At least one of the two is not a truth-seeker

Ron Jeremy, possibly the world's most famous male porn star, has had regular debates across the United States with Craig Gross, pastor of xxxChurch, which tries to help folks stop watching pornography. Writes Gross:

I started XXXchurch.com 8 years ago, created a software called X3watch that is keeping almost 1 million people accountable online and I am most often known as the Porn Pastor. I have only had sex with one woman who happens to be my wife.

Ron says we are just alike. He has been with 5,000 women and I have been with my wife of 12 years almost 5,000 times.

Just alike… Well not really.

Ron is for porn and I am against porn. We are opponents on stage. In fact we have debated each other over 60 times in the last 4 years. We have debated at Yale, Ohio State, University of Southern California, Texas Tech, and in a few weeks we start the school year off with another debate at the University of Tennessee.

They have debated each other over sixty times.

It would be interesting to see those sixty debates and whether either debater's opening position changed at all in response to the other's position. They have failed to iterate to a joint position after dozens and dozens of repeated arguments about the same issue. At least one of them is not a truth-seeker (and see here).

Also interesting: lots of secular venues like universities will host these debates but very few churches will:

Why is the church so afraid to hear the other side? I think it would be a great outreach to bring the debate to a church but every time I pitch it to a church or Christian college they say, "We could never let him on stage at church."

I don't get it. But then again, these are often the same people who say I should not even be friends with him, let alone on a tour bus with him. I know Zacchaeus was a short dude in the Bible but how can we overlook that story and see the example Jesus set for us to go after people?

Two friends of mine, Miles McPherson and Ryan Meeks have agreed to do the unthinkable. On October 9, Ron and I will do the unthinkable and head over to The Rock, a church in San Diego. A few months later on March 5 we will bring the debate to Eastlake Church in Seattle, Washington.

Universities are at least nominally committed to truth seeking. Churches, less so.

It would be interesting to have before and after audience polling to see how many folks changed positions post-debate across the different venues.

Media bias

Aren't blogs terrible - just echo chambers where folks find news that fits their ideological slant rather than unbiased opinion.

Turns out that the mainstream media's no better. Gentzgow and Shapiro find that ideological language used in newspapers (death tax vs estate tax, for example) responds directly in a profit-maximizing way to the partisan makeup of the paper's local readership.

In this paper, we develop and estimate a new measure of slant that compares the use of partisan language in newspapers with that of Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Our measure is computable with a minimum of subjective input, is related to readers’ subjective ratings of newspaper slant, and is available for newspapers representing over 70 percent of the daily circulation in the United States.

Combining our measure with zip code-level circulation data, we show that consumer demand responds strongly to the fit between a newspaper’s slant and the ideology of potential readers, implying an economic incentive for newspapers to tailor their slant to the ideological predispositions of consumers. We document such an effect and show that variation in consumer preferences accounts for roughly one-fifth of the variation in measured slant in our sample.

By contrast, we find much less evidence for a role of newspaper owners in determining slant.

So, stop pointing fingers at evil Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner and look in the mirror. It's far more likely that YOU'RE the one to blame. Maybe you and I can self-deceive into thinking we only want (provide) unbiased information, and that we're of the enlightened few who really are truth-seekers. But it's bloody hard work. Heck, even our preferred choice of experts seems driven by our priors.

It's impossibly unlikely that enough folks ever would become truth-seekers that media bias will go away: newspapers have too high of fixed costs ever to cater solely to truth-seekers. Blogs may well be your only hope, contra the usual story. So long as you're a truth seeker. Go read some Overcoming Bias and repent. In the meantime, try to cultivate a shame function that's more strongly increasing in being accused of motivated reasoning than of disloyalty.