From my perspective, given that LW is the place the poll is running, it is precisely this axis of variation in political attitudes that I’m interested in because this is roughly the attitude I’d expect from a significant number of people here, but few other places… and I’m not sure how many to expect nor how long they would have held such an attitude.
I would expect a significant percentage of people on LW to have independently read about the neurology of political decision making, seen its implications for truth-seeking, and begun to change their thinking habits thereby. Among this cohort, more or less “instinctive” processes could be expected in 2001 (except to the degree that relatively ad hoc personal theories of meta-political reasoning might have moved them farther away from baseline, but the evidence exposure would be sporadic and weird). By 2008 a lot of independently rational people should have heard about the studies, updated, and begun to modify their habits of political thought based on the popularized brain studies. In 2011 it would be reasonable to expect to see what convergent “politico-cognitive results” tended to grow out of the combined evidence exposure and updating tendencies… and LW would be a place to find that data :-)
This seems like a more interesting question to me than simply “who around here used to be or is red or blue?”
I think my suggestion for an interesting political poll of the community would involve asking people a bunch of questions to probe the long term meta-issues I’d expect to uniquely find here (eg “When did you hear about study X?”, “How familiar are you with lesswrong’s blue/green terminology?”, “Do you know about {semi-obscure dirt from political sex scandal in your country}?”, etc, etc). Then for direct political-object-level correlates just send them elsewhere to get a few scores from pre-establishedposition quizes to plug in as answers on our quiz.
From my perspective, given that LW is the place the poll is running, it is precisely this axis of variation in political attitudes that I’m interested in because this is roughly the attitude I’d expect from a significant number of people here, but few other places… and I’m not sure how many to expect nor how long they would have held such an attitude.
I would expect a significant percentage of people on LW to have independently read about the neurology of political decision making, seen its implications for truth-seeking, and begun to change their thinking habits thereby. Among this cohort, more or less “instinctive” processes could be expected in 2001 (except to the degree that relatively ad hoc personal theories of meta-political reasoning might have moved them farther away from baseline, but the evidence exposure would be sporadic and weird). By 2008 a lot of independently rational people should have heard about the studies, updated, and begun to modify their habits of political thought based on the popularized brain studies. In 2011 it would be reasonable to expect to see what convergent “politico-cognitive results” tended to grow out of the combined evidence exposure and updating tendencies… and LW would be a place to find that data :-)
This seems like a more interesting question to me than simply “who around here used to be or is red or blue?”
I think my suggestion for an interesting political poll of the community would involve asking people a bunch of questions to probe the long term meta-issues I’d expect to uniquely find here (eg “When did you hear about study X?”, “How familiar are you with lesswrong’s blue/green terminology?”, “Do you know about {semi-obscure dirt from political sex scandal in your country}?”, etc, etc). Then for direct political-object-level correlates just send them elsewhere to get a few scores from pre-established position quizes to plug in as answers on our quiz.