I like these ideas, but when speaking about political topics, even more attention must be paid to connotations. For example, most people would consider “cooperation” good, until you explain them that, technically, cooperation also includes things like “trading with slave-owners without trying to liberate their slaves”. Suddenly it doesn’t feel so good. Similarly, your definition of “selfishness” includes “not wanting to eat rat poison and supporting ban against adding rat poison to human food”; and a psychopath who doesn’t want to eat rat poison but is perfectly okay with feeding it to other people is most “unselfish” in this specific topic.
Speaking about correlations (which are not always causations), it seems to me important to distinguish things like “I happen to have trait X, therefore I support law Y (which benefits X)” from things like “I honestly believe that having people with trait X benefits the society, which is why I developed a trait X, and why I also support law Y (which benefits X) to motivate more people to become X”. Without this distinction we are putting opinions “I am white, therefore slavery is okay” and “I am a surgeon, and I think only people who studied medicine should be allowed to practice surgery” into the same category.
I guess the lesson here is that to avoid applause lights, to each noble-sounding definition you should try to also give an example of a horrible thing which technically matches the definition.
Thanks, good comments. I very much agree with the first point. It is very important to pay attention to connotations. I’ll put some serious thought into what terms to use if I get around actually doing this.
I agree with the second point too. It’s not that far-fetched regarding many questions. For instance, it seems to me that people who are right-wing and left-wing, respectively, when they are young, tend to choose careers on different bases. Right-wing people tend to want to earn more money than left-wing people. Thus to some extent they earn a lot of money because they are right-wing, rather than are right-wing because they earn a lot of money.
You could give various further questions intended to distinguish “selfishness” from other explanations of the correlation; for instance, questions regarding your views have changed as a result of changes in interest. In practice, this might be hard to do efficiently, though.
I guess, though, that if you have a sufficient number of questions, and your political views consistently correlate with your interests, then it’d be hard to explain this with anything but “selfishness”.
I agree with the last point, also, that the score would need to be accompanied with a thorough discussion of how to interpret it. For instance, a left-wing feminist member of NAACP who is also a working class African-American female might be given the same selfishness score, on this test, as a low-tax anti-feminist racist who is also rich, white and male, but most people would find the former pattern of preferences less objectionable than the latter.
For instance, a left-wing feminist member of NAACP who is also a working class African-American female might be given the same selfishness score, on this test, as a low-tax anti-feminist racist who is also rich, white and male, but most people would find the former pattern of preferences less objectionable than the latter.
LOL. Don’t you want to say “most people in my social circles”? Your political preferences are on full display here.
I like these ideas, but when speaking about political topics, even more attention must be paid to connotations. For example, most people would consider “cooperation” good, until you explain them that, technically, cooperation also includes things like “trading with slave-owners without trying to liberate their slaves”. Suddenly it doesn’t feel so good. Similarly, your definition of “selfishness” includes “not wanting to eat rat poison and supporting ban against adding rat poison to human food”; and a psychopath who doesn’t want to eat rat poison but is perfectly okay with feeding it to other people is most “unselfish” in this specific topic.
Speaking about correlations (which are not always causations), it seems to me important to distinguish things like “I happen to have trait X, therefore I support law Y (which benefits X)” from things like “I honestly believe that having people with trait X benefits the society, which is why I developed a trait X, and why I also support law Y (which benefits X) to motivate more people to become X”. Without this distinction we are putting opinions “I am white, therefore slavery is okay” and “I am a surgeon, and I think only people who studied medicine should be allowed to practice surgery” into the same category.
I guess the lesson here is that to avoid applause lights, to each noble-sounding definition you should try to also give an example of a horrible thing which technically matches the definition.
Thanks, good comments. I very much agree with the first point. It is very important to pay attention to connotations. I’ll put some serious thought into what terms to use if I get around actually doing this.
I agree with the second point too. It’s not that far-fetched regarding many questions. For instance, it seems to me that people who are right-wing and left-wing, respectively, when they are young, tend to choose careers on different bases. Right-wing people tend to want to earn more money than left-wing people. Thus to some extent they earn a lot of money because they are right-wing, rather than are right-wing because they earn a lot of money.
You could give various further questions intended to distinguish “selfishness” from other explanations of the correlation; for instance, questions regarding your views have changed as a result of changes in interest. In practice, this might be hard to do efficiently, though.
I guess, though, that if you have a sufficient number of questions, and your political views consistently correlate with your interests, then it’d be hard to explain this with anything but “selfishness”.
I agree with the last point, also, that the score would need to be accompanied with a thorough discussion of how to interpret it. For instance, a left-wing feminist member of NAACP who is also a working class African-American female might be given the same selfishness score, on this test, as a low-tax anti-feminist racist who is also rich, white and male, but most people would find the former pattern of preferences less objectionable than the latter.
LOL. Don’t you want to say “most people in my social circles”? Your political preferences are on full display here.