[Part of the debate around: Conflict Vs. Mistake] [Criticizing articles like: In defence of conflict theory, Conservatives As Moral Mutants (part of me feels like the link is self-trigger-warning, but I guess I will just warn you that this is not a clever attention-grabbing title, the link means exactly what it says and argues it at some length)] [Related to: Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?, The Cowpox of Doubt, Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons] [Epistemic effort: I thought of this argument and was so pleased by my own cleverness that I decided to post it.] [Note: I have a nagging feeling I’ve spent a thousand words spelling out something completely obvious. Still, I hope there’s value in actually spelling it out.] There has been a flurry of discussion around the nature of political conflict in the rationality movement for the last five months, sparked by a blog post by Scott Alexander on his blog Slate Star Codex making a dichotomy between mistake theorists who think their political opponents are mistaken on factual policy questions and conflict theorists who think their political opponents are innately evil. There have been a lot of good articles on the subject on every side and on both the object-level and the meta-level (well, on both the meta-level and the meta-meta-level), but also many bad ones resting on mistakes (I know, I am showing my side here). One class of pro-conflict-theory arguments that bother me a lot goes like this: > Mistake theory can't be the correct worldview because, for example, it's historically documented that tobacco companies hired scientists to spread misinformation about whether smoking causes cancer instead of thinking about it in a rational way. Other historical case studies used include the rise of liberal democracy, the abolition of slavery, giving women the right to vote, the end of segregation, etc. A scientific theory that is often used in this kind of argument is J