You have just made a falsifiable prediction! If socialism does not turn out to be negatively correlated with reading the sequences, will you rethink your political views?
As it turns out, socialism does negatively correlate with reading the sequences: coding “less than 25%” as 12.5% and “almost all” as 100%, the naive correlation appears to be −0.06; on average, socialists claim to have read 47% of the sequences, compared to the 51% claim of nonsocialists, a difference of about .12sd. This is significant at the .1 level. Controlling for whether one has been here since the OB days, we go down to about a 2 percentage point difference in sequence completion, about .06sd within each “cohort” and not at all statistically significant.
Statistical significance is a mental disease. The effect size is low enough that I just updated in the direction of “either socialism is more interesting than it looks or people in Europe define ‘socialism’ as liberalism”.
The survey defined socialism as “what is done in Scandinavia”, which for me is social-democracy : free-market capitalism with wealth redistribution, strong social safety net, regulation to protect workers, customers or the environment, and some critical sectors (like education) more or less directly handled by the state.
My own definition of socialism is “socialized ownership of the means of production”, which can take many shapes : government ownership is a form socialism, but cooperatives or mutualism are other forms of socialism. Socialism doesn’t necessarily means centralized planning, even if it is usually described as such.
But anyway, since the survey defined socialism in the first meaning, I used under it the first meaning to answer “socialism” in the survey, and I think we can safely assume most people who answered “socialism” used it under the first meaning.
Let the next survey have the same definitions for communism, conservatism, and liberalism.
Define “socialism” as “Sending children to cigar making factories and sugar making plantations instead of school, like in Cuba; sending suspected dissenters to a KGB prison in Siberia for torture, like in Russia; or sending baby Pandas to reeducation camps for torture, like in China.”
Define “libertarianism” as “Rule by corporations, like in the United States; or beating chimney-sweeps to death with a cane while wearing a bowler hat and monocle, like in Britain.”
I predict similar responses. You can’t expect people to comply with redefined political labels.
Actually, I answered socialism because I’m a libertarian socialist, the examples made clear that libertarianism and socialism were supposed to mean ‘American-style (i.e. capitalist) libertarianism’ and ‘social-democracy’ respectively, neither of which are anywhere near my position, the survey had no “none of the above” answer and that “socialism” is less unsatisfactory to me than that “libertarianism”.
This doesn’t surprise me. I have believed for a while now that political left-ness versus right-ness is determined by terminal values, not by beliefs or epistemology (except for the case of religiously based moral opinions, but in a forum of mostly atheists this effect doesn’t show up much.)
“either socialism is more interesting than it looks or people in Europe define ‘socialism’ as liberalism”.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
In my country a “liberal” is basically “classical liberal”, some kind of conservative or libertaria, but I’ve grown accustomed to American usage over the past three years.
We need data on what the proportion of Americans is.
This was the question and the options, as detailed in the survey:
“Given that no label can completely describe a person’s political views, with which of these labels do you MOST identify?”
Libertarian, for example like the US Libertarian Party: socially permissive, minimal/no taxes, minimal/no redistribution of wealth
Conservative, for example the US Republican Party and UK Tories: traditional values, low taxes, low redistribution of wealth
Liberal, for example the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party: socially permissive, more taxes, more redistribution of wealth
Socialist, for example Scandinavian countries: socially permissive, high taxes, major redistribution of wealth
Communist, for example the old Soviet Union: complete state control of many facets of life
I chose Socialist simply because I prefer what they seem to have in Scandinavia, than what the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party seems to have on offer.
I chose Socialist simply because I prefer what they seem to have in Scandinavia, than what the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party seems to have on offer.
The US Democratic Party is a lot less coherent entity than the left-er party in most countries. In most OECD countries, the person who says “I wish our government spending : GDP ratio was more like Canada’s” is a right-wing position while “I wish our government spending: GDP ratio was more like Sweden’s” is a left-wing position. In the the US, people espousing either of these views end up in the Democratic coalition, because the entire spectrum is shifted so far to the right, and there is nowhere else to go.
A lot of US Democrat-leaning voters wish the US was a parliamentary system, so that the centrist and center-left wings of the party could split (as they are in Canada between Liberals and New Democrats).
“I wish our government spending : GDP ratio was more like Canada’s” is a right-wing position while “I wish our government spending: GDP ratio was more like Sweden’s”
Yes politics really is this boring over here.
The US Democratic Party is a lot less coherent entity than the left-er party in most countries.
Arguably the Republican party is also a less coherent party than many right-er parties in continental Europe, where you usually have a “libertarian leaning” smaller-goverment party, a social conservative (Christian-ish) party and occasionally also in addition to that a nationalist party.
Consider for a moment that Ron Paul, Patrick Buchanan and George Bush are in the same party. What’s the overlap between these three in terms of something like trade tariffs, immigration, foreign relations, which parts of government spending should be cut, where spending should increase, meddling in social issues, education ect. ?
I’ve heard some of my countrymen complain we have too many parties with little variation among them. But I’m rather glad coalition building is required to be done in a arguably more transparent way. It also makes individual parties a temporary affair, since they break up and recombine all the time. Bad parties also tend to fail to enter parliament when they screw up things too much, which helps cull blind loyalty votes. It also allows some parties like the Greens or the Pirate party that otherwise wouldn’t be heard to get a voice in parliament and I’m glad they do.
I chose Socialist simply because I prefer what they seem to have in Scandinavia, than what the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party seems to have on offer.
I generally prefer what they have in Scandinavia compared to British Labour and US Democrats as well. Though I chose conservative so I’m not sure how this maps.
Perhaps “traditional values” (whatever that means) combined with basically a neutral attitude to wealth redistribution and an eye for expected quality of life? Or perhaps growing up in a country where everyone I know considers themselves some kind of “social democrat”, I have an odd idea of what “conservative” stands for.
Actually I’d be quite interested to get more data on the 29 other conservatives here, I wonder if we’re just “secular right” types (like I partially consider myself to be since I’m an atheist) or if some of the crypto and pseudo theists are conservative as well. Also I wonder how many where influenced by Moldbug or any of the other representatives of the internet (new? alternative?) intellectual right. To give one data point on the latter, I never even considered there might be interesting material from right wing thought, until I was exposed to it on-line and began seeing merit in it.
Edit: I counted 7 committed or lukewarm theists among conservative LWers.
Actually I’d be quite interested to get more data on the 29 other conservatives here, I wonder if we’re just “secular right” types (like I partially consider myself to be since I’m an atheist) or if some of the crypto and pseudo theists are conservative as well.
It should be right there in the spreadsheet, under ReligiousViews.
Where I come from, liberals are mostly right-wing too, but it’s hard to disentangle whether that’s because the whole spectrum is to the left or whether the definitions are just different. The survey did explain that “liberal” meant US liberal. (ETA: as per the sibling comment, it’s a little more complicated than that)
This is the case in Australia too. The “Liberal” party is the major right-wing political party (and thus are more similar to the Republicans than the Democrats (in the US)), so there is a distinction between “big-L” and “little-L” liberals.
Only if you misuse it! Statistical significance is a good shorthand for how likely it is that a result is a fluke, which is helpful to know. Concluding from even astronomically precise p-values to some particular non-null hypothesis without other evidence in its favor, like “reading the Sequences causes people to be less socialist,” is another kettle of tea.
Or to go from a different angle: I don’t think much of anything can be concluded about communists and the sequences, even though there’s a non-tiny effect size, because, like, there are only five of us. (Probably the same applies to conservatives, just slightly less so; I’m too lazy to do the math.) One’s better off with reasonable priors: Sequences probably don’t impact politics that much, communists are probably like socialists in their likelihood of reading a blog by a George Mason economist, the terms probably aren’t cutting reality at its joints, and so on.
or people in Europe define ‘socialism’ as liberalism”
“Socialism” is a really imprecise word aside from various specialized contexts and discourses; all you can really conclude is that the person identifying as such values equality relatively highly. (In this sense it’s a poor descriptor but perhaps a less mind-killing label than a good descriptor of policy preferences would be, although “left” is probably better at this still, so it’s not clear to me that there’s an actual sweet spot that would justify continued use of the term.) Per the definitions offered in the survey, socialism (“socially permissive, high taxes, major redistribution of wealth”) and liberalism (“socially permissive, more taxes, more redistribution of wealth”) are basically the same thing, aside from being defined absolutely or relatively (such that liberalism would technically be to socialism’s left if you think your scope polity has high taxes and major redistribution of wealth.) Since there’s a lot of left ideological space between “a bigger welfare state” and (meaningfully narrow interpretations of) “state control of many aspects of life,” it’s difficult to say how many self-reported socialists are social democrats and how many are one flavor of “hard” left or another. Similarly, it’s hard to guess how many of the Moldbug set classified themselves as libertarian versus conservative—is “socially permissive”/”traditional values” about religion or race and gender? - and hence what the paleo/”liberaltarian” split is among libertarians (though you could probably catch the Objectivist and ancap cluster with virtue ethics and deontology.)
It seems pretty clear that the political mainstream here, as in almost all educated Western sets, is some form of cosmopolitan democratic capitalism, but it’s difficult to see how large that mainstream is. Maybe you’d see some interesting correlations with being some flavor of weirdo or a weirdo at all—so if you have a strong prior that reading the Sequences will draw you into that mainstream, the low effect size of reported socialism on sequence reading probably shouldn’t affect it much! - I dunno.
In some places (notably the United States), “liberal” means “politically left”, which in turn pretty much refers to a package of political views held by those who oppose the “conservative” or “politically right”.
In other places, “liberal” retains its original association with concern for liberty, and is comparable to the American use of “Libertarian”.
This mostly happened for arbitrary historical reasons, but the easiest way to attach a story to it is as follows:
During the English Civil War and the French Revolution, those in support of popular rule (liberty/equality) were called “Liberals” and those in support of rule by the monarchy were called “Conservatives”. The French setup had the liberals sitting on the left and conservatives sitting on the right, thus creating the basis for the “spectrum” between left and right views. Of course, the common meanings of “conservative” and “liberal” were already in opposition (“he is liberal” means “he is free [with …]”) and so even when the “conservative” political view no longer referred to supporters of the monarchy, the “liberal” view was simply whatever opposed them.
Someone who insists political parties in the US have anything to do with ideology rather than simply being a combination of coalition and accident, might characterize modern “conservative” and “liberal” as representing the battle between “liberty” versus “equality” (respectively, ironically).
In other places, “liberal” retains its original association with concern for liberty, and is comparable to the American use of “Libertarian”.
I don’t really want to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but is at least worth noting that some modern US liberalsdispute the libertarians’ claim to be the heirs to classical liberalism.
As a Scandinavian socialist I support things like:
High taxes and public spending—around 50% of GDP seems about right.
Cradle-to-grave socialized medicine.
Publicly funded education—up to and including the university level.
An elaborate social safety net.
Extensive feminist social engineering schemes (long state-funded paternity leave and so on).
Why do I support things like that? Because I’m used to them and my first-hand experience tells me they work quite well. Also because the Scandinavian countries look good in international comparisons of various things. Though of course we can think of alternative explanations for that—maybe Scandinavia works well because it is populated by Scandinavians (a Steve Sailer type explanation) - I’m open to persuasion.
If you define socialism as “a system with state ownership of the means of production” then I’m not a socialist but some other type of collectivist.
There is a big effect if you look at time in the community rather than sequence reading. 38% of newcomers who have been part of the LW community for under a year picked “socialist”, compared to only 21% of the oldtimers who have been part of LW for 2 years or more. Most of the shift is from libertarianism, which is at only 28% of newcomers vs. 41% of oldtimers.
As someone who selected “socialist” (and yet has read the sequences) I want to remind you that that the example given in the survey for what “socialist” meant in the context of the survey was Sweden—it wasn’t Cuba, Venezuela, or Greece.
Not wanting to enter a political debate, but putting Cuba, Venezuela and Greece in the same bag is quite shocking to me. I don’t see how Greece is more “socialist” than most of Europe, and Venezuela is very different from Cuba in so many aspects than trying to group them is making an arbitrary cluster (unless you’re speaking of a generic specific thing like “the two founding members of Alba”).
Not wanting to enter a political debate, but putting Cuba, Venezuela and Greece in the same bag is quite shocking to me.
Not wanting to enter a political debate either, but my point was NOT that these three are in the same bag, it was that I don’t consider any of them in the same bag as Sweden which was the example given.
Political identification, in an age when individuals have basically no impact on national politics, is more about aesthetics and signalling than anything else. Socialism is just so much more populist than libertarianism.
26.6% are socialists? Now I understand why, the majority don’t read the sequences.
You have just made a falsifiable prediction! If socialism does not turn out to be negatively correlated with reading the sequences, will you rethink your political views?
Socialists averaged having read 47% of the sequences. If you include communists it goes down very slightly.
Non-socialists averaged having read 52% of the sequences.
The difference is not statistically significant at the customary alpha=0.05 level, but it’s very close.
As it turns out, socialism does negatively correlate with reading the sequences: coding “less than 25%” as 12.5% and “almost all” as 100%, the naive correlation appears to be −0.06; on average, socialists claim to have read 47% of the sequences, compared to the 51% claim of nonsocialists, a difference of about .12sd. This is significant at the .1 level. Controlling for whether one has been here since the OB days, we go down to about a 2 percentage point difference in sequence completion, about .06sd within each “cohort” and not at all statistically significant.
Statistical significance is a mental disease. The effect size is low enough that I just updated in the direction of “either socialism is more interesting than it looks or people in Europe define ‘socialism’ as liberalism”.
The survey defined socialism as “what is done in Scandinavia”, which for me is social-democracy : free-market capitalism with wealth redistribution, strong social safety net, regulation to protect workers, customers or the environment, and some critical sectors (like education) more or less directly handled by the state.
My own definition of socialism is “socialized ownership of the means of production”, which can take many shapes : government ownership is a form socialism, but cooperatives or mutualism are other forms of socialism. Socialism doesn’t necessarily means centralized planning, even if it is usually described as such.
But anyway, since the survey defined socialism in the first meaning, I used under it the first meaning to answer “socialism” in the survey, and I think we can safely assume most people who answered “socialism” used it under the first meaning.
Let the next survey have the same definitions for communism, conservatism, and liberalism.
Define “socialism” as “Sending children to cigar making factories and sugar making plantations instead of school, like in Cuba; sending suspected dissenters to a KGB prison in Siberia for torture, like in Russia; or sending baby Pandas to reeducation camps for torture, like in China.”
Define “libertarianism” as “Rule by corporations, like in the United States; or beating chimney-sweeps to death with a cane while wearing a bowler hat and monocle, like in Britain.”
I predict similar responses. You can’t expect people to comply with redefined political labels.
Actually, I answered socialism because I’m a libertarian socialist, the examples made clear that libertarianism and socialism were supposed to mean ‘American-style (i.e. capitalist) libertarianism’ and ‘social-democracy’ respectively, neither of which are anywhere near my position, the survey had no “none of the above” answer and that “socialism” is less unsatisfactory to me than that “libertarianism”.
Or rationality doesn’t much impact people’s views on politics. Good thinkers seem to me to be all over the place politically.
This doesn’t surprise me. I have believed for a while now that political left-ness versus right-ness is determined by terminal values, not by beliefs or epistemology (except for the case of religiously based moral opinions, but in a forum of mostly atheists this effect doesn’t show up much.)
I wouldn’t be surprised.
In my country a “liberal” is basically “classical liberal”, some kind of conservative or libertaria, but I’ve grown accustomed to American usage over the past three years.
We need data on what the proportion of Americans is.
This was the question and the options, as detailed in the survey:
I chose Socialist simply because I prefer what they seem to have in Scandinavia, than what the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party seems to have on offer.
The US Democratic Party is a lot less coherent entity than the left-er party in most countries. In most OECD countries, the person who says “I wish our government spending : GDP ratio was more like Canada’s” is a right-wing position while “I wish our government spending: GDP ratio was more like Sweden’s” is a left-wing position. In the the US, people espousing either of these views end up in the Democratic coalition, because the entire spectrum is shifted so far to the right, and there is nowhere else to go.
A lot of US Democrat-leaning voters wish the US was a parliamentary system, so that the centrist and center-left wings of the party could split (as they are in Canada between Liberals and New Democrats).
Yes politics really is this boring over here.
Arguably the Republican party is also a less coherent party than many right-er parties in continental Europe, where you usually have a “libertarian leaning” smaller-goverment party, a social conservative (Christian-ish) party and occasionally also in addition to that a nationalist party.
Consider for a moment that Ron Paul, Patrick Buchanan and George Bush are in the same party. What’s the overlap between these three in terms of something like trade tariffs, immigration, foreign relations, which parts of government spending should be cut, where spending should increase, meddling in social issues, education ect. ?
I’ve heard some of my countrymen complain we have too many parties with little variation among them. But I’m rather glad coalition building is required to be done in a arguably more transparent way. It also makes individual parties a temporary affair, since they break up and recombine all the time. Bad parties also tend to fail to enter parliament when they screw up things too much, which helps cull blind loyalty votes. It also allows some parties like the Greens or the Pirate party that otherwise wouldn’t be heard to get a voice in parliament and I’m glad they do.
I generally prefer what they have in Scandinavia compared to British Labour and US Democrats as well. Though I chose conservative so I’m not sure how this maps.
Perhaps “traditional values” (whatever that means) combined with basically a neutral attitude to wealth redistribution and an eye for expected quality of life? Or perhaps growing up in a country where everyone I know considers themselves some kind of “social democrat”, I have an odd idea of what “conservative” stands for.
Actually I’d be quite interested to get more data on the 29 other conservatives here, I wonder if we’re just “secular right” types (like I partially consider myself to be since I’m an atheist) or if some of the crypto and pseudo theists are conservative as well. Also I wonder how many where influenced by Moldbug or any of the other representatives of the internet (new? alternative?) intellectual right. To give one data point on the latter, I never even considered there might be interesting material from right wing thought, until I was exposed to it on-line and began seeing merit in it.
Edit: I counted 7 committed or lukewarm theists among conservative LWers.
It should be right there in the spreadsheet, under ReligiousViews.
I must have missed it, where was it linked to?
At the bottom.
Thanks!
Thanks it’s been some time since I took the survey and I forgot how that question was formulated.
Where I come from, liberals are mostly right-wing too, but it’s hard to disentangle whether that’s because the whole spectrum is to the left or whether the definitions are just different. The survey did explain that “liberal” meant US liberal. (ETA: as per the sibling comment, it’s a little more complicated than that)
This is the case in Australia too. The “Liberal” party is the major right-wing political party (and thus are more similar to the Republicans than the Democrats (in the US)), so there is a distinction between “big-L” and “little-L” liberals.
Only if you misuse it! Statistical significance is a good shorthand for how likely it is that a result is a fluke, which is helpful to know. Concluding from even astronomically precise p-values to some particular non-null hypothesis without other evidence in its favor, like “reading the Sequences causes people to be less socialist,” is another kettle of tea.
Or to go from a different angle: I don’t think much of anything can be concluded about communists and the sequences, even though there’s a non-tiny effect size, because, like, there are only five of us. (Probably the same applies to conservatives, just slightly less so; I’m too lazy to do the math.) One’s better off with reasonable priors: Sequences probably don’t impact politics that much, communists are probably like socialists in their likelihood of reading a blog by a George Mason economist, the terms probably aren’t cutting reality at its joints, and so on.
“Socialism” is a really imprecise word aside from various specialized contexts and discourses; all you can really conclude is that the person identifying as such values equality relatively highly. (In this sense it’s a poor descriptor but perhaps a less mind-killing label than a good descriptor of policy preferences would be, although “left” is probably better at this still, so it’s not clear to me that there’s an actual sweet spot that would justify continued use of the term.) Per the definitions offered in the survey, socialism (“socially permissive, high taxes, major redistribution of wealth”) and liberalism (“socially permissive, more taxes, more redistribution of wealth”) are basically the same thing, aside from being defined absolutely or relatively (such that liberalism would technically be to socialism’s left if you think your scope polity has high taxes and major redistribution of wealth.) Since there’s a lot of left ideological space between “a bigger welfare state” and (meaningfully narrow interpretations of) “state control of many aspects of life,” it’s difficult to say how many self-reported socialists are social democrats and how many are one flavor of “hard” left or another. Similarly, it’s hard to guess how many of the Moldbug set classified themselves as libertarian versus conservative—is “socially permissive”/”traditional values” about religion or race and gender? - and hence what the paleo/”liberaltarian” split is among libertarians (though you could probably catch the Objectivist and ancap cluster with virtue ethics and deontology.)
It seems pretty clear that the political mainstream here, as in almost all educated Western sets, is some form of cosmopolitan democratic capitalism, but it’s difficult to see how large that mainstream is. Maybe you’d see some interesting correlations with being some flavor of weirdo or a weirdo at all—so if you have a strong prior that reading the Sequences will draw you into that mainstream, the low effect size of reported socialism on sequence reading probably shouldn’t affect it much! - I dunno.
IIRC, liberalism itself has different meanings on the two sides of the Atlantic, even though I can’t remember what either of them was.
In some places (notably the United States), “liberal” means “politically left”, which in turn pretty much refers to a package of political views held by those who oppose the “conservative” or “politically right”.
In other places, “liberal” retains its original association with concern for liberty, and is comparable to the American use of “Libertarian”.
This mostly happened for arbitrary historical reasons, but the easiest way to attach a story to it is as follows:
During the English Civil War and the French Revolution, those in support of popular rule (liberty/equality) were called “Liberals” and those in support of rule by the monarchy were called “Conservatives”. The French setup had the liberals sitting on the left and conservatives sitting on the right, thus creating the basis for the “spectrum” between left and right views. Of course, the common meanings of “conservative” and “liberal” were already in opposition (“he is liberal” means “he is free [with …]”) and so even when the “conservative” political view no longer referred to supporters of the monarchy, the “liberal” view was simply whatever opposed them.
Someone who insists political parties in the US have anything to do with ideology rather than simply being a combination of coalition and accident, might characterize modern “conservative” and “liberal” as representing the battle between “liberty” versus “equality” (respectively, ironically).
I don’t really want to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but is at least worth noting that some modern US liberals dispute the libertarians’ claim to be the heirs to classical liberalism.
That’s an odd claim. All the capitalist libertarians I know are Lockeans, and are well aware of those sorts of constraints.
As a Scandinavian socialist I support things like:
High taxes and public spending—around 50% of GDP seems about right.
Cradle-to-grave socialized medicine.
Publicly funded education—up to and including the university level.
An elaborate social safety net.
Extensive feminist social engineering schemes (long state-funded paternity leave and so on).
Why do I support things like that? Because I’m used to them and my first-hand experience tells me they work quite well. Also because the Scandinavian countries look good in international comparisons of various things. Though of course we can think of alternative explanations for that—maybe Scandinavia works well because it is populated by Scandinavians (a Steve Sailer type explanation) - I’m open to persuasion.
If you define socialism as “a system with state ownership of the means of production” then I’m not a socialist but some other type of collectivist.
Please tell me that this is an official phrase.
Haha, I’m afraid not. These things are always framed in terms of “equal rights” or “social justice” or “changing perceptions”.
There is a big effect if you look at time in the community rather than sequence reading. 38% of newcomers who have been part of the LW community for under a year picked “socialist”, compared to only 21% of the oldtimers who have been part of LW for 2 years or more. Most of the shift is from libertarianism, which is at only 28% of newcomers vs. 41% of oldtimers.
Since old-timers tend to be Overcoming Bias fans the libertarian-leaning nature of that blog explains the difference.
Downvoted for implicit insult.
As someone who selected “socialist” (and yet has read the sequences) I want to remind you that that the example given in the survey for what “socialist” meant in the context of the survey was Sweden—it wasn’t Cuba, Venezuela, or Greece.
Not wanting to enter a political debate, but putting Cuba, Venezuela and Greece in the same bag is quite shocking to me. I don’t see how Greece is more “socialist” than most of Europe, and Venezuela is very different from Cuba in so many aspects than trying to group them is making an arbitrary cluster (unless you’re speaking of a generic specific thing like “the two founding members of Alba”).
Not wanting to enter a political debate either, but my point was NOT that these three are in the same bag, it was that I don’t consider any of them in the same bag as Sweden which was the example given.
Somehow I don’t think adding a smiley face to this post would have helped you get into the positives Bruno_Coelho.
Which in itself is very interesting.
Political identification, in an age when individuals have basically no impact on national politics, is more about aesthetics and signalling than anything else. Socialism is just so much more populist than libertarianism.
Did they ever?