Am I a complete outlier in that I’m not interested in politics to the point of being ignorant of what the various standard positions (like “liberal” or “socialist”) mean; and being unable/unwilling to pass judgment about things like various levels of taxes due to lack of knowledge about expected effect of such policies?
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.
I’ve updated over the past year over to try hard not to pass such judgments, for the reason you describe. But I’ve still found myself in political arguments over the underlying principles. People who disagree with the beliefs I previously would have advocated strongly for tend not just to disagree with me on the effects of taxes and regulation, but on what moral imperatives we’re trying to satisfy.
It seems crazy to disagree on economic principles anyway. The ways about which one should try to answer a question like “The GDP will go down under policy X, as compared to policy Y” are fairly uncontroversial, and yet people disagree passionately about which answer is right when it’s clear that their convictions are under-determined. How can they become so moralistic about what to me seem like dry amoral facts? And yet, I have the same impression—that peoples’ moral intuitions correlate strongly with the type of economics they believe in.
Am I a complete outlier in that I’m not interested in politics to the point of being ignorant of what the various standard positions (like “liberal” or “socialist”) mean; and being unable/unwilling to pass judgment about things like various levels of taxes due to lack of knowledge about expected effect of such policies?
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.
I’ve updated over the past year over to try hard not to pass such judgments, for the reason you describe. But I’ve still found myself in political arguments over the underlying principles. People who disagree with the beliefs I previously would have advocated strongly for tend not just to disagree with me on the effects of taxes and regulation, but on what moral imperatives we’re trying to satisfy.
It seems crazy to disagree on economic principles anyway. The ways about which one should try to answer a question like “The GDP will go down under policy X, as compared to policy Y” are fairly uncontroversial, and yet people disagree passionately about which answer is right when it’s clear that their convictions are under-determined. How can they become so moralistic about what to me seem like dry amoral facts? And yet, I have the same impression—that peoples’ moral intuitions correlate strongly with the type of economics they believe in.