Your post leads to a few curiosities, some oddities, and perhaps a dash of irony.
The 'postulate' endorsement was derived from Krugman who was troubled by Klein's VOX article which, in turn, was based a study: “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government” by Dan Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Dawson, and Paul Slovic". In following the chain backwards I found nuggets of interest.
Krugman wrote:
"What Ezra does is cite research showing that people understand the world in ways that suit their tribal identities: in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread facts in a way that confirms their biases. And more information doesn’t help: people screen out or discount facts that don’t fit their worldview. Politics, as he says, makes us stupid.
But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives... I mean (conservatives)... overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute."
I suppose Krugman was mildly chastising Klein for not going beyond the study's conclusions, given that Krugman's "lived experience" tells him that conservatives misreads the facts far more than liberals...then I discovered that Klein was exactly not about how people misread facts, so much as how they approach problem solving.
Krugman was partly misreading the article, Klein was pointing out that "Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.". In other words, according to Klein, folks did not "generally misread the facts", but that partisans went dumb when the problem suggested the opposite of what they believed - in fact:
"Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them. (Max's note: this too was inaccurate see original study comments below).
"Consider how utterly insane that is: being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right."..."Klein writes that “People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.”
But then, after reading parts of the original study, I realized that Klein also got it wrong. The authors found that when a partisan group of folks with low and high numeracy skills are provided with a problem that appears to confirm their bias, they stop thinking and readily accept it even though it was wrong. When a problem appeared to conflict their beliefs, the partisan used their numeracy skills to look critically, and were then more likely to get the answer right. The politics did not become polarized, just that the chances of solving a problem when the problem appeared to confirm a bias was much less than when it appeared to contradict bias. And those with higher numeracy skills were, naturally, far more likely to get it right.
Interesting...how the problem of objectively reading an original study, on bias in problem solving, is itself distorted by bias in problem solving.
Hmmmm...
