Transcription
There's a graphic floating around the magosphere and it's one of the most insidious forms of misinformation I've ever seen because at face value it looks smart and I've seen it posted hundreds of times. I've even seen people dedicate entire videos to it.
The responses are consistently underwhelming because it's actually pretty easy to debunk once you take it out of the abstract. So that's what we're going to do and you've probably seen this floating around. There is more diversity of thought on the political right than on the political left.
The author claims that we pride ourselves on open-mindedness, but in reality, liberal thinking coalesces around a narrow set of opinions, which is already kind of a weird thing to say because opinions is plural for opinion, not just opinion. But the point still stands and at a glance, people might look at this and say, "Oh, no. The left is narrow-minded without appreciating the fact that we are not looking at diversity of thought. What we're looking at is diversity of unfounded opinion."
Let's take the sun for example. If you ask a person, "What is the sun made of?" Not unlike asking a daycare full of three-year-olds. This guy on the right says, "I think it's made of lava." This person says, "I think it's a god punishing us for our sins." This person says, "I think it's my dad who died 10 years ago." And this person way up here says, "I think it's fireworks that got trapped in a very thin layer of gas on the outside of the earth."
Meanwhile, a woman with a PhD in astrophysics from over here walks into the room and says, "It's actually just a fusion reaction. It's not fire or lava or spirits." And then these people who all appreciate how fun it is to be part of a bandwagon fallacy, even though they can't define it or spell it, say something like, "Oh, look at this big academic heathen feminist over here. She just believes whatever big science tells her. The fact is when you have a completely untested hypothesis, this approach is smart. But when you have settled science, this is where you want to be. Because this mess is nothing more than a collection of untested hypotheses. Whereas these opinions are overwhelmingly the result of peer-reviewed scientific research. These people move human evolution forward. Whereas these people are those videos of like 20 hamsters on a wheel or half of them went flipping off into the walls and one really crazy one is hurdling three others that are holding on for dear life. Meanwhile, none of them take the time to notice that a scientist opened the door to the cage 3 hours ago."