Mother Jones: The more liberals and conservatives know about science, the more they have wildly variant views about the risks of global warming, according to research by Yale's Dan Kahan. You might call it the "smart idiot" effect--knowledge, itself, seems to make people with diametrically opposed views more sure that they're right, and thus worsens the political fight over what is actually scientifically true.
And recent research suggests that the smart idiot effect isn't limited to climate change--it also...