The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Pauline Kael Lives!
“A finding in a study on the relationship between science literacy and political ideology surprised the Yale professor behind it: Tea party members know more science than non-tea partiers,” Politico reports. Dan Kahan, who teaches law, “wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him”:
“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.
“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv–& I don’t watch Fox News very often–and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post [sic] and Politico). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”
Pauline Kael
It’s reminiscent of Pauline Kael, The New Yorker’s film critic who confessed after the 1972 election that she knew only one person who voted for [the winner of the presidential election, Republican] Richard Nixon.
Kahan added, in Politico’s words, that Kahan said “the results wouldn’t change his negative views of the tea party.” That in itself is an interesting datum in the study of cognitive bias among intellectuals.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists. [Note: the excerpt above is from the Oct. 18 BOTW archives.]
