> Not entirely accurate, in my opinion. You should realize most issues brought up as arguments between left and right are publicized in order to substantiate a (mostly ficticious) divide between the left and right, and thereby prevent cooperation on instituting solutions that would likely disrupt established power structures.

My take is that yes, on the surface there is a great deal of theatrics/pantomime in politics. Once you have an established thing, then the political dance steps become ever more formalized.

However I can't agree that the left/right divide is mostly fictitious. I believe it stems from deep history in our genetics and our environment. The left/right is really one tribe with a permanent civil war. My hypothesis is that this internal struggle is the defining characteristic of successful civilizations, and that groups of humans without this dynamic have died out. It is obviously wasteful of intellectual resources so why does it exist? Some hints may be; famously it is easier for individuals to spot flaws in others than of themselves. Also many questions about resource allocation for example are binary in nature. More distribution, less distribution, more regulation, less regulation. You can make decisions more fine grained but you can't have your cake and eat it too i.e. it's guns & butter.

> I would have to argue also, that point 2 is somewhat incorrect. The cultural attributes of liberalism are more likely derived from television, which has many orders of magnitude more influence over people's thinking than any college or school has. Don't discount the social cues adopted by peer groups which influence one's behavior, also mostly imparted through television.

I completely agree. I will demote the Academy from first order affect to a second order affect.

I want to add one caveat. Television knows full well it's a non-substantive medium. Especially compared to say, books, internet conversation or oxford style debating. Because it is aware of its intrinsic superficiality it very often will call upon experts, polls, studies and other means of affirming it's own predilections. The strongest card it uses is to call upon academics. What are the producers really saying when they do this instead of arguing from first principals which they never do? "These are the Thinking People. This is what they say and it mainly agrees with us except even more so. Therefore our political positions, our mores and habits are more than justified".

If you subtract the Academy from Television, its status descends from broadsheet to tabloid. This is one of the reasons some people prefer tabloids since they find them more honest as their bias is clear and evident. I have frequently had working class people complain to me that Television has rotted people's brains. Overall I believe it to be a Net Loss to society.

> Perhaps your 3rd point is the most accurate of the stated reasons. But, even then, your final conclusion leaves me disturbed. There is no reason to distrust verifiable facts when they are presented, and I don't think right-wingers are any more prone to ignorance than left-wingers. What is rotten in the entire matter is that the industries attached to that science, and governments that employ science for the same reason, as a tool, with which to procure economic benefits from market participants.

It IS disturbing. It is disturbing that in 1900 there were about 1000 physicists and today there are about 1000000 but I believe it's safe to say we don't exactly have 1000x the number of theoretically interesting or practically useful results. String theory is almost certain to be intellectual masturbation. Even without government and corporate entities biasing research by funding (huge systemic problem), it is an uncomfortable realization that probably the handful of scientists working with aristocratic benefactors had a vastly higher productive output than the average modern day scientists. Yes, time is a factor that makes the people who stand out, stand even more out, but you've also to consider that most people who existed are forgotten and that today there exists much more wealth and technology. At its most dire in the present we have Eroom's Law, whereby medical discoveries are happening at an exponentially declining rate[1] despite also exponentially declining costs in the tools of discovery: x-ray crystallography and genome sequencing. This same pattern is replicated in dozens of major areas of science and engineering, namely that basic research is withering. It's not a recent thing either.

The most not-talked-about thing is something that doesn't exist. If we are living in a time of progress we should be seeing many NEW inventions and scientific discoveries in fields that are totally new. But we don't really. Something that doesn't exist is hard to measure, but if the Singularity people were correct then we should be seeing a Cambrian explosion of new science, new invention, and we aren't. Marc Andreessen claims that software is eating the world, and he's right, but how is it that people who have zero credibility in a specific domain are able to continually whip the ass off the domain experts time and time again (e.g. discovering new types of astronomical observation and dramatically better medical analysis)? I mean some computer people are very very switched on, but I'm starting to wonder if something more elemental than having a quantity of computer cycles is at play. Is it possible that a large number of disciplines has stopped doing science a long time ago and nobody noticed? Is the quality of the modern scientist just poorer in some way? If they were analytical, they would be good at their job. If they were creative, they could create new interdisciplinary fields. If they were good communicators, they could stich the former two together. If they are neither good analytical thinkers, creative thinkers or communicators, then perhaps they are really bureaucrats at worst or technicians at best.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....