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gjm comments on Identifying bias. A Bayesian analysis of suspicious agreement between beliefs and values. - Less Wrong Discussion
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How many beliefs concern propositions which aren't probabilistically correlated with each other, though?
Also, this seems to ignore the possibility of deriving one's values from one's beliefs.
Also, this seems to ignore the possibility that people cannot research everything themselves, and therefore have to trust others to get some of their beliefs, and that if they have reason to distrust someone who happens to be using a true belief, they can justifiably distrust true beliefs. Climate change is extremely convenient for the left to promote leftist policies, to the point where anyone on the right who doesn't know a lot of science would justifiably think "the people who believe in climate change are probably engaged in motivated reasoning".
In so far as this is true, it is also true that climate change denial[1] is extremely convenient for the right. (And vice versa.)
[1] I intend this here to mean simply "denying" rather than "denying in the face of what ought to be overwhelming evidence"; there doesn't seem to be a neutral way of putting it.
This is a general phenomenon: if there are rival positions X and Y on a factual matter, which if true would support rival positions P and Q on a matter of policy, then you may suspect partisans of P of bias when they assert X, but you may equally suspect partisans of Q of bias when they assert Y. So if you are not yourself very partisan, what difference should this make to your opinions about X versus Y? It should make you treat someone's opinion about X/Y as less informative in so far as they have a partisan position on P/Q that would explain it. (But bear in mind that the causation may go X/Y -> P/Q rather than the other way around, so the appropriate discounting is less than you might naively think.)
So, in this case, you might reasonably be very suspicious about American politicians' statements about climate change, because in the US the issue is very politicized. So, where else should you look?
[2] E.g., a wealthy entity -- a government, an industry consortium, etc. -- might provide funding for climate research in ways that happen to favour employment of scientists whose views match the wealthy entity's. Those scientists may individually be perfectly unbiased, following the evidence wherever it leads, but the process that selects them may be biased.
According to this argument, you should never think that any position of someone who disagrees with you is based on motivated reasoning. Because if the reasoning is convenient for opinion X, the opposite is always convenient for ~X. For instance, "evolution is a conspiracy of scientists" is convenient for creationists, but "evolution is not a conspiracy of scientists" is convenient for non-creationists. So if you claim the former is motivated reasoning, the creationist can claim the latter is motivated reasoning.
It doesn't really work this way; the positive claim is the one that needs to be analyzed for motivated reasoning.
No; I didn't say that and if you think you can infer it from things I did say then at least one of us has made a serious error.
What I do claim is: (1) the mere fact that their position matches their values is not sufficient ground for thinking they're engaged in motivated reasoning; (2) motivated reasoning can happen (and does happen) on both sides of any issue and you shouldn't assume it's only on one side.
This is at best a heuristic (just as e.g. the notion of "the burden of proof" is). The same claim can often be cast as "positive" or "negative" without changing its content, and any claim (positive or negative) may be the result of motivated reasoning. (Stefan's paper gives right-wingers' skepticism about global warming as an example; in this thread you give left-wingers' endorsement of global warming as an example; I bet the amount of motivated reasoning going on in both cases is non-zero[1].)
[1] The amounts may be very different in the two cases.
Let's take a more careful look at your example of creationism. It is absolutely correct that "evolution is a conspiracy of scientists" is convenient for creationists, and that "evolution is not a conspiracy of scientists" is convenient for evolutionists. We can flip them around so that "positive" and "negative" change places: "evolution is an extremely well supported scientific theory and is almost certainly correct" is a positive claim. (You may notice that evolution and climate change fit the same templates.)
So the "positive versus negative" test is no use here. What else can we do? We can investigate the matter thoroughly for ourselves (in which case we no longer need to care much whether other people are engaging in motivated reasoning). We can look for less-biased populations, as I did two comments upthread, in which case we'll find plenty of devoutly religious people and non-scientists who accept evolution and very few devoutly irreligious people and scientists who reject evolution; and we'll find that in places where evolution is less "politicized" (meaning, in this case, less used as a shibboleth in arguments about religion or about the prestige of science) it's very widely accepted.
Or we can do what Stefan's paper describes (which overlaps with what I describe), and look at the extent to which people's attitudes to evolution are part of a bigger picture where whatever's hypothetically motivating them motivates other things too. Do anti-evolutionists tend also to be anti-abortion, anti-same-sex-marriage, (in the US) Republican rather than Democratic, etc.? Why, yes, they very much do, which by Stefan's heuristic suggests that their anti-evolutionism is likely to be the product of their religion. Do evolutionists tend to have positions opposite to those? Probably yes, but not to nearly the same extent.
What if we consider not religion but "prestige of science" as a possible cognition-motivator? Do evolutionists tend to accept anthropogenic climate change, quantum mechanics, general relativity, heliocentrism, etc.? Yes, but most of the things hidden under the "etc." are more or less uncontroversial, and on the actually-controversial ones (e.g., climate change) my prediction is that again we'll see more alignment with allegedly-motivating beliefs on the creationist side than on the non-creationist side.
So, it looks to me as if we can do pretty well at telling whether creationism or its reverse is more likely the result of motivated reasoning, but we need to work harder to do so than just decreeing one of them the "positive" position. Likewise with climate change. Do you disagree?
1) What is the extent? "Probably the same extent" doesn't really help you here if you don't know what it is.
2) This would suggest that the arguments for same-sex marriage were motivated reasoning 20 years ago, and the arguments for atheism were motivated reasoning 100 years ago. What the heuristic is really detecting is popularity, because unpopular beliefs tend to have much higher correlations with other beliefs.
One can often compare things better than one can quantify them individually. I expect there are more Baptist preachers in the United States than in Bolivia, but I couldn't tell you how many there are of either.
In the present case, it seems to me that almost all anti-evolutionists just happen to be adherents of conservative forms of religions like Christianity and Islam that involve a relatively recent divine creation, which happen also to have something of a tradition of opposing abortion and homosexuality. (The link with right-wing politics in the US is a bit arbitrary, and actually on further reflection that link may be weaker than I thought, because it's specifically white conservative Christianity in the US that goes with voting Republican.)
That might be true. (It's not obvious to me that it is.) But if it is, the obvious next question is: why are unpopular beliefs more highly correlated with other beliefs? The obvious candidate answers seem to me to amount to saying that unpopular beliefs are more likely to be caused by something other than the truth. E.g., an unpopular belief may correlate with other beliefs because it's held almost exclusively by a few small groups who were convinced of it by some single person, and he convinced them of a bunch of other things too. That's not the same thing as motivated reasoning, I agree, but it's got the exact same problem: it means that those beliefs are quite likely not very rationally held.
(Only "quite likely". Sometimes the single persuasive person really has spotted something important that others have missed. But the odds aren't good, especially once the belief in question has been around for a while and others have had a chance to be persuaded of it without the founder's charisma.)
The point is that even beliefs we consider correct were, when they were still unpopular, limited to a small group of people and highly correlated with other beliefs. That's how ideas spread. At one point, atheism was correlated with lots of radical ideas because all of society was religious, and atheism was so far from the status quo that nobody was going to be one without a type of conviction that would lead them to extremism in general (by their time's standards).
Do you think that support for gay marriage 20 years ago was rare but randomly distributed through the population?