>Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.
It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias".
I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts.
And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.
Collecting plastic to recycle is almost certainly not worth the fuel and labor it takes, it gets landfilled more often than not. We’d be better off collecting only separated PET and HDPE and landfilling the rest.
> or dangers associated with nuclear power
Nuclear power is the safest method of power generation that uses steam or gas to spin a turbine.
I'm also left to center and I agree with you on all three! I think left-wing examples are subtler and hard to identify. Even among among Democrats left of center types and liberals, the examples I cited are minority opinions, but likely to be systematically found on the left, a phenomenon which won't be negated by the self-report of one person correctly tracking the facts (and to be clear, I think you are correctly tracking the facts on each of these!).
Agreed, I know a fair amount of left leaning people who think everything they put in a recycling bin is dutifully recycled down the line and that nuclear power is more dangerous than it actually is. People on the left (including myself!) can let their emotions outweigh factual evidence as easily as people on the right. I also agree that just because you and I are left leaning and understand the factual position on the examples you mentioned doesn’t mean much, we’ve both met plenty of counter examples to ourselves.
I suspect the left wing examples of believing an emotional argument instead of a factual one are more subtle because they aren’t as focused on negative emotions as right wing examples.
I think Nuclear power is an interesting case and can be usefully contrasted with say vaccine denial. The anti nuclear position is one that was certainly correct at someone point in time and retains many good arguments that require technical chops to untangle and requires one to come to many other technically challenging conclusions to come to the arguably correct position.
Vaccine denial requires one to ignore decades of fairly simple positions about which no expert credibly disagrees nor has in our lifetime.
It's like watching 2 packs of athletes some of which are failing to clear 1 meter hurdles whilst on the other side some are tripping on little nubs set in the floor.
It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias".
I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts.
And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.