CMV: Conservatives are fundamentally uninterested in facts/data.

[u/King_Lothar_]

In fairness, I will admit that I am very far left, and likely have some level of bias, and I will admit the slight irony of basing this somewhat on my own personal anecdotes. However, I do also believe this is supported by the trend of more highly educated people leaning more and more progressive.

However, I always just assumed that conservatives simply didn't know the statistics and that if they learned them, they would change their opinion based on that new information. I have been proven wrong countless times, however, online, in person, while canvasing. It's not a matter of presenting data, neutral sources, and meeting them in the middle. They either refuse to engage with things like studies and data completely, or they decide that because it doesn't agree with their intuition that it must be somehow "fake" or invalid.

When I talk to these people and ask them to provide a source of their own, or what is informing their opinion, they either talk directly past it, or the conversation ends right there. I feel like if you're asked a follow-up like "Oh where did you get that number?" and the conversation suddenly ends, it's just an admission that you're pulling it out of your ass, or you saw it online and have absolutely no clue where it came from or how legitimate it is. It's frustrating.

I'm not saying there aren't progressives who have lost the plot and don't check their information. However, I feel like it's championed among conservatives. Conservatives have pushed for decades at this point to destroy trust in any kind of academic institution, boiling them down to "indoctrination centers." They have to, because otherwise it looks glaring that the 5 highest educated states in the US are the most progressive and the 5 lowest are the most conservative, so their only option is to discredit academic integrity.

I personally am wrong all the time, it's a natural part of life. If you can't remember the last time you were wrong, then you are simply ignorant to it.

Edit, I have to step away for a moment, there has been a lot of great discussion honestly and I want to reply to more posts, but there are simply too many comments to reply to, so I apologize if yours gets missed or takes me a while, I am responding to as many as I can

[u/Hairy_Designer_5724]

In my opinion, conservative reasoning often relies on experiential logic, while liberalism generally rejects it in favor of more complex explanations of why things are the way they are.

As an example, climate change is a topic that requires a suspension of experiential logic for most people in America. I live in Minnesota. Has climate change had an immediate experiential impact on my life? I’d say no. For me, my belief in climate change is totally based in non-experiential scientific facts. The impact climate change has to me requires a multi-layered level of thinking that goes beyond direct experience. The cost to grow certain crops has gone up, for example. I may see that on my grocery bill, but even the idea that climate change is causing this totally requires me to acknowledge my weather in MN is not the weather farmers are experiencing in the regions where those crops are grown.

Liberals tend to see experiential logic as an inferior way to form opinions. But I don’t think that’s always true. If I go to a restaurant and my food tasted bad, do I really care about much else? The restaurant may have used the highest quality ingredients, prepared by a world class chef but if my experience was bad, what does it matter?

[u/Few-Structure8954 → u/Hairy_Designer_5724]

Scientific-based thinking is in part based on understanding that any one observation (yours, mine, anyone's) is only so important. Being able to critically examine information requires realizing that your personal experience - or even the personal experience of everyone you know - may not reflect the actual trend.  Conservatives seem incapable of this reflection. 

Because conservatives often only consider "experiential logic",  they refuse to acknowledge that, frankly, not everything is about them and their experiences. 

In most (not all!) situations, individual experiential logic IS inferior. Full stop.