Comment by spenuke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spenuke | Hacker News Reader

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I think the main problem is that we conflate the political spectrum (what are the responsibilities of the State?) and the epistemological spectrum (how do we determine what is true and not?). The "Western World", for better and worse, is a product of the Enlightenment, and as a result is irreducibly leftist in its epistemology: modern democracy depends on a belief that a citizenry armed with the scientific method and rational discourse can rule themselves without resorting to the authority of a king or a holy book.

The Right Wing (in the US, our Republican Party) is less identifiable by its right-wing policies as it is by its right-wing epistemology: they reject all scientific evidence for climate change, biological and geological history, medicine, etc. For the religious, this manifests itself in the old epistemology that says the Bible is the sole source of all Truth. For the non-religious, this tends to manifest itself as total nihilism, which is expressed in the more heartless strains of Libertarian Objectivism; for these people, might equals right and society is a zero-sum game where the only truth is winning and losing.

And this epistemological divide is the one that is tearing us apart. When you say there's no serious right-leaning counter-weight to (the NYT et al.), what you mean is that there is no serious news outlet that doesn't hold the Enlightenment values. And when you put it in this light, it's an obvious statement, isn't it? Politically speaking, the WSJ and the Economist can very much be considered right of center (leaving aside that the median center has moved right over the last 40 years), but they are still rooted in Enlightenment science and rationalism.

Point is, although the political right wing is currently the main base of the epistemological right wing, it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And the problem with saying we need more right-wing voices in mainstream media is that there are so few of them who meet the basic epistemological requirements; when they do, they are often rejected by the broader right wing for being too far left!

> they reject all scientific evidence for climate change

I stumbled across this earlier in the week (http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yco...) and found it interesting to see the difference in answers under "BELIEFS" (scroll past the map).

70% agree "Global warming is happening"

53% agree "Global warming is caused mostly by human activity"

49% agree that "Most scientists think global warming is happening"

71% strongly agree that they "Trust climate scientists"

What struck me the most was gap between the credibility of climate scientists and the two more heavily politicized topics of whether humans are driving climate change and whether there is agreement by scientists on it happening. How can ~ 70% of people agree it is happening and trust the scientists but only ~50% believe the outcome of the research?!

One what basis do you expect consistency from humans? If ever there was an unexamined assumption, that's it.

I don't expect it but I think it's a great illustration of the gap between reality and political belief (something we likely all suffer from to some degree).

That's a very convenient and self-congratulatory view of things. Science denialism happens on both the left and the right.

The book Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice, by Alice Dreger gives a good survey of the terrain.

>>That's a very convenient and self-congratulatory view of things. Science denialism happens on both the left and the right.

Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them. The right cheers its science deniers on and elects them to government positions.

The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter. The end result is roughly the same.

>Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them.

I haven't seen any significant scorn directed towards post-modernist views from NYT, WaPo and co. At least not in the last several years. In fact, they seem to implicitly welcome those views.

> The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter.

Neither does religion in general statement that science is false, not does post-modernism in general say that science doesn't matter. Some religious views may either deny science generally or, more often, deny only that science that conflicts with the religion's axiomatic beliefs (which implies that the religion have axiomatic beliefs in the domain to which science applies, which not all do.)

And while post-modernism may, depending on the particular flavor, deny either the fundamental existence of or the accessibility of an objective root truth, it has no fundamental conflict with the utilitarian argument for empiricism and science (it conflicts essentially with the quasi-religious belief that science extends beyond being a useful means of predicting future experiences to being something that ultimately tells the root truth of the universe, but that belief is not essential to science.)

Thank you for illustrating my point by conflating the political spectrum with the epistemological spectrum. :)

As for "self-congratulatory", I was responding to the old chestnut that mainstream media is too far to the left. Next time we talk about GMOs and anti-vaxxers, I'll have a chance to chastise the people who are more likely to be on my side of the political spectrum.

I would put it differently. I think the episemological divide (or at least one of them) is between pre- and post-Hegelian views. Post-Hegel, real truth (in the old sense) is gone, and all that's left is a repeated cycle of dialectic.

What we're left with is that "truth" is only true within a society or group; I can have my truth that's true for me, and demand that you respect it. (I was going to say that this is what we're left with on part of the left, but on reflection the behavior you're complaining about on the right fits this pattern as well.)

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