Thursday, October 17, 2013

Facts overcome confirmation bias

Politico: "Eureka! Tea Partiers know science."  Shorter version: Yale professor is shocked to find that conservatives score higher on science literacy test than liberals.  You might say that this insulated, ivory tower egghead's stream of thought on this matter was laminar and then suddenly - bam! - his Reynolds number hit 2000 and everything was turbulent.

Whoops, I kinda veered into Tea Party-speak there.  For my liberal friends, it was like he thought one thing but then he was like, whoa, that's not what I thought.

4 comments:

another Eric Lindholm said...

"I no longer hold this particular mistaken view." Get it? He allows new information to change his opinion on something. What a concept. The irony is that the more "scientifically literate" Tea Partiers would never consider such a thing. If the facts disagree with what you already "know," the facts are wrong.

Anonymous said...

There's madness in their method.

Eric said...

I take note of your characterization of the Tea Party and raise you the judgement of the IPCC who averred that there's a 95% certainty that mankind is causing global warming and then (in their recent report) made NO mention of the observable fact that there's been no global warming in 16 years, while CO2 levels have spiked.

So, yes, I believed global warming is a farce and I was right.

Oceans, shmoceans said...

How skeptics view global warming/How realists view global warming:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif