> The stratifications on this are troubling.

They are, yet almost no one I know of (in leadership positions, or the general public) seems to think they're troubling enough to put any serious effort into determining with some level of certainty why there is so much stratification along political lines on so many important issues, this being only one of them. "Conservatives are uneducated" sounds about right so that's what we'll go with it seems, regardless of whether it's actually correct. That belief may be right, but it may not.

> It's not a partisan issue: we all pay these costs.

In one perspective, but as is usually the case, there are several perspectives involved. Another non-trivial perspective is that the solution requires non-partisan cooperation, and from that perspective partisanship is not only an issue, it is a crucially important issue, so we might be well served by putting some effort into understanding the true nature of it.

> Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.

For certain definitions of "more", "severe", "objectively", "true", and "frequent".

So if the problem isn't simply that "conservatives are uneducated", what else might it be? I think the answer lies in the incredibly complex manner in which people perceive the world in general, what information they consume, how they perceive that information, and how they integrate it into their personal internal overall worldview. People think they think in facts, but they actually think in stories, and in turn this affects how they consume new information.

Take this simple article as an example, and notice the variety of perspectives we see already with just a few (14 at the time of my writing) comments posted in this thread. Notice how people aren't discussing just the content of the article, but rather including related ideas from past information they have consumed and stored (the mechanics of which we do not understand) within the mental model of the world they hold in their brain. An even better example of this behavior can be seen in the recent discussion on the CDC report on vaping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20915520 Observe all the complex perspectives based on the very same "facts" in the article. Observe all the assertions of related "facts", that are actually only opinions. Observe all the mind reading.

If you start looking for this phenomenon you will notice it everywhere, and if you pay closer attention you may also notice that certain topics are particularly prone to devolving into narrative (rather than fact) based conversation. The usual suspects are obvious: religion, gender, sexuality, etc, but smoking/vaping seems to me like somewhat of an interesting outlier. The former examples are very closely tied to personal identity, but while smoking/vaping shares an identity attribute to some degree, I feel like there's some other unseen psychological issue in play that results in such high polarization of beliefs.

My guess is you and I see very different things despite consuming the very same article. I lean conservative/libertarian (generally speaking), and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.

In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article, and post commentary on ~why/how you believe you feel you consider that important on a psychological level. Psychological self-analysis is famously difficult, but even with moderate success I suspect some very interesting things would rise to the surface.