are still confident about it.
  2. No, I just figure there is no point in explaining those things again since you didn’t get them the first time.
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This seems to be the weak link in your analysis. What’s you basis for this claim?

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If I have a “complete misunderstanding” of his position, then so does the entire Wikipedia article on Watt (second sentence: “Often described as “anti-environmentalist”, he was one of Ronald Reagan’s most controversial cabinet appointments.”). And so does the Washington Post article I cited. So does the TIME magazine article rating him as one of the ten worst Cabinet members in modern history. His record and reputation are as glaringly obvious as they are appalling. If you think I just “misunderstand his position”, it is you who is misinformed.

Oreally? I responded to your misleading claim that “Despite all that belief in climate change under Obama, they never submitted the treaty to the senate” by pointing out that there was not a hope in hell that the Republican-dominated Senate of the time would have ratified it, which was hardly Obama’s fault, and that Obama took the initiative to ratify it by Executive authority. This is factually what happened. Obama did this because “all that belief in climate change” was sincere and he was motivated to do the right thing. I’m fascinated to know what it is about this that I “don’t get”.

I responded to your incorrect statement that fracking was mainly responsible for the reduction in US CO2 emissions by pointing out all the other factors that were major contributors. I’m fascinated to know what it is about this that I “don’t get”.

I gave you at least three different objective mainstream cites about Watt’s reprehensible environmental record. I’m fascinated to know what it is about this that I “don’t get”.