I don’t think it’s about powerful people or personality cults. The same dynamic surely can be observed in any communities (interest groups, even families), wher

I don’t think it’s about powerful people or personality cults. The same dynamic surely can be observed in any communities (interest groups, even families), where people take sides based on personalities rather than facts about events alone. It’s just less prominent, but same overall phenomena - the bias exists, and there are cases where it becomes severe and nearly unconditional. It’s easy to dismiss PG with “SV techbros are nuts”, but that could be (or could be not, but there’s a risk) the same identity over substance bias manifestation. To de-bias, we should look where the class/status/social-circle identity becomes unimportant. There’s a theory that our reasoning had evolved not for truth-seeking purposes but for a social cohesion, but I haven’t yet read well about it (“The enigma of reason” is on my reading list) to form an informed opinion.