I’ve already discussed those between hard-core believers that UFOs are aliens and election denialists. Here are some more:
How the pursuit of maximized safety with the backdrop of disaster hyperbole strangled the development of nuclear energy and the risk the same will happen with AI developments. Those who
forgetcarbon copy the past . . .Support for price controls (especially on the right as a new development) and the growing anti-vax movement. The parallel is how both are in opposition to expert consensus. One is anathema to economists as the other is to doctors. (Credit for this one goes to Allison Schrager.) The idea that prices that are “too high” and prices that are “too low” can be costlessly corrected by laws in defiance of economic reality is absurd. For example, rent control and anti-price gouging in the case of “too high” and minimum wages in the case of “too low”. The idea that vaccines either don’t work or cause more harm than good full stop is equally absurd.
O.J. Simpson’s murdering & subsequent “search for the real killers” and the Jeffrey Epstein saga & the decades-long, pedo-mania moral panic stretching back to the fictional satanic cabals in Seattle and including Pizzagate.
Confusion between nominal versus real variables and confusion between stocks versus flows. Failure to adjust for inflation or other scaling leads people to draw very dumb comparisons especially but not only over time. Similarly not understanding the difference between a stock and a flow leads to dumb comparisons like the market capitalization of Apple or NVIDIA versus the GDP of Texas or Canada.
Effective defensive use of drone warfare against foreign aggressors in both the cases of Ukraine and Iran. I am not paralleling the aggressors in these cases. One way it is interesting is how in one case it is lauded while in the other it is downplayed depending on one’s position in each war. Another way is how it is seen as heroic or underhanded depending again on one’s position. One should not put a variable normative judgment on the matter.
Support for foreign aid and other endeavors within struggling emergent economies rather than outright immigration as a means to help the global poor and support for donor kidney exchange mechanisms rather than free markets in organ sales as a means of helping people who need organ transplants. In both cases the superior solution is passed over for the inferior substitute.
The Puritanical prudish Zeitgeist of American culture and the intolerance for Islamic traditions that are otherwise in congruence with the former. It seems that purity is perfidy when it doesn’t match one’s culture.
Independently (and usually mutually exclusively for one or the other position) holding certain belief that banning guns or holding certain belief that banning drugs will lead to a significantly safer and better world. The truth is the world is much more complicated and nuanced than that.
Substack referenced: