I believe that this is the most relevant question we can ask if we’re talking politics
Why ???
One of ways politics messes up people’s reasoning is that they tend to pay excessive implication to the political alignment of issues. When considering policy X, they first ask themselves, “is X a left-wing or a right-wing policy”? (I know I used to, though I try to do so less and less), which in turn is likely to subconsciously influence how skeptical they are of pieces of evidence, etc.
This isn’t a very big problem for elections, where one’s vote has very little weight anyway, but you also get the same effect when judging ideas about society or history, or parenting styles, or careers …
So paying less attention to politics should reduce emotional priming and increase decision quality.
I don’t see what benefit one could get from paying attention to politics, apart from maybe getting along better with people who care about politics.
Why ???
One of ways politics messes up people’s reasoning is that they tend to pay excessive implication to the political alignment of issues. When considering policy X, they first ask themselves, “is X a left-wing or a right-wing policy”? (I know I used to, though I try to do so less and less), which in turn is likely to subconsciously influence how skeptical they are of pieces of evidence, etc.
This isn’t a very big problem for elections, where one’s vote has very little weight anyway, but you also get the same effect when judging ideas about society or history, or parenting styles, or careers …
So paying less attention to politics should reduce emotional priming and increase decision quality.
I don’t see what benefit one could get from paying attention to politics, apart from maybe getting along better with people who care about politics.