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i wonder how much the following hypothesis is true. it's obviously not completely true, but maybe there is some value in contemplating it.
for most issues that people have expended a lot of effort arguing about, if you could truly impartially reason through it, run experiments, etc, the correct answer is either not that hard to figure out, or that we're pretty sure we can't know one way or the other. but the discourse is fucked because the vast majority (maybe literally all) of people have some bottom line they're already sympathetic to, and smart people can make plausible sounding arguments for any conclusion, and so truly reasoning things through impartially is both very hard to do and even if you somehow manage to do it, it's hard to signal that you did so, and anyways people with motivated reasoning will only listen to you if your answer happened to agree with theirs.
the main evidence i have for this hypothesis is that there are questions where one side is overwhelmingly obviously correct if you actually think about it or look into it, and yet, there is the appearance of a balanced public debate.
the main evidence against this hypothesis is that probably people who disagree also think they're overwhelmingly obviously correct, and it seems arrogant to declare that i am simply more correct, and in any case oftentimes people disagreeing are wrong but their disagreement still contains enough of a kernel of truth to be worth thinking about.
In my experience, there aren't many such debates where the correct answer readily leaps to the surface if you look for it. It's more that the correct answer is obvious once you find it, but if you're in a poor epistemic environment, the answer is hard to find even if you're looking for it.
For example, the literal veracity of Christianity is hard to determine if everyone you know is a devout Christian, even if you're not biased at all by wanting to believe what other people believe.
I don't think AI water usage fits the pattern. People keep repeating the line "AI uses a lot of water", and making political cartoons about AI slurping up all the water in the world, but I don't remember anyone ever arguing for it being true.
This is in contrast to religion, price fixing and possibility of AGI, where you can in fact find smart people making long and complicated arguments on both sides.
4leogao
here are 3 links that argue for AI water consumption being a big problem that i found in like 5 minutes. they aren't good arguments, but they go beyond just asserting it.
https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/FSW_2602_AI_Water_Energy_UPDATE.pdf