Comment by emmett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emmett | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That quote is NOT Scott saying that pro-life advocates are right about abortion or wrong about abortion. That quote is Scott saying that once you start to believe that "the enemy" is a cackling evil villain, who is lying about their true motivations and secretly is only advocating for their preferred policies because they want to do evil things...you are doomed, at least in terms of seeking truth. Because once you believe that, there is nothing that "the enemy" can ever say or do that will change your mind. It's always just a tactic to advance their evil plot.

Of course, Scott could be wrong about this thesis. It's possible that maybe believing that pro-life conservatives don't care at all about fetuses doesn't actually indicate that you have a trapped prior that will prevent you from ever hearing new arguments on the abortion issue. But that is the argument that Scott is advancing, not that you can't form opinions about the truth or falsehood of someone's political views at all.

I guess my question is whether the author believes that it’s possible to have knowledge about these sorts of things or not. Everything he says in this article sounds like he’s saying that obtaining such knowledge is impossible, or at least that neither side has obtained knowledge. He seems to only judge the validity of the opposing views by how strongly their proponents believe the views, and since the two views seem to be held equally strongly, he seems to conclude that there is no discernible difference in the validity of the views. But if it were possible to obtain such knowledge, then it would be possible to correctly say “both sides believe their views equally strongly, but side A is more correct and side B is less correct.”

There are outside groups with less of that type of bias that will often be able to see things in a more nuanced way that more closely reflects reality. For example, maybe someone from another country who is uninterested in politics.

That doesn't mean there are some people who have no bias at all. Just different ones that apply to other things.

In the examples you quoted, he was deliberately listing views extreme enough to be inaccurate. For example, both the liberal and conservative examples said the characterization applied to _everyone_ in those groups. The less-biased interpretations might be: _some_ conservatives really _do_ care about fetuses and lives, and _some_ liberals _do_ care about preventing COVID deaths.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com