I get half of my political news and analysis from a great podcast called Left Right & Center. (The other half is from Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square.) LR&C is an ongoing conversation between three guys from different political perspectives on what’s happened this week, and has been very valuable for the development of my own political thinking.
The other day, I was listening to another great podcast, This Week in Microbiology, and it hit me that these two shows have the exact same format. TWiM is also an ongoing conversation between three guys about the news of the week. The superficial difference is that TWiM is about bacteria and LR&C is about US politics.
The more abstract difference between these two podcasts, though, is that Left, Right & Center is an excercise in outcome-irrelevant learning, while This Week in Microbiology is an exercise in outcome-relevant learning. That is to say, the empirical events of the week change the opinions of the TWiM guys but almost never change the opinions of the LR&C guys. This is a huge difference. On TWiM, when there is a disagreement, they look up what is known about the issue and almost immediately come to an agreement based on facts: either one person is right and the other wrong, or else we really don’t yet know the answer to that question.
On LR&C, when there is disagreement (which there is on every topic), each fact that comes into the conversation is either disputed or used to proove each person’s own point. In politics, the facts are basically irrelevant. Makes me wonder why it remains so interesting.
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 
July 6, 2013 at 7:11 pm
This is a neat observation. It strikes me that on LR&C, the roles being played by the three eponymous speakers are prescribed by the format (even the title) of the podcast. If one of them should radically change their politics as a learning outcome, they’d have to leave. Or at least rename the podcast. And it seems very telling that we have a number of shows (Crossfire, etc.) in this format that suggest: “this is fair and balanced because we have an X and Y and a Z”, while we’re very suspicious of anyone saying “look, all the Xs who spend much time thinking about it wind up as Zs, so we don’t need an X on this show.”
Technical: your link to “outcome-irrelevant learning” links back to this article. Is that what it’s supposed to do?
July 7, 2013 at 11:00 pm
As I understand it (it was before my time for the show), that very thing happened except the switcher was not fired. I think Arianna Huffington was the voice of the right on the show for quite a while before some kind of conversion experience put her into a liberal-leaning independent category. They kept her on until she quit to run Newsweek, they just added a new righty. So for many years it was three guys, LR&C, and Huffington.
Thanks for the heads up on the link. I’ve fixed it. It is supposed to link to an essay called “Three Predictions.”
February 28, 2015 at 10:31 am
[…] a question I thought the folks on This Week In Microbiology (which I’ve written about here and here) might be able to answer. I emailed them and they did so, at the end of episode 73. I thought the […]
June 3, 2017 at 12:14 pm
[…] Left, Right & Center – Weekly political analysis from a liberal, conservative, and centrist. This show taught me that political analysis is all about outcome-irrelevant learning. […]