What’s going on is that tailcalled’s factor model doesn’t in fact do a good job of identifying rationalists by their sociopolitical opinions. Or something like that.
[EDITED to add:] Here’s one particular variety of “something like that” that I think may be going on: an opinion may be highly characteristic of a group even if it is very uncommon within the group. For instance, suppose you’re classifying folks in the US on a left/right axis. If someone agrees with “We should abolish the police and close all the prisons” then you know with great confidence which team they’re on, but I’m pretty sure the great majority of leftish people in the US disagree with it. If someone agrees with “We should bring back slavery because black people aren’t fit to run their own lives” then you know with great confidence which team they’re on, but I’m pretty sure the great majority of rightish people in the US disagree with it.
Tailcalled’s model isn’t exactly doing this sort of thing to rationalists—if someone says “stories about ghosts are zero evidence of ghosts” then they have just proved they aren’t a rationalist, not done something extreme but highly characteristic of (LW-style) rationalists—but it’s arguably doing something of the sort to a broader fuzzier class of people that are maybe as near as the model can get to “rationalists”. Roughly the people some would characterize as “Silicon Valley techbros”.
My model takes the prevalence of the opinion into account; it’s the reason that sometimes you have to e.g. agree strongly and other times you merely have to not-disagree. There’s unpopular opinions that the factor model does place correctly, e.g. I can’t remember whether I have a question about abolishing the police, but supporting human extinction clearly went under the leftism factor even though leftists also disagreed (because leftists were less likely to disagree and disagreed less strongly in a quantitative sense).
I think the broader/fuzzier class point applies more directly though; from a causal perspective you’d expect rationalists to have some ideology that exists in the general population (e.g. techbros) plus our own idiosyncratically developed ideology. But a factor model only captures low-rank information, so it’s not going to accurately model idiosyncratic factors that only exist for a small portion of population.
In theory according to the model, rationalists should score slightly above 12 on average, and because we expect a wide spread of opinions, this means according to the model we should also expect a lot of rationalists to just score 12 directly. So there’s nothing funky if you score 12.
Also 12—what’s going on?
What’s going on is that tailcalled’s factor model doesn’t in fact do a good job of identifying rationalists by their sociopolitical opinions. Or something like that.
[EDITED to add:] Here’s one particular variety of “something like that” that I think may be going on: an opinion may be highly characteristic of a group even if it is very uncommon within the group. For instance, suppose you’re classifying folks in the US on a left/right axis. If someone agrees with “We should abolish the police and close all the prisons” then you know with great confidence which team they’re on, but I’m pretty sure the great majority of leftish people in the US disagree with it. If someone agrees with “We should bring back slavery because black people aren’t fit to run their own lives” then you know with great confidence which team they’re on, but I’m pretty sure the great majority of rightish people in the US disagree with it.
Tailcalled’s model isn’t exactly doing this sort of thing to rationalists—if someone says “stories about ghosts are zero evidence of ghosts” then they have just proved they aren’t a rationalist, not done something extreme but highly characteristic of (LW-style) rationalists—but it’s arguably doing something of the sort to a broader fuzzier class of people that are maybe as near as the model can get to “rationalists”. Roughly the people some would characterize as “Silicon Valley techbros”.
My model takes the prevalence of the opinion into account; it’s the reason that sometimes you have to e.g. agree strongly and other times you merely have to not-disagree. There’s unpopular opinions that the factor model does place correctly, e.g. I can’t remember whether I have a question about abolishing the police, but supporting human extinction clearly went under the leftism factor even though leftists also disagreed (because leftists were less likely to disagree and disagreed less strongly in a quantitative sense).
I think the broader/fuzzier class point applies more directly though; from a causal perspective you’d expect rationalists to have some ideology that exists in the general population (e.g. techbros) plus our own idiosyncratically developed ideology. But a factor model only captures low-rank information, so it’s not going to accurately model idiosyncratic factors that only exist for a small portion of population.
In theory according to the model, rationalists should score slightly above 12 on average, and because we expect a wide spread of opinions, this means according to the model we should also expect a lot of rationalists to just score 12 directly. So there’s nothing funky if you score 12.
What does the model predict non-rationalists would score?