Ira Wolfson

The Bayesian polarization literature asks how rational agents can diverge given common evidence. This is the wrong question. In real-world political environments, evidence is not common. Fox News does not show what MSNBC shows. The convergence theorems fail not because of subtle differences in priors, likelihoods, or credibility assessments, but because their central premise—shared observation—is violated at scale. The existing literature models second-order effects while ignoring the first-order cause. This paper argues that most political polarization requires no sophisticated explanation: people see different things. Interventions targeting cognition address the wrong problem. Infrastructure is the target.