Thread by @asymmetricinfo

This thread is worth reading, the epistemic criss on the right is real, and yes, the mainstream media, by freaking out about Trump and abandoning normal standards, made that epistemic crisis much worse.

That said, I have some quibbles ...

https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1413165168956088321

Fundamentally, I agree that this is the story many Trump supporters/apologists tell themselves, and that too much of it is true for comfort.

But my personal experience is that at the end of the day, the story is irrelevant; they side with Trump because they hate/fear his enemies

Back them off any particular truth claim, force them to confront the inescapable evidence that it's false, and they retreat almost instantly to some total irrelevancy about how progressives are nasty and dangerous.

They may be right, but that doesn't make Trump's lies any truer.

Now, if you are a Trump opponent, you're nodding along and saying "Preach, sister". Here's the bad news: fundamentally, this is how almost everyone reasons, almost all of the time. They start from what they want to do and work backwards to the principals that will support it.

We are tribal creatures, and our reasoning skills are optimized for getting other people in our tribe to like/respect/go along with us, not for discovering what is true about the world.

We have some institutions that mildly correct for this tendency, but the more they are captured by one side of a bitter ideological divide, the less well they will perform those corrections, and indeed, that is where we are with media, academia, etc.