Thanks for posting this. I'm reminded of the Politics as Mind-killer phenomenon. I attempt to generalize it as:

"Once the question of resource allocation starts to hinge on certain facts, people have a huge impetus to argue for the facts being in whatever way serves them, no matter how logically independent those facts are from their values."

So if some issue of public debate hinged on whether 1+1=2, you would find amazingly good arguments for why it's wrong, if people stood to gain from an implication of it being wrong.

The two important lessons to draw are:

1) In the pursuit of truth, you must always be on the lookout for the motive force of the resource-seeking that hinges on not finding the truth.

2) As in the link above, human thought does not naturally and neatly divide into beliefs and values: the values can yank beliefs "along for the ride", so speak.