And yes, the question "what has been observed that doesn't fit your thesis?" is the right one. I'm reading Jon Haidt's Substack series now on the impact of social media on mental health, and I appreciate that he leads off with a discussion of some studies that show no impact. He may still be using motivated reasoning when he talks about why he thinks those studies are flawed or superseded, but the fact that he's putting them front and center in the first place, not buried in a footnote or glossed over entirely, already puts him in 95+ percentile for truth seeking practice.
And for the same reason I appreciate your leading with substantive criticisms and only then discussing convenience/inconvenience of factual claims. I try to stay away from the "wouldn't it be awfully convenient for your worldview to believe that" kind of argument for just the reason I think you're getting at here: we all have things we want to believe about the world, and we all put our mental thumbs on the scale when it comes to observations that reinforce vs challenging those things, and pointing out when your outgroup does that can easily slide into implicitly flattering yourself that you're the exception. Man, the stories I'm sure we both could tell about libertarians-- including, certainly, my own more-doctrinairely-libertarian former self-- making factual claims that in retrospect were completely ridiculous, but made it so much easier to believe that our ideology didn't come with hard tradeoffs!
Thanks for the book review!
And yes, the question "what has been observed that doesn't fit your thesis?" is the right one. I'm reading Jon Haidt's Substack series now on the impact of social media on mental health, and I appreciate that he leads off with a discussion of some studies that show no impact. He may still be using motivated reasoning when he talks about why he thinks those studies are flawed or superseded, but the fact that he's putting them front and center in the first place, not buried in a footnote or glossed over entirely, already puts him in 95+ percentile for truth seeking practice.
And for the same reason I appreciate your leading with substantive criticisms and only then discussing convenience/inconvenience of factual claims. I try to stay away from the "wouldn't it be awfully convenient for your worldview to believe that" kind of argument for just the reason I think you're getting at here: we all have things we want to believe about the world, and we all put our mental thumbs on the scale when it comes to observations that reinforce vs challenging those things, and pointing out when your outgroup does that can easily slide into implicitly flattering yourself that you're the exception. Man, the stories I'm sure we both could tell about libertarians-- including, certainly, my own more-doctrinairely-libertarian former self-- making factual claims that in retrospect were completely ridiculous, but made it so much easier to believe that our ideology didn't come with hard tradeoffs!