Asymmetrical Processing of Ideas: Part 1

In connection with theories that the recent presidential election was fraudulent (with which I strongly disagree), I've had some discussions recently about how people can become very mistaken about reality, holding theories as certainties when the actual evidence for those theories are very thin.  Someone commented that they wondered whether people who do this were just unaware of the concepts of burden of proof or Ockham's Razor (aka the "principle of parsimony").

I disagreed, for the reason that I believe you can usually see a perfectly good understanding of those principles in operation when the person is critiquing someone else's theories.

The problem is therefore not a lack of understanding of correct intellectual procedures, but a radical asymmetry in the application of those procedures. Theories that fit into a certain a priori favored worldview are subjected to token scrutiny only, while anything that challenges that worldview is subjected to skepticism of the most stringent kind. I think there are several common manifestations of this:

1. A too-complete rejection of arguments coming from entire classes of people because they are of the opposition. "Wait, you're seriously quoting something from the Washington Post? LOL! Don't you know you can't trust anything they say?" Or, "I only need to see somebody quote from Matt Walsh to know I can safely ignore anything they ever say again."
2. The complement to this: an extreme generosity in forgiving the failures of someone or some set of ideas because they pushed some idea or goal that is very important to you. "Fr. So-and-so is accused of sexual molestation?? But he's a conservative priest who loves Latin . . . this must be a setup." Or, "OK, so yeah, some people have taken this ideology to an extreme and it resulted in socialist hell-holes of a country. But this is *so* much more generous to the poor, there must be some good in it we can keep!"
3. Excessive focusing on one aspect of a theory you like that you know to be true, while ignoring crucial parts that are way less certain. "The media is absolutely biased against conservatives, and they hate Trump with a passion. This would need to be the case for a widespread conspiracy to defraud Trump of the election to be successful. Therefore, it's reasonable to believe that this is absolutely happening!" Or, "The actions of this policeman against this black man is an obvious, complete outrage. It's reasonable to believe that the police in general are a complete hotbed of racism and hatred!" Emotionally, you can take certainty in one thing and spread it out to a lot of related things, without a rational justification.
4. The complement to the above, finding one aspect of your opponent's argument that you know with certainty is false and focusing excessively on it, but without questioning how badly this error damages the overall argument. Not all flaws in an argument are fatal, but to someone determined to reject an argument, oftentimes any flaw is sufficient reason to throw away the whole thing in disgust.
5. Radical disengagement from people or activities that could give you sources of information that support your opponent's argument over yours. The time someone is willing to spend listening to his opponent, or looking for evidence that will support his opponent, is a fantastic indication of how objective he is willing to be overall. For the social media conspiracist, the amount of time he is willing to spend reading lengthy, often repetitive treatises from his favorite internet talking heads is usually vastly greater than the time he is willing to spend reading opposing viewpoints.

I would like to look at examples of all of these types of thinking in the current social media debate over the Capitol Building riot.  Since I am in the camp of "Trump deserves to be impeached for what he instigated" and "the violence of this riot was primarily coming from extremists who have been part of the Trump movement, not primarily from leftist plants", I am going to try to make more of an effort to find examples of this type of asymmetric thinking from proponents of these viewpoints.  However, I will be looking at this from both sides as well.