Maybe more like Openness in the Big 5, but I’m not sure.
I spent some time thinking about this, but it seems complicated. For example, it seems to me that when liberals want the society to change, they usually want the whole society to change—as opposed to e.g. first trying the new experiment in one county only.
I mean, I understand that if one strongly believes that X is good and perfectly safe, then “X everywhere” is better than e.g. “X in one city”. But when it turns out that “X everywhere” is politically impossible, at least for today, in such case I would still prefer “X in one city” to “X nowhere”… but surprisingly, some of my liberal friends have the opposite reaction. It’s like they have a lot of courage about global changes, but somehow get scared by small-scale experiments.
It’s… sorry if this is too uncharitable… as if instead of conservatives’ “safety in tradition”, liberals prefer “safety in numbers”. Change everything, so that if hypothetically something goes wrong, we are all in it, together.
(Rejecting both the “safety in tradition” and the “safety in numbers” seems like a libertarian trait to me.)
EDIT:
Thinking about it some more, maybe Openness is the typically liberal trait, and Conscientiousness is the typically conservative one. And perhaps the paradox of willing to enact liberal policies at large scale, but not at small scale, could be explained by liberals understanding on some level that they are good at changing things, but conservatives are good at maintaining things. A functional country could have liberals at the top, but still must have conservatives at least at the bottom, or it will fall apart. (If everyone participates in the permanent revolution, no one makes bread.) If you try to create a small-scale liberal utopia, the conservatives could simply leave it, and then the utopia would fall apart; which is why you must create liberal utopias at state scale.
Let me offer you a couple more frameworks to think about it.
One is Haidt’s Moral Foundations framework. It is put forward in Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, but Wikipedia tl;drs it thusly:
The original theory proposed five such foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation
…liberals are sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, conservatives are more sensitive to the Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity foundations and libertarians are found to have roughly equal sensitive to each foundation. According to Haidt, this has significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are to a degree blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally-driven words or behavior as having another basis—at best self-interested, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another.
My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.
Jordan B Peterson is doing further research on Big5 vs politics. He already has some intermediate results, such as dividing the “liberals” into “egalitarians” and “PC authoritarians” (the latter are similar in some aspects to the egalitarians, but in other aspects to conservative authoritarians).
I haven’t read about that much yet, but it resonates with my impressions of politics. The short version is: imagine the “motte” and “bailey” of social justice… turns out, they actually correspond to two different groups of people, measurably different in personality traits. (The “PC authoritarians” were already called “regressive left” at some parts of internet.)
Yes I think that’s exactly right. Scott Alexander’s idea on it from the point of view of living in a zombie world makes this point really clear: do we risk becoming zombies to save someone, or no?
That is pretty much it. Except, describing it as zombies makes it seems like the dangers are all fictional, and therefore the people who worry about them are silly.
But real world contains real dangers, so I would expect that people who got hurt in the past will be more likely to adopt the “conservative” mindset, while people who lived relatively sheltered lives will be more likely to adopt the “liberal” mindset. (Reality check: most liberal people? trust fund kids at expensive colleges. most conservative people? working class.)
Reality check: most liberal people? trust fund kids at expensive colleges. most conservative people? working class.
Really disagree there. Plenty of trust fund kids are conservative, plenty of scholarship students are liberal… even at the same university. I think if you want to generalize, the more apt generalization is city vs. rural areas. There are tons of “working class” liberals, they work in service industries instead of coal mines. The big difference is the proximity to actual diversity, when you work with and live with and see diverse people every day, you get acclimated to it and accept it as the norm; when you live in a rural area with few people, nearly all of whom are white, you get acclimated to that. When the societal norm of rural areas is a more conservative, Christian mindset, and that in the cities is a more liberal mindset then it follows naturally that people in these areas would generally develop into those dominating mindsets.
I’m not sure that your statement about who gets hurt in the past is more likely to be conservative in the future is true, either. Your conclusion doesn’t directly follow from the premise, and I can think of numerous personal and historical examples that run counter. Same with “liberals are sheltered”, you offer no evidence that links your premise to conclusion and there are tons of counter examples.
The big difference is the proximity to actual diversity, when you work with and live with and see diverse people every day, you get acclimated to it and accept it as the norm;
This makes me wonder how much of the liberal/conservative divide with how seriously we take minor acts of terrorism has to do with direct experience with big cities. If you don’t live in a city, hearing about a terrorist attack in a city is probably really scary, but if you’ve actually lived in a big city, a few people dying every few years is incredibly uneventful (for comparison, 318 people were murdered in my city last year).
A century ago, before liberal social policies, this would be considered an unacceptably high level of crime. Heck, I consider Baltimore a borderline post-apocalyptic no-go zone. Although I’m sure parts of it, specifically the parts with the fewest ethnic minorities, are ok. But as Eliezer said:
if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.
Would it boil down to risk preferences / risk aversion then?
Maybe more like Openness in the Big 5, but I’m not sure.
I spent some time thinking about this, but it seems complicated. For example, it seems to me that when liberals want the society to change, they usually want the whole society to change—as opposed to e.g. first trying the new experiment in one county only.
I mean, I understand that if one strongly believes that X is good and perfectly safe, then “X everywhere” is better than e.g. “X in one city”. But when it turns out that “X everywhere” is politically impossible, at least for today, in such case I would still prefer “X in one city” to “X nowhere”… but surprisingly, some of my liberal friends have the opposite reaction. It’s like they have a lot of courage about global changes, but somehow get scared by small-scale experiments.
It’s… sorry if this is too uncharitable… as if instead of conservatives’ “safety in tradition”, liberals prefer “safety in numbers”. Change everything, so that if hypothetically something goes wrong, we are all in it, together.
(Rejecting both the “safety in tradition” and the “safety in numbers” seems like a libertarian trait to me.)
EDIT:
Thinking about it some more, maybe Openness is the typically liberal trait, and Conscientiousness is the typically conservative one. And perhaps the paradox of willing to enact liberal policies at large scale, but not at small scale, could be explained by liberals understanding on some level that they are good at changing things, but conservatives are good at maintaining things. A functional country could have liberals at the top, but still must have conservatives at least at the bottom, or it will fall apart. (If everyone participates in the permanent revolution, no one makes bread.) If you try to create a small-scale liberal utopia, the conservatives could simply leave it, and then the utopia would fall apart; which is why you must create liberal utopias at state scale.
Let me offer you a couple more frameworks to think about it.
One is Haidt’s Moral Foundations framework. It is put forward in Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, but Wikipedia tl;drs it thusly:
The other one is Kling’s Three-Axes model. Briefly,
Jordan B Peterson is doing further research on Big5 vs politics. He already has some intermediate results, such as dividing the “liberals” into “egalitarians” and “PC authoritarians” (the latter are similar in some aspects to the egalitarians, but in other aspects to conservative authoritarians).
I haven’t read about that much yet, but it resonates with my impressions of politics. The short version is: imagine the “motte” and “bailey” of social justice… turns out, they actually correspond to two different groups of people, measurably different in personality traits. (The “PC authoritarians” were already called “regressive left” at some parts of internet.)
Yes I think that’s exactly right. Scott Alexander’s idea on it from the point of view of living in a zombie world makes this point really clear: do we risk becoming zombies to save someone, or no?
That is pretty much it. Except, describing it as zombies makes it seems like the dangers are all fictional, and therefore the people who worry about them are silly.
But real world contains real dangers, so I would expect that people who got hurt in the past will be more likely to adopt the “conservative” mindset, while people who lived relatively sheltered lives will be more likely to adopt the “liberal” mindset. (Reality check: most liberal people? trust fund kids at expensive colleges. most conservative people? working class.)
Reality check: most liberal people? trust fund kids at expensive colleges. most conservative people? working class.
Really disagree there. Plenty of trust fund kids are conservative, plenty of scholarship students are liberal… even at the same university. I think if you want to generalize, the more apt generalization is city vs. rural areas. There are tons of “working class” liberals, they work in service industries instead of coal mines. The big difference is the proximity to actual diversity, when you work with and live with and see diverse people every day, you get acclimated to it and accept it as the norm; when you live in a rural area with few people, nearly all of whom are white, you get acclimated to that. When the societal norm of rural areas is a more conservative, Christian mindset, and that in the cities is a more liberal mindset then it follows naturally that people in these areas would generally develop into those dominating mindsets.
I’m not sure that your statement about who gets hurt in the past is more likely to be conservative in the future is true, either. Your conclusion doesn’t directly follow from the premise, and I can think of numerous personal and historical examples that run counter. Same with “liberals are sheltered”, you offer no evidence that links your premise to conclusion and there are tons of counter examples.
Kind of like how the mayor of London said people must now accept a certain level of terrorism as ‘Part & Parcel’ of living in a big city?
This makes me wonder how much of the liberal/conservative divide with how seriously we take minor acts of terrorism has to do with direct experience with big cities. If you don’t live in a city, hearing about a terrorist attack in a city is probably really scary, but if you’ve actually lived in a big city, a few people dying every few years is incredibly uneventful (for comparison, 318 people were murdered in my city last year).
A century ago, before liberal social policies, this would be considered an unacceptably high level of crime. Heck, I consider Baltimore a borderline post-apocalyptic no-go zone. Although I’m sure parts of it, specifically the parts with the fewest ethnic minorities, are ok. But as Eliezer said: