On the ACX 2022 survey, the “Politics” question deliberately adopted different wording for the “Neoreactionary” option from the one it’s used in the past and that’s also used here. Here’s Scott, talking about the results of that survey:
The biggest effect is that many fewer people identify as neoreactionary, but I’m pretty sure that’s because I changed the question wording. It was previously “neoreactionary, such as Singapore”, but I thought that in real life nobody thinks of Singapore as NRx, and this was probably attracting a lot of Singapore fans who had no idea what it meant otherwise, so I changed it to “neoreactionary, such as the writings of Curtis Yarvin” and it dropped by more than half. Unfortunately this means I can’t track actual variations in neoreaction popularity over time, which I’d be interested in knowing. There was no similar change to the definition of alt-right, but it dropped by about 33%.
I think that (1) he is correct that “neoreactionary” doesn’t really mean “like Singapore” but also (2) the change makes inter-year comparisons difficult. I wonder whether the Right Thing would be for the LW survey to keep the old wording this year and then change next year to Scott’s new wording. (Then if you want to compare LW 2020 with LW 2024, you can try to relate LW 2020-2022 to LW 2023-2024 despite the wording change by guessing that LW’s 2022/2023 change in support for neoreaction here is comparable to ACX’s change in the same pair of years, which you can see because ACX uses the same wording for those years.)
Your suggested Right Thing seems a decent idea. We could also put both definitions on that question, each with their own bullet points.
The other option is to use the 2020 questions, which did not give examples but covered a little wider of a spread. Looking at the different ways this question has been asked over the years, I’m tentatively leaning towards this option.
On the ACX 2022 survey, the “Politics” question deliberately adopted different wording for the “Neoreactionary” option from the one it’s used in the past and that’s also used here. Here’s Scott, talking about the results of that survey:
I think that (1) he is correct that “neoreactionary” doesn’t really mean “like Singapore” but also (2) the change makes inter-year comparisons difficult. I wonder whether the Right Thing would be for the LW survey to keep the old wording this year and then change next year to Scott’s new wording. (Then if you want to compare LW 2020 with LW 2024, you can try to relate LW 2020-2022 to LW 2023-2024 despite the wording change by guessing that LW’s 2022/2023 change in support for neoreaction here is comparable to ACX’s change in the same pair of years, which you can see because ACX uses the same wording for those years.)
Your suggested Right Thing seems a decent idea. We could also put both definitions on that question, each with their own bullet points.
The other option is to use the 2020 questions, which did not give examples but covered a little wider of a spread. Looking at the different ways this question has been asked over the years, I’m tentatively leaning towards this option.