A skeptic, rationalist, scientist, or anyone who applies critical thinking will come to an issue, assess the available data, then leave with a conclusion that is supported by the evidence. Then there’s the ideological extremists who come to an issue with a conclusion, cherry pick the data for what supports their predetermined conclusion, then leave with more misinformation to spread.

You get definitely get this on the far right.

There’s the religious who look for anecdotes to support their beliefs. They ignore claims of miracles and religious experiences from the followers of other religions (or call it the work of the devil), but accept all the ones from their own. They will accept events that correlate with their prayers as divinely answered prayers, but ignore all the ones where things didn’t go how they wanted. If someone gets medical treatment and recovers from a severe illness and people prayed, they will ignore the skill of the physician and effectiveness of the treatment that caused the recovery and instead credit the prayer.

You also get it from creationists who will find anything that calls into doubt even a shred of current (or even past) evolutionary theory or geologic time and pounce on it as if it would destroy the whole thing. They don’t try to form a theory, they just try to poke holes in the scientific theory, often with elements of the theory that have already been discarded. Heck, they’ll even look at the fact that the theory is changing and routinely being updated and revised and see it as a flaw. They find presuppositions comforting and a constant effort to be more correct scary.

You will see this from the climate change denialists or anthropogenic climate change denialists who will look at a cold winter or a cool summer as discrediting global warming, in spite of the fact that the climate models predict more extreme weather and are looking at long term trends, not individual seasons or regions. The ones who just don’t think it’s human caused will look at all the other factors that contribute to warming, such as volcanic greenhouse gas emissions and solar cycles, and think those factors have much more impact on the big picture over what we can do, without taking into account how big of an impact even the slightest changes in climate are already having on humanity and how much worse it will get.

Then there’s the conspiracy theorists who are all over the crazy spectrum, but they are convinced that everyone is out to get them. Therefore the government and big businesses are behind everything. Any discrepancy in an official report, any uncertainty, or any anomaly points to a sloppy cover up while  the complete lack of evidence looks too clean. Of course, it would be comforting to think that the government had everything under control and that a band of religious extremists weren’t able to take over airliners. It would be comforting to think that there aren’t really dangerous illnesses and horrifying diseases, but instead the pharmaceutical companies were behind all of it. At least then someone would be in control and this world wouldn’t be as chaotic as it really is.

Of course you can find the nutjobs on the left as well.

There’s the anti-vaccination movement who cherry pick data from safety and efficacy studies, completely misunderstand how vaccines are produced, and cite anecdotes about not getting sick when not getting vaccinated or having some unrelated problem around the time of a vaccine. They’ll talk about the toxins present in vaccines and the horrible effects they can have in high enough quantities, quantities that are not contained in vaccines. They’ll talk about how, to use the influenza vaccine as an example, they aren’t effective in infants, therefore they don’t work, even though they do work quite well in adults and the fact that they aren’t effective in infants makes it even more important for the adults who come into contact with them to get vaccinated. They’ll also cite examples of people getting coming down with or being diagnosed with illness or condition X shortly after receiving vaccination Y, even though there is no relation between them (i.e. you start showing symptoms of a cold the day after getting the flu shot, therefor the vaccine must have made you sick). They’ll also spread misinformation about what’s in vaccines, such as claiming that vaccines which contain isolated surface antigens actually contain live virus, something that is patently false.

Then there’s the organic food movement. They claim that pesticides, genetically modified food, preservatives, and sometimes even pasteurization will make you sick, give you cancer, or otherwise be unhealthy. This is in spite of not having evidence to support those claims. It’s basically a paranoia about the developments of the 20th century that has allowed us as a species to feed ourselves, given our current size. Without pesticides, crop yields would be significantly lower and as long as you wash your produce, the trace amounts of pesticides aren’t anything to worry about. Genetic modification is how we have developed food crops and livestock since the agricultural revolution. Sure, for the first 10,000 years or so the technique was restricted to artificial selection, but modern science has allowed for the direct manipulation of genes. Preservatives are that wonderful invention (now that we have more than just salt) that allow for food to stay fresher longer, that way we aren’t dependent on local growing seasons to have some variety in our diets.

We can’t forget about alt-med. It’s amazing that there are people who don’t trust treatments with proven and documented safety and efficacy and would rather take a placebo, rather than real medicine. Sure, a placebo isn’t likely to hurt you, but if you’re up against something your body can’t fight on its own, then taking a placebo instead of the real thing is a really dangerous idea and marketing at anything other than a placebo is false advertising.

As you can see, there are nutjobs on both sides of the ideological spectrum and for the life of me I can’t figure out their apparent hatred for modernity and science. It’s truly baffling.