A new theory about political polarization

Are you sure?

It seems to me if A is not not-proven, it is surely proven.

If A is still just a hypothesis, then it is not-proven, and isn't not not proven.

You should get checked out for a personality disorder.

The average person does not have training in engineering or law, and hasn't developed logical thought processes.

Arguing with somebody who doesn't use logic must feel pointless. What is the point of winning such an argument?

However, I have not seen Trump allege any cases of corruption other than investigations of Trump.

In that case, it is not so much corruption as it is political bias. But if that were the case, wouldn’t we see a disproportionate pursuit of other liberal objectives, like corporate malfeasance and voter disenfranchisement?

(Purely anecdotal) Most FBI agents I know are loudly conservative.

Basically, it seems we could A. take Trump at his word that he has not done anything wrong and that thousands of Americans have forsaken their oaths in order to pursue a nefarious plot against a leader for whom many of them voted Or B. let them do their job. If Trump has done nothing wrong, the facts will bear him out.

A lot of prominent contemporaries of Newton critisized Newton for a "magic" explanation of gravity. How Jupiter knows a mass of Sun, to be attracted to it with a proper force? We learn Newton's theory in a school when we are not developed mentally enough to question Newton's theory, so we just accept it as an authority gives it to us. Then we become accustomed to it and it feels ok to Jupiter to know mass of Sun, so we do not question it when becoming wiser. But it is a stupid thing really. Einstein's explanation with the bent space-time is much better.

I do not mean to mock Newton, to state that he was wrong and his critics were right. I'm trying to say that the lack of explanation is not a fatal thing for a theory. Critics of Newton were right, but Newton was right also.

The real achievement of Newton is to 'trivialization' of a problem, he picked mass as a leading factor and ignored all other possible factors, like brightness, size, visible size on the sky, albedo, inner structure, material, density, etc. Newton picked mass, wrote his law, and managed to prove that Kepler's law could be derived from Newton's law.

The discussed theory of political polarization do a very similar thing: it picks just one factor and describes facts with it, ignoring a lot of other factors. It is trivialization of a problem. I didn't thoroughly read the article, but it seems for me that authors propose a quantitative measures of a polarization and their model is able to predict them. They do worse than Newton because they didn't invent a whole new branch of math to prove that other models could be derived from their's. But does it makes their achievement nonexistent?

> the recognition that, for example, a dog and a wolf are the same type of thing was in and of itself non-obvious.

I'm not sure about this. The trouble is I was born at the era when the relation between a dog and a wolf was obvious. Maybe this make it impossible to me to believe that this couldn't be obvious. It seems for me that it is obvious that similar species are similar. Even if we do not state explicitly that they are related, we feel it already, so when stated it feels obvious. The non-obvious is when dissimilar species are related.

So I don't know was it obvious that a dog and a wolf are the same type, though I could make a testable prediction to check it: if Linnaean taxonometry was non-obvious, than there had to be an outrage of contemporaries. Only obvious things are accepted by everyone.

> What I think you are trying to describe is a model, which is a system of understanding information without necessarily explaining it.

Yes, almost. One small correction: it is not understanding, it is just a mnemonic, which makes it relatively easy to file information and to retrieve it. The resulting understanding is a 'fake' one, people feel it like they understand, but really there are no understanding behind this feeling.

Her statements are certainly true, however they don't support her argument at all--they just attack the status quo. If you read her arguments out of context, would you think that she was arguing for less funding for the system that is failing our women across the country? After all, you can't "redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs" while still funding law enforcement at anywhere near similar levels. Her argument amounts to 'Rape is bad. The system hasn't solved it, so we don't need the system.'

This is dangerous nonsense. If the system is ineffective, it's fine to replace it. But it should be replaced by a system which will give better results. Ms. Kaba provides no evidence that any alternative will give better results. We're expected to gamble the safety of millions of people around the country on a point of progressive dogma.

Ms. Kaba's position reminds me of a parable. In the olden days, as the story goes, a (not so wise) king grew concerned about the plight of his people. Plague was sweeping across the country, killing the poor in droves. The king asked for more information on the problem at hand, and an advisor brought him a table of figures. He reviewed the figures, and saw a correlation! The provinces where the most people were dying were also the provinces where there were the most physicians! The issue was clear; the solution simple. The physicians were clearly the cause of the plague. All he had to do to save his people was get rid of all of the damned physicians.

This 'defund the police' malarkey strikes me as the same kind of unthinking gut reaction.