I generally approve of Scott Adams, and am glad to see someone being rational (or at least shooting for that) loudly in public. But:
resulting in several unexpected conclusions
Eh. The gender wage gap is an issue where you just need to be unbiased and read carefully to get to the right answer, and so the only possibly surprising thing was that the partisans were willing to accept that a famous person had read carefully and was unbiased, especially since he used enough space to make the various claims distinct and clear. (I was surprised by nothing in that post, because I had read carefully about the gender wage gap in the past.)
But the second one rapidly turned into being unproductive (by his own admission) because the question was ill-formed, and you need more than being unbiased and reading carefully to get to the right answer. (Note his claim that no one ever died because they misunderstood evolution—as if antibiotic resistance and eugenics weren’t relevant! You also need a strong world-model, i.e. an understanding of all the relevant science.)
“Balance” is also not that good a way to look at things: like he discovered, both parties have roughly equal numbers of voters who are against vaccination. In general, we should expect scientific ignorance (do more Republicans or Democrats believe in Newtonian physics instead of folk physics?), and so unless it’s a club they can use to beat their enemies, it rarely shows up.
Perhaps you could go science by science, and figure out which delusions are encouraged by which party. The Republicans surely like to misuse the Laffer Curve, but the Democrats also surely like to misrepresent the effects of a minimum wage. Which is the more serious sin? Now we have to rerun the engine on a new topic, and getting an answer may require evidence that does not yet exist.
I generally approve of Scott Adams, and am glad to see someone being rational (or at least shooting for that) loudly in public. But:
Eh. The gender wage gap is an issue where you just need to be unbiased and read carefully to get to the right answer, and so the only possibly surprising thing was that the partisans were willing to accept that a famous person had read carefully and was unbiased, especially since he used enough space to make the various claims distinct and clear. (I was surprised by nothing in that post, because I had read carefully about the gender wage gap in the past.)
But the second one rapidly turned into being unproductive (by his own admission) because the question was ill-formed, and you need more than being unbiased and reading carefully to get to the right answer. (Note his claim that no one ever died because they misunderstood evolution—as if antibiotic resistance and eugenics weren’t relevant! You also need a strong world-model, i.e. an understanding of all the relevant science.)
“Balance” is also not that good a way to look at things: like he discovered, both parties have roughly equal numbers of voters who are against vaccination. In general, we should expect scientific ignorance (do more Republicans or Democrats believe in Newtonian physics instead of folk physics?), and so unless it’s a club they can use to beat their enemies, it rarely shows up.
Perhaps you could go science by science, and figure out which delusions are encouraged by which party. The Republicans surely like to misuse the Laffer Curve, but the Democrats also surely like to misrepresent the effects of a minimum wage. Which is the more serious sin? Now we have to rerun the engine on a new topic, and getting an answer may require evidence that does not yet exist.
The empirical data on the minimum wage question doesn’t indicate that at the sizes minimum wage is debated it has much negative economic consequences.
To me it’s not clear that democrats are usually arguing on the topic positions that are farther away from the data than Republicans.