Political orientations do not cancel out, and politics is not about truth.

Duarte et al. propose that divergent political biases cancel each other out such that increasing political diversity will improve scientific validity. We argue that this idea is misguided.

Independent decisions are fictional from a psychological perspective.

Contrasting independent with socially influenced decision making does not capture crucial differences in decision making. Independence is fictional, and social influences substantially permeate preference construction. A distinction between deliberate and intuitive decision making would be more useful, and the problem in the big-data era is deciding when it is better to rely on deliberation and when to trust one's intuitions.