Not knowing your background, I'll just say that to find Fred's score on Conservatism, you can find the divergence of each of Fred's responses from the average response in the sample for each question, multiply that by each question's factor loading on Conservatism, and then combine these together to find a score for Fred's Conservatism.
It’s almost like all the social stuff is based upon individual neuroses and what actually dictates our political system are the economic motivations of the various factions
I think your article is great and your analysis is insightful. However, I think a big problem with modern political analysis is our constraint of the two-dimensional. Part of that's practical: our media are all two-dimensional and it's difficult to communicate the z-axis.
I genuinely think our understanding of political science will advance with three-dimensional media. I don't know if a sphere or cube would be better suited to communicating things (hopefully not a torus), but there's clearly more than two important axes.
You can show three axes with color, and you can also carry out studies to verify the fourth axis as well. But that, good sir, is a story for another day.
The spiral concept is basically that humans as individuals and collectively as societies go through stages of growth. Magical thinking to mythic thinking to rational to post-modern thinking is one way to describe it. Classical liberalism was born out of the shift from mythic to rational thinking. This is why we stopped slavery e.g. For a long time this was the political battle (scientists vs. the church, for example). Then roughly in the 60s some "liberals" began to think in a post-rational way. This started as things like "All truth is constructed" and eventually became a somewhat unhealthy extreme identity politics, the extremes of "Nobody can tell me what pronouns to use" type thinking. Meanwhile some "conservatives" moved from a mythic (racist, sexist) worldview to a rational worldview -- these are the neocons, the Republicans who want progress and liberty. Anyways the point is less about the specifics and more about the concept of growing through stages, where each next stage transcends and includes the one before it. There are roughly three main stages that would map to our parties today, and then a fourth "post-post-modern" stage which on an individual level is probably what explains the "open to psychedelics" in your survey results.
Interesting. That is perhaps a spiral of cultural change rather than merely political change. But I am interested in the relationship between culture and political values; if I am lucky, I will be able to better test the kinds of ideas you describe someday.
This was enlightening. This 3rd dimension, the idealism/realism dimension explains so much. That's how you know it's a true insight. When it makes sense of previously confusing and seemingly contradictory information. I think this will really change my view of the political arena. I wonder if you have any age data that might shed light on whether people tend to become more realist as they get older? My intuition says yes, modestly but a hunch is just a hunch.
If true, this association between age and idealistic conservatism dovetails well with teenagers being more hedoistic / sexual / experimenting / irreligious, while the elderly grow more wary of sex, drugs, and rock & roll as their desire for sensory stimulation drops and the salience of death and an afterlife rises.
Whenever I see conservative / liberal I have the feeling the word definitions are misunderstood.
The logical opposite to conservative is radical.
Conservative literally want to conserve - tradition, resources, religious values, social systems, history, knowledge, legal systems. In the most extreme example conserve means nothing changes. Radical means extreme or at the root, as in change of foundational.
Rank it then from
Conservative - 0% change
Reformer - 20% change
Moderate - 40% change
Progressive - 60% change
Revolutionary - 80% change
Radical - 100% change
Anarchy is opposed to autarchy or authoritarianism
Anarchy - 0% governance
Libertarian - 20% minimal direction
liberal - 40% moderate cooperation
Progressive - 60% signifiant cooperation
Authoritarian - 80% concentrated control
Totalitarian - 100% control
You’ll find scatterplots of concepts, social systems and science, systems which change over time map to these two axes very naturally and logically. It’s just that the oolical use of “left” actually maps to conservative today.
What Trump is doing in government is radical - radical right. Obama was wildly conservative.
Clinton was moderate reformer, Obama was conservative progressive
That’s not factually accurate according to data I’ve observed. I’ll share some measures, if that’s relevant
“Short” spans of history must include major change such as telephony, federal highway, interstate banking, global supply chain which have drastically changed the makeup of the US since horse-and-buggy. You’d think the federal workforce exploded with all that, yet since 1940 the federal workforce has shrunk as a percentage of the US population.
Were you to consider “bloated governmental bureaucracy” today to pre-1940 you should also consider that life expectancy in the US has close to doubled from around 40 in 1900 to around 75 today, poverty has declined from 50% to 10-12%. What workforce there is is fairly competent in supporting a very high standard of living.
Compared to global metrics the US has one of the lower governmental employee bases as a % of population in the world.
Calling Obama "conservative" is only accurate when you look at a short time span of history. Yes, he wanted to preserve the federal government as it existed while he took office, but an important question is how long the federal government had been structured like that? It seems that much of the federal apparatus was constructed with FDR as a response to the Great Depression and WW2. American history did not begin in 1945 or 1933. When earlier periods of this nation's history are studied, it becomes obvious that the bloated bureaucratic state that Obama was preserving (and Trump is dismantling) was the aberration not the rule.
Eysenck actually referred to the opposite of conservatism as radicalism - but he also used conservative to mean "right" and radical to mean "left."
Ultimately I don't think it makes sense to argue about definitions. Words mean what people use them to mean. If you want to repurpose the words to mean what you describe, you can absolutely do that! The trick is convincing anybody else to follow along.
Repurpose? Word don’t change often. Organizations do frequently.
I’m using the common dictionary definition. The Sierra Club is a profoundly conservative organization. It literally seeks to conserve. Mao’s communism is profoundly Radical Authoritarian. Counties with Monarchies are profoundly conservative authoritarian setups which conserve monarchies, monarchies being authoritarian, not democratic.
The NIMBY movement is has a profoundly conservative focus - to preserve existing housing.
The Catholic Church is a profoundly conservative organization which seeks to preserve existing religious and social setups with an authoritarian non-democratic governance. Southern Baptist the same. Charismatic Christian structures are progressive organization structures with liberal adherence to faith.
Organizations change, words don’t.
Planned Parenthood was revolutionary in its origin and liberal in its idea, but once established it became mainstream conservative in its approach and progressive in its alignment with government. Richard Nixon after all signed Title X and PP became a state funded institution. Then, as abortion opposition became radicalized by the right, the conflict grew to institutionalize a radical authoritarian agenda to remove abortion rights. Simultaneously, PP took up a radical liberal position on trans “kids”, which then increasingly aligned itself to an authoritarian position based on a non-empirical supernaturalist and social constructivist ideology (more later)
It was simultaneously conservative libertarian on reproduction, and authoritarian radical on trans kids.
There is a third axis not often discussed which is supernaturalist < - > materialist and a 4th one which is nature <-> nurture
Kennedy is a radical, libertarian, non-materialist with a strong call to constructivist
Many hard scientists are conservative (science is very conservative field), liberal (free-thinking), very materialist but sometimes social constructivist (generally soft sciences)
Trump is a radical authoritarian figure, with few supernatural views but little empirical trust, and very naturist view of psychology
Anti-pornography movements are radical authoritarian, with non-empirical and social constructivist views on change.
Lesbian and gay movements in the US used to be radical liberal to libertarian, with supernaturalist and naturist views on our condition.
After the state became liberalized, LGB gradually drifted towards conservatism and eventually same-sex marriage (profoundly conservative).
The LGB condition moved toward material science and remained firmly in nature non-constructivist ideology.
However, TQ+ and cultural progressive movements took a hard turn and adopted a radical stance on sexuality and gender, redefining GLB experience and adopted authoritarian measures to enforce that stance. They also became 100% social constructivist and naturist simultaneously (the fundamental contradiction: born gendered and constructed) and supernaturalist (gender is a supernaturalist construct)
Feminism was a radical anti-patriarchical movement in conception, libertarian to anarchist in focus on governance, highly constructivist in bearing on condition of women, and empirical in its approaches - women paid $.72 every dollar a man gets.
The dominant model now is in conflict with TQ+ - progressive to authoritarian exercise of conservative policies adopted in the 60’s and 70’s for women, a conflicted fight between naturist and constructivist ( feminist policies actually increase presence of women in traditional work roles; yet women are kept out of STEM from social constructivist models), which is a conflict with empiricist - more women graduate from school, more women work etc. ) anti-patriarchal ideas are now conservative.
The Republican Party is hardly recognizable from 40 years ago. Reagan was conservative to reformist (anti-taxes), libertarian small government, but religious / supernaturalist in view of humans with naturist views on human nature. He was quite progressive on immigration for instance.
Republicans today seem to be radical on taxation (tariffs not seen for 100 years), anarchist on organization ( there is no other word for DOGE), authoritarian on immigration along with hard conservative with authoritarian state support against radical TQ+ agenda, along with a swing to anti-constructivist and centrist move between supernaturalist and materialist views of people.
He’s just proposing a different conceptualization of the issues. Having “fun,” seems a little close-minded for someone who is also asking us to think differently about political choice schemes.
Ich thinke thou meantest "wordes," but abide a few hundred yeeres and that which thou hast just written maye end up soundinge right fine.
> I’m using the common dictionary definition.
Oh come on, you're not engaging with the post at all. Worse, you're not even trying to garner attention for your own website. You could have posted a discrete comment about NIMBYism being conservative or whatever and then linked to some essay on your own site to funnel traffic there. Did you do that? No? No.
Most people don't naturally agree with everything on one side of the map and reject everything on the other size; they pick and choose a bit. It's only brainwashed extremists (*cough*cough*woke*cough) who treat politics as a package deal.
Infinity is absolutely not a number. Numbers are positions of quantity, which is dividing things into equivalent parts. Infinity is a direction - keep going, or etcetera.
Numbers are not necessarily positions of quantity; the imaginary number i is not a way of dividing things into equivalent parts, but rather a solution to a question "What is the square root of negative one?" For more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number
All languages are only as useful as their ability to describe reality. Paradox, imaginary numbers, attributes of god, all are equally indistinguishable from fiction.
Interesting. I wonder what you think of the Schroedinger equation, which describes the time evolution of quantum systems, such as the electrons in atoms, using the imaginary number via H Psi = i h-bar d(Psi)/dt? I also wonder what you think of the use of complex analysis (an entire field devoted to the study of imaginary numbers) to optimize airfoil design for flight. Maybe you have trouble distinguishing electrons and airplanes from fiction?
That's my position, yes; while neither imaginary nor infinite quantities are considered a part of the real numbers, all of these terms are simply mathematical conventions. Physics as a discipline is very directly concerned with things we recognize as part of the real world, and physics makes frequent use of both imaginary numbers and infinity; for example, complex analysis offers tools for evaluating analytic functions by carrying out path integrals around singularities (i.e. values where the functoins go to infinity). Infinities are also a topic of quantum electrodynamics, which generally copes with them through renormalization.
I wonder where I'd end up — I'm a bit weird as someone very progressive when it comes to rights and art, more 'conservative' (??) in terms of daily life (I think we're way too industrialized and farms and communal living is cool), somewhat religious, anti most authority (it changes), pragmatist. I certainly don't fit into any party perfectly — not that I expect to. I always ended up high middle Lib Left on that old chart and it always felt a wee bit simplistic.
I'll grant that's funny! Still, even a moment's thought should tell anyone there are *plenty* of athletic people around to hang around naked. The real explanation is more likely that nobody wants to be associated with Naked Nazis: https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/germanys-naked-truth/
Huh. Never heard of that before. Granted the decline of the nudist movement seems to be a function of the larger decline of the hippy movement, but I take your point this may have had something to do with it.
Absolutely fascinating. Politics is a nearly infinite-dimensional space and I always wondered what principal component analysis would reveal--after all I always thought the Nolan Chart (the distant ancestor of the political compass) was more of a memetic play by libertarians to look like the good guys.
Urban and liberal we all know, I think you're right about the woke, and this is one of the reasons they beef with the Scott Alexander crowd (realistic leftists and rightists?) so bad. I think you're right about Ukraine, much as I hate to admit it because Putin is absolutely the bad guy here.
Also, libertarian realistic leftists...um, yeah, but I won't comment.
My friends were mostly libertarian, so I grew up with Nolan-chart style thinking, but I suspect the problem of bias making libertarians look like good guys has really been baked into the thinking of Anglophone culture. There's a libertarian streak that runs through English history all the way back to the Doomsday Book, and became even more pronounced with the founding of US.
I don't have a strong sense of Rationalists other than that they have the same libertarian, realistic, and leftist background I do - where we disagree, it's usually over details or intellectual matters rather than the kind of fundamental incompatibilities I experience with religious people, Trump Conservatives, or the Woke left. Some of Scott's fanbase may easily veer right, though, and there are a couple of religius posters like Diseach (sp?) who are probably completely on the other side of the map.
A lot of things on my mind but I'll keep it bite sized for now; I wonder what the relationship between realism and materialism are in this framework. Are they interchangeable? I find that "realism" has an implicit conservative tilt.
Glad you liked it! If you don't like the term "realism," then you're in luck: Eysenck had a massive pile of research on his conceptualization of this second factor as "tough-mindedness." Although the push largely fizzled out after his death, you can still find it online at https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Eysenck+psychology+of+politics
As for materialism, that might depend on what you mean, but the usual definition of materialism ("The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.") is clearly a tough-minded leftist value. The more informal sense of materialism that says "what matters is money" might be shifted rightward, at least in light of some early research quoted by Eysenck...
George, E. I. (1954) "An experimental study of the relaton between personal values, social attitudes and personality traits." Ph.D. Thesis. Univ. London Lib., 1954.
...which found an economic focus to be a tough conservative value, while a theoretical focus was tough-left, and an aesthetic focus was (slightly) tender-left.
Thanks for the thorough response. Lot of food for thought.
You're right, "materialism" is a tricky term. I suppose I meant it in the former sense; the approach that prioritizes material conditions in explaining phenomena, as opposed to rational or ideological factors (orthodox marxism being the best example I can think of, which is obviously left).
I come from IR theory, where "realism" refers to a very specific school of theories. Both Marxist and Realist IR theory focuses entirely on material conditions, whereas other theories, namely liberalism and constructivism, tend to ascribe more weight to ideological factors. IR realists (which I'd roughly label myself as) focus on military/economic balance of power; by and large, we're a conservative crowd.
More generally, the word "realist" to me implies something about risk management, which in my understanding represents the core of the conservative-liberal distinction. Though I suppose "right and left" don't necessarily correlate to "conservative and liberal." Within the Soviet context, there were plenty of elements within the "far left" that were as resistant to change and risk as any classical conservative.
Guess it boils down to whether an individual's stubbornness is due to something inherent/physiological about their manner of thought, or whether it's a product of the ideological framework that they inhabit. Oh look, we're back to materialism vs. idealism.
Just thinking out loud. Again, banger post. Thanks!
Do you know the test-retest reliability of your survey? I was designing my own about a month ago and looking at the 3 factors correlation with the big 5. It died in development he’ll but I’d love to hear more about your experience putting it together.
Oh, sure! This is something I've been doing for years, but I don't have test-retest values as I've never used anything other than convenience samples from the Internet, and the purpose was always to generate and analyze factor scores, rather than to look at any one person's scores. When I do try to measure these political factors in the context of other research, I almost always use extremely brief measures of 10 (or even fewer) questions. Since reliability is a function of the number of items in a psychometric battery, it isn't likely to be high. There's always going to be noise, but I'd rather deal with that than cause test fatigue - my own scores on classic Big Five tests were always very extreme because I'd get bored answering 300 questions.
The real difficulty is always finding respondents. How representative they are isn't such a worry, because my main concern isn't what the average person is like; I generally am more concerned with the way the variables themselves intercorrelate, and it's actually difficult *not* to sample a wide enough variety of people to fill out the space, so long as you have the numbers. Numbers are always the problem, and the solution is to go begging, and to find other people who are willing to endorse your surveys. For example, https://philosophieblog.substack.com/ endorsed the romantic preferences survey I'm running right now, and probably generated 100 respondents for it: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/romantic-preferences-survey
I personally found your question about 'treating people more equally' impossible to answer. These days there are two definitions of 'treating people more equally'-- and they are diametrically opposed. My definition of 'treating people more equally' is that the RULES and the PROCESSES APPLIED are the same for everyone -- but leftists defintion of 'treating people more equally' refers to the OUTCOME. I didn't know which one you meant. If you ever do another survey you might get a lot stronger signal if you clarified which kind of equality you are talking about.
To me, it is almost impossible to even talk about fairness or justice or equality anymore without carefully defining the terms. Justice and fairness to me is equal outcomes for the same behavior, whereas to the left 'Justice' and 'Fairness' means their preferred demographic comes out ahead.
Ultimately items don't work for rational reasons; they work for their own reasons, and we have to figure out why they do. You can see by the factor analysis that "We'd have fewer problems if we treated people more equally" is one of the most effective items at measuring attitudes in its region.
If you want to know why I *suspect* it works well, I think the assumption on the tender/idealistic left is that systematic biases in society don't give equal outcomes for the same behavior. Minority students earn worse grades / make less money for the same amount of work. But frankly it could be more elemental than that; if you have a knee-jerk positive response to "treat people more equally," you're probably a tender-minded leftist.
How did you determine how any of these individuals score on these axes?
Not knowing your background, I'll just say that to find Fred's score on Conservatism, you can find the divergence of each of Fred's responses from the average response in the sample for each question, multiply that by each question's factor loading on Conservatism, and then combine these together to find a score for Fred's Conservatism.
It’s almost like all the social stuff is based upon individual neuroses and what actually dictates our political system are the economic motivations of the various factions
Really? What makes you say that?
I think your article is great and your analysis is insightful. However, I think a big problem with modern political analysis is our constraint of the two-dimensional. Part of that's practical: our media are all two-dimensional and it's difficult to communicate the z-axis.
I genuinely think our understanding of political science will advance with three-dimensional media. I don't know if a sphere or cube would be better suited to communicating things (hopefully not a torus), but there's clearly more than two important axes.
You can show three axes with color, and you can also carry out studies to verify the fourth axis as well. But that, good sir, is a story for another day.
What if it’s a spiral not a flat graph?
Go on.
The spiral concept is basically that humans as individuals and collectively as societies go through stages of growth. Magical thinking to mythic thinking to rational to post-modern thinking is one way to describe it. Classical liberalism was born out of the shift from mythic to rational thinking. This is why we stopped slavery e.g. For a long time this was the political battle (scientists vs. the church, for example). Then roughly in the 60s some "liberals" began to think in a post-rational way. This started as things like "All truth is constructed" and eventually became a somewhat unhealthy extreme identity politics, the extremes of "Nobody can tell me what pronouns to use" type thinking. Meanwhile some "conservatives" moved from a mythic (racist, sexist) worldview to a rational worldview -- these are the neocons, the Republicans who want progress and liberty. Anyways the point is less about the specifics and more about the concept of growing through stages, where each next stage transcends and includes the one before it. There are roughly three main stages that would map to our parties today, and then a fourth "post-post-modern" stage which on an individual level is probably what explains the "open to psychedelics" in your survey results.
Interesting. That is perhaps a spiral of cultural change rather than merely political change. But I am interested in the relationship between culture and political values; if I am lucky, I will be able to better test the kinds of ideas you describe someday.
Definitely a mix of political, cultural, and personal. Read Ken Wilber for a deep dive!
This was enlightening. This 3rd dimension, the idealism/realism dimension explains so much. That's how you know it's a true insight. When it makes sense of previously confusing and seemingly contradictory information. I think this will really change my view of the political arena. I wonder if you have any age data that might shed light on whether people tend to become more realist as they get older? My intuition says yes, modestly but a hunch is just a hunch.
Glad you found it useful!
Some of Eysenck's early work found older people to be more idealistic / tender-minded, and more conservative. Possibly coincidentally, I replicated this finding in one of my first small-scale studies mentioned at https://thingstoread.substack.com/i/158688810/does-the-model-still-stand-up-in-the-st-century .
If true, this association between age and idealistic conservatism dovetails well with teenagers being more hedoistic / sexual / experimenting / irreligious, while the elderly grow more wary of sex, drugs, and rock & roll as their desire for sensory stimulation drops and the salience of death and an afterlife rises.
Infinity is not a number.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F8pej8cr9ojt41.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df42967ee6da05ac64be987323e09a7ace86044e9
Whenever I see conservative / liberal I have the feeling the word definitions are misunderstood.
The logical opposite to conservative is radical.
Conservative literally want to conserve - tradition, resources, religious values, social systems, history, knowledge, legal systems. In the most extreme example conserve means nothing changes. Radical means extreme or at the root, as in change of foundational.
Rank it then from
Conservative - 0% change
Reformer - 20% change
Moderate - 40% change
Progressive - 60% change
Revolutionary - 80% change
Radical - 100% change
Anarchy is opposed to autarchy or authoritarianism
Anarchy - 0% governance
Libertarian - 20% minimal direction
liberal - 40% moderate cooperation
Progressive - 60% signifiant cooperation
Authoritarian - 80% concentrated control
Totalitarian - 100% control
You’ll find scatterplots of concepts, social systems and science, systems which change over time map to these two axes very naturally and logically. It’s just that the oolical use of “left” actually maps to conservative today.
What Trump is doing in government is radical - radical right. Obama was wildly conservative.
Clinton was moderate reformer, Obama was conservative progressive
Royalties are conservative authoritarian,
Mao was radical authoritarian
That’s not factually accurate according to data I’ve observed. I’ll share some measures, if that’s relevant
“Short” spans of history must include major change such as telephony, federal highway, interstate banking, global supply chain which have drastically changed the makeup of the US since horse-and-buggy. You’d think the federal workforce exploded with all that, yet since 1940 the federal workforce has shrunk as a percentage of the US population.
Were you to consider “bloated governmental bureaucracy” today to pre-1940 you should also consider that life expectancy in the US has close to doubled from around 40 in 1900 to around 75 today, poverty has declined from 50% to 10-12%. What workforce there is is fairly competent in supporting a very high standard of living.
Compared to global metrics the US has one of the lower governmental employee bases as a % of population in the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size
Regan presided over a federal workforce which was roughly 25% larger than Obama’s, in proportion to population, Obama was a local minimum.
You can see non-partisan statistics here.
https://ourpublicservice.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FedFigures_FY18-Workforce-1.pdf
Calling Obama "conservative" is only accurate when you look at a short time span of history. Yes, he wanted to preserve the federal government as it existed while he took office, but an important question is how long the federal government had been structured like that? It seems that much of the federal apparatus was constructed with FDR as a response to the Great Depression and WW2. American history did not begin in 1945 or 1933. When earlier periods of this nation's history are studied, it becomes obvious that the bloated bureaucratic state that Obama was preserving (and Trump is dismantling) was the aberration not the rule.
Eysenck actually referred to the opposite of conservatism as radicalism - but he also used conservative to mean "right" and radical to mean "left."
Ultimately I don't think it makes sense to argue about definitions. Words mean what people use them to mean. If you want to repurpose the words to mean what you describe, you can absolutely do that! The trick is convincing anybody else to follow along.
Repurpose? Word don’t change often. Organizations do frequently.
I’m using the common dictionary definition. The Sierra Club is a profoundly conservative organization. It literally seeks to conserve. Mao’s communism is profoundly Radical Authoritarian. Counties with Monarchies are profoundly conservative authoritarian setups which conserve monarchies, monarchies being authoritarian, not democratic.
The NIMBY movement is has a profoundly conservative focus - to preserve existing housing.
The Catholic Church is a profoundly conservative organization which seeks to preserve existing religious and social setups with an authoritarian non-democratic governance. Southern Baptist the same. Charismatic Christian structures are progressive organization structures with liberal adherence to faith.
Organizations change, words don’t.
Planned Parenthood was revolutionary in its origin and liberal in its idea, but once established it became mainstream conservative in its approach and progressive in its alignment with government. Richard Nixon after all signed Title X and PP became a state funded institution. Then, as abortion opposition became radicalized by the right, the conflict grew to institutionalize a radical authoritarian agenda to remove abortion rights. Simultaneously, PP took up a radical liberal position on trans “kids”, which then increasingly aligned itself to an authoritarian position based on a non-empirical supernaturalist and social constructivist ideology (more later)
It was simultaneously conservative libertarian on reproduction, and authoritarian radical on trans kids.
There is a third axis not often discussed which is supernaturalist < - > materialist and a 4th one which is nature <-> nurture
Kennedy is a radical, libertarian, non-materialist with a strong call to constructivist
Many hard scientists are conservative (science is very conservative field), liberal (free-thinking), very materialist but sometimes social constructivist (generally soft sciences)
Trump is a radical authoritarian figure, with few supernatural views but little empirical trust, and very naturist view of psychology
Anti-pornography movements are radical authoritarian, with non-empirical and social constructivist views on change.
Lesbian and gay movements in the US used to be radical liberal to libertarian, with supernaturalist and naturist views on our condition.
After the state became liberalized, LGB gradually drifted towards conservatism and eventually same-sex marriage (profoundly conservative).
The LGB condition moved toward material science and remained firmly in nature non-constructivist ideology.
However, TQ+ and cultural progressive movements took a hard turn and adopted a radical stance on sexuality and gender, redefining GLB experience and adopted authoritarian measures to enforce that stance. They also became 100% social constructivist and naturist simultaneously (the fundamental contradiction: born gendered and constructed) and supernaturalist (gender is a supernaturalist construct)
Feminism was a radical anti-patriarchical movement in conception, libertarian to anarchist in focus on governance, highly constructivist in bearing on condition of women, and empirical in its approaches - women paid $.72 every dollar a man gets.
The dominant model now is in conflict with TQ+ - progressive to authoritarian exercise of conservative policies adopted in the 60’s and 70’s for women, a conflicted fight between naturist and constructivist ( feminist policies actually increase presence of women in traditional work roles; yet women are kept out of STEM from social constructivist models), which is a conflict with empiricist - more women graduate from school, more women work etc. ) anti-patriarchal ideas are now conservative.
The Republican Party is hardly recognizable from 40 years ago. Reagan was conservative to reformist (anti-taxes), libertarian small government, but religious / supernaturalist in view of humans with naturist views on human nature. He was quite progressive on immigration for instance.
Republicans today seem to be radical on taxation (tariffs not seen for 100 years), anarchist on organization ( there is no other word for DOGE), authoritarian on immigration along with hard conservative with authoritarian state support against radical TQ+ agenda, along with a swing to anti-constructivist and centrist move between supernaturalist and materialist views of people.
This comment is almost impossible to read.
Yeah I was trying to have fun with him, but frankly I just should've said what you did.
He’s just proposing a different conceptualization of the issues. Having “fun,” seems a little close-minded for someone who is also asking us to think differently about political choice schemes.
> Word don’t change often.
Ich thinke thou meantest "wordes," but abide a few hundred yeeres and that which thou hast just written maye end up soundinge right fine.
> I’m using the common dictionary definition.
Oh come on, you're not engaging with the post at all. Worse, you're not even trying to garner attention for your own website. You could have posted a discrete comment about NIMBYism being conservative or whatever and then linked to some essay on your own site to funnel traffic there. Did you do that? No? No.
I guess I’m in a weird place. I oppose biblical truth and am a big fan of casual living, but I’m an enthusiastic supporter of school uniforms.
Most people don't naturally agree with everything on one side of the map and reject everything on the other size; they pick and choose a bit. It's only brainwashed extremists (*cough*cough*woke*cough) who treat politics as a package deal.
Infinity is absolutely not a number. Numbers are positions of quantity, which is dividing things into equivalent parts. Infinity is a direction - keep going, or etcetera.
Numbers are not necessarily positions of quantity; the imaginary number i is not a way of dividing things into equivalent parts, but rather a solution to a question "What is the square root of negative one?" For more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number
Meanwhile, complex infinity is an unsigned number that has no direction; see https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=complex+infinity
All languages are only as useful as their ability to describe reality. Paradox, imaginary numbers, attributes of god, all are equally indistinguishable from fiction.
Interesting. I wonder what you think of the Schroedinger equation, which describes the time evolution of quantum systems, such as the electrons in atoms, using the imaginary number via H Psi = i h-bar d(Psi)/dt? I also wonder what you think of the use of complex analysis (an entire field devoted to the study of imaginary numbers) to optimize airfoil design for flight. Maybe you have trouble distinguishing electrons and airplanes from fiction?
If it actually describes a relationship in reality, it's not imaginary.
That's my position, yes; while neither imaginary nor infinite quantities are considered a part of the real numbers, all of these terms are simply mathematical conventions. Physics as a discipline is very directly concerned with things we recognize as part of the real world, and physics makes frequent use of both imaginary numbers and infinity; for example, complex analysis offers tools for evaluating analytic functions by carrying out path integrals around singularities (i.e. values where the functoins go to infinity). Infinities are also a topic of quantum electrodynamics, which generally copes with them through renormalization.
I write more about this kind of thing at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/can-you-divide-by-zero
I think someone who supports royalty should also support cousin marriage
I wonder where I'd end up — I'm a bit weird as someone very progressive when it comes to rights and art, more 'conservative' (??) in terms of daily life (I think we're way too industrialized and farms and communal living is cool), somewhat religious, anti most authority (it changes), pragmatist. I certainly don't fit into any party perfectly — not that I expect to. I always ended up high middle Lib Left on that old chart and it always felt a wee bit simplistic.
Obesity happened to nudist camps
I'll grant that's funny! Still, even a moment's thought should tell anyone there are *plenty* of athletic people around to hang around naked. The real explanation is more likely that nobody wants to be associated with Naked Nazis: https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/germanys-naked-truth/
Huh. Never heard of that before. Granted the decline of the nudist movement seems to be a function of the larger decline of the hippy movement, but I take your point this may have had something to do with it.
Absolutely fascinating. Politics is a nearly infinite-dimensional space and I always wondered what principal component analysis would reveal--after all I always thought the Nolan Chart (the distant ancestor of the political compass) was more of a memetic play by libertarians to look like the good guys.
Urban and liberal we all know, I think you're right about the woke, and this is one of the reasons they beef with the Scott Alexander crowd (realistic leftists and rightists?) so bad. I think you're right about Ukraine, much as I hate to admit it because Putin is absolutely the bad guy here.
Also, libertarian realistic leftists...um, yeah, but I won't comment.
My friends were mostly libertarian, so I grew up with Nolan-chart style thinking, but I suspect the problem of bias making libertarians look like good guys has really been baked into the thinking of Anglophone culture. There's a libertarian streak that runs through English history all the way back to the Doomsday Book, and became even more pronounced with the founding of US.
I don't have a strong sense of Rationalists other than that they have the same libertarian, realistic, and leftist background I do - where we disagree, it's usually over details or intellectual matters rather than the kind of fundamental incompatibilities I experience with religious people, Trump Conservatives, or the Woke left. Some of Scott's fanbase may easily veer right, though, and there are a couple of religius posters like Diseach (sp?) who are probably completely on the other side of the map.
Absolute banger post. Banger map. Bravo.
A lot of things on my mind but I'll keep it bite sized for now; I wonder what the relationship between realism and materialism are in this framework. Are they interchangeable? I find that "realism" has an implicit conservative tilt.
Glad you liked it! If you don't like the term "realism," then you're in luck: Eysenck had a massive pile of research on his conceptualization of this second factor as "tough-mindedness." Although the push largely fizzled out after his death, you can still find it online at https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Eysenck+psychology+of+politics
As for materialism, that might depend on what you mean, but the usual definition of materialism ("The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.") is clearly a tough-minded leftist value. The more informal sense of materialism that says "what matters is money" might be shifted rightward, at least in light of some early research quoted by Eysenck...
George, E. I. (1954) "An experimental study of the relaton between personal values, social attitudes and personality traits." Ph.D. Thesis. Univ. London Lib., 1954.
...which found an economic focus to be a tough conservative value, while a theoretical focus was tough-left, and an aesthetic focus was (slightly) tender-left.
Thanks for the thorough response. Lot of food for thought.
You're right, "materialism" is a tricky term. I suppose I meant it in the former sense; the approach that prioritizes material conditions in explaining phenomena, as opposed to rational or ideological factors (orthodox marxism being the best example I can think of, which is obviously left).
I come from IR theory, where "realism" refers to a very specific school of theories. Both Marxist and Realist IR theory focuses entirely on material conditions, whereas other theories, namely liberalism and constructivism, tend to ascribe more weight to ideological factors. IR realists (which I'd roughly label myself as) focus on military/economic balance of power; by and large, we're a conservative crowd.
More generally, the word "realist" to me implies something about risk management, which in my understanding represents the core of the conservative-liberal distinction. Though I suppose "right and left" don't necessarily correlate to "conservative and liberal." Within the Soviet context, there were plenty of elements within the "far left" that were as resistant to change and risk as any classical conservative.
Guess it boils down to whether an individual's stubbornness is due to something inherent/physiological about their manner of thought, or whether it's a product of the ideological framework that they inhabit. Oh look, we're back to materialism vs. idealism.
Just thinking out loud. Again, banger post. Thanks!
Do you know the test-retest reliability of your survey? I was designing my own about a month ago and looking at the 3 factors correlation with the big 5. It died in development he’ll but I’d love to hear more about your experience putting it together.
Oh, sure! This is something I've been doing for years, but I don't have test-retest values as I've never used anything other than convenience samples from the Internet, and the purpose was always to generate and analyze factor scores, rather than to look at any one person's scores. When I do try to measure these political factors in the context of other research, I almost always use extremely brief measures of 10 (or even fewer) questions. Since reliability is a function of the number of items in a psychometric battery, it isn't likely to be high. There's always going to be noise, but I'd rather deal with that than cause test fatigue - my own scores on classic Big Five tests were always very extreme because I'd get bored answering 300 questions.
The real difficulty is always finding respondents. How representative they are isn't such a worry, because my main concern isn't what the average person is like; I generally am more concerned with the way the variables themselves intercorrelate, and it's actually difficult *not* to sample a wide enough variety of people to fill out the space, so long as you have the numbers. Numbers are always the problem, and the solution is to go begging, and to find other people who are willing to endorse your surveys. For example, https://philosophieblog.substack.com/ endorsed the romantic preferences survey I'm running right now, and probably generated 100 respondents for it: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/romantic-preferences-survey
I personally found your question about 'treating people more equally' impossible to answer. These days there are two definitions of 'treating people more equally'-- and they are diametrically opposed. My definition of 'treating people more equally' is that the RULES and the PROCESSES APPLIED are the same for everyone -- but leftists defintion of 'treating people more equally' refers to the OUTCOME. I didn't know which one you meant. If you ever do another survey you might get a lot stronger signal if you clarified which kind of equality you are talking about.
To me, it is almost impossible to even talk about fairness or justice or equality anymore without carefully defining the terms. Justice and fairness to me is equal outcomes for the same behavior, whereas to the left 'Justice' and 'Fairness' means their preferred demographic comes out ahead.
Ultimately items don't work for rational reasons; they work for their own reasons, and we have to figure out why they do. You can see by the factor analysis that "We'd have fewer problems if we treated people more equally" is one of the most effective items at measuring attitudes in its region.
If you want to know why I *suspect* it works well, I think the assumption on the tender/idealistic left is that systematic biases in society don't give equal outcomes for the same behavior. Minority students earn worse grades / make less money for the same amount of work. But frankly it could be more elemental than that; if you have a knee-jerk positive response to "treat people more equally," you're probably a tender-minded leftist.