Of Politics and Science

"...there is a fundamental difference between science and politics. In fact, I've come to view them more and more as opposites.
"In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined. The march toward scientific progress is not always straightforward, and some well-regarded (even 'consensus') theories are later proved wrong -- but either way science tends to move toward the truth.
"In politics, by contrast, we seem to be growing ever further away from consensus. The amount of polarization between the two parties in the United States House, which had narrowed from the New Deal through the 1970s, had grown by 2011 to be the worst that it had been in at least a century."

-- Nate Silver (from "The Signal and the Noise")