Well-educated atheist American white men in their mid 20s with no children who work with computers.
“The new thing for people who would have been Randian Objectivists 30 years ago.”
The demographics are essentially the same except LW is probably more than 2:1 politically left vs. right. Objectivists are probably more than 2:1 in the other direction.
Since when did people like us decide it is OK to be liberal/socialist?
I think there is a significant correlation between Objectivism/hardcore libertarianism and the described demographics, but it does not mean that all or even most people of that demographic have that ideology; it just means that this demographic is much more likely to have this ideology that a random person is.
Also, while it is true that there are more LWers that are atheist than theist, male than female, white than other races, etc, it is at the same time very unlikely that most LWers have all those characteristics. (Being typical in all respects is very atypical). And just having one of those characteristics different might make the correlation with Objectivism/hardcore libertarianism reduce a lot.
Also, while it is true that there are more LWers that are atheist than theist, male than female, white than other races, etc, it is at the same time very unlikely that most LWers have all those characteristics.
Given that we are 86.2% male cisgender, 84.3% caucasion (non-hispanic), and 83.3% atheist (spiritual or not) that means a minimum of 53% of LWers are all three; probably the actual number is over 60%.
In answer to the parent, atheism in America may have started becoming a more liberal pursuit somewhere around 30 years ago when the Republican party started being substantially more religious and dismissive of atheism and science.
53% isn’t the product; the product is 60.5%. 53% is 100%-13.8%-15.7%-16.7%=53.8%, i.e. every person who deviates from typical does so in only one way. magfrump did correctly guess that it was more likely that they were positively correlated than not, which is what I would have guessed as well. In the general population, being male is correlated with being atheist, and I haven’t looked at the race-atheism correlations lately, but I wouldn’t be surprised if being non-hispanic white is correlated with atheism.
[edit] Er, if by “the product” you were referring to the part where he says it’s likely to be over 60%, then ignore this comment.
In answer to the parent, atheism in America may have started becoming a more liberal pursuit somewhere around 30 years ago when the Republican party started being substantially more religious and dismissive of atheism and science.
I would actually have said that Nixon was the last Republican president that wasn’t actively hostile to science and atheism. Compared with Reagan and Bush, he certainly has a very different reputation.
EDIT: I would have said that without having looked at the link or having been alive at the time.
How is the Southern Strategy related to atheism? It seems to have been an appeal to ethnocentrism. What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
My first response is that human societies are like ecosystems in that it’s difficult to only do one thing to them; moreover, to understand this it’s probably better to see the “appeal to ethnocentrism” as more of a strategic meme intended to shift the voting behaviors of an entire group. The Republicans simply wanted to expand the “vote Republican” behavior, identified a likely population, and then found something easy, near and dear to get them motivated: States Rights (at the time used as a justification for segregation). Former Dixiecrats flock to the Republican Party in droves and change its makeup—where it used to be a party of the Northern cities, it’s now becoming the party of rural, Southern conservatives.
This is the late 60s. The culture wars are already in swing. And the Republicans are now fast gaining ground among a population that is largely rural-to-suburban, quite ethnically-homogenous and xenophobic, for whom the church is the center for much of civil as well as religious society,
Martin Luther King has just been assassinated. There are riots among African-American communities over this. The Black Power movement comes to prominence, changing the flavour of much of the civil rights movement’s dialogue (King terrified people enough with his civil disobedience). Demonstrations against the Vietnam War are a regular occurance and shown on nightly news programs—very often the flag is burned. The hippie culture is spreadiing drugs and free love.
The new Republican contingent is quite amenable when Nixon starts talking about a side dish of Law And Order next to States Rights. The seeming paradox simply does not matter here. As the Republican party demographics and representation shift over the next decade, federalism in areas relating to the culture war becomes a key part of voting trends and and policies within this bloc. Explicitly religious and ethno-nationalist rhetoric become critical parts of communication within this group. The Creation Science movement comes to prominence, not as a quirky little subcultural thing barely anyone thinks about much but as a platform of the more extreme segments of the religious right. Republican atheists find themselves part of a deeply-divided base. They probably don’t like it much, but the Southern Strategy seems to be very successful, at both state and federal levels, so they get lots of the attention at a party level.
It takes a while for this all to shake out. Some of the atheists jump ship; others are in traditional Republican strongholds where this is not such a point of tension but find themselves increasingly-outnumbered as the party grows into a new population and thus, less-prioritized by the Party in general.
This new Republican movement is not only successful in the South—pretty much anyplace where demographics match up somewhat closely is a new Republican hotspot waiting to happen. The Lower Midwest, the Rockies and the Southwest all see inroads of this new brand as well.
The Republican Party is becoming more hostile to atheists. The Democrats are staying steady or slowly becoming more receptive, but critically, their new Civil Rights platform means that they’re growing steadily in urban areas in the North and the upper East Coast, as well as California. These areas are better breeding grounds for atheists—high population densities, higher income, higher rates of education, more diverse in many ways and sometimes more tolerant of that diversity, sometimes even in matters of civil law.
What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
Not available to me offhand, but I’m not necessarily describing a net shift in religiosity, but rather a redistribution of certain forms of it within the population, as indexed to Party affiliation.
What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
Not sure, but they’ve generally been consistently higher for a long time. That’s where we get the term Bible Belt which has been around since the late 1920s. Moreover, the Lost Cause was early on heavily connected to religion.
Empirically, Nixon was ok on science issues. For example, Nixon was essentially responsible for both the founding of NOAA and the EPA. If one wants to hang this on a specific Republican President, Reagan seems easier, given that he made multiple deeply uninformed comments about science.
The “etc.” was meant to cover the other listed demographic characteristics: young age, American, childless… If you add all those, the actual number of LWers satisfying all of them should drop below ~40%.
Adding in American, no children, works with computers, and less than 30 drops it to 10%; education is a bit tougher to code (ideally, you would want to index it by age). Most of the work is being done by “American,” “less than 30,” and “works with computers.” (No children, conditioned on being less than 30, does almost nothing.)
While this is usually true, I suspect that these measures will not all be independent (i.e. there will be some people who are outsiders to Less Wrong in many ways) and that combined with the fact that there are huge supermajorities (rather than simply majorities) of these populations will mean that most LWers are in fact highly typical.
Either way this doesn’t address the core claim of whether these characteristics select for Libertarianism. I don’t have the time or experience with spreadsheets to figure this out immediately but we could certainly look at that as an empirical question. Looking back my earlier reply was really outside the spirit of your first post so I apologize for that.
Well-educated atheist American white men in their mid 20s with no children who work with computers.
“The new thing for people who would have been Randian Objectivists 30 years ago.”
The demographics are essentially the same except LW is probably more than 2:1 politically left vs. right. Objectivists are probably more than 2:1 in the other direction.
Since when did people like us decide it is OK to be liberal/socialist?
I think there is a significant correlation between Objectivism/hardcore libertarianism and the described demographics, but it does not mean that all or even most people of that demographic have that ideology; it just means that this demographic is much more likely to have this ideology that a random person is.
Also, while it is true that there are more LWers that are atheist than theist, male than female, white than other races, etc, it is at the same time very unlikely that most LWers have all those characteristics. (Being typical in all respects is very atypical). And just having one of those characteristics different might make the correlation with Objectivism/hardcore libertarianism reduce a lot.
Given that we are 86.2% male cisgender, 84.3% caucasion (non-hispanic), and 83.3% atheist (spiritual or not) that means a minimum of 53% of LWers are all three; probably the actual number is over 60%.
In answer to the parent, atheism in America may have started becoming a more liberal pursuit somewhere around 30 years ago when the Republican party started being substantially more religious and dismissive of atheism and science.
Out of the 1067 people who made their responses public, 694 are all three, which is 65%.
Magfrump, how did you manage to guess that it would be over the product? I wouldn’t have thought they would be positively correlated.
53% isn’t the product; the product is 60.5%. 53% is 100%-13.8%-15.7%-16.7%=53.8%, i.e. every person who deviates from typical does so in only one way. magfrump did correctly guess that it was more likely that they were positively correlated than not, which is what I would have guessed as well. In the general population, being male is correlated with being atheist, and I haven’t looked at the race-atheism correlations lately, but I wouldn’t be surprised if being non-hispanic white is correlated with atheism.
[edit] Er, if by “the product” you were referring to the part where he says it’s likely to be over 60%, then ignore this comment.
good thing I read the last sentence first, yeah I was :p
Nice job breaking it, Nixon.
I would actually have said that Nixon was the last Republican president that wasn’t actively hostile to science and atheism. Compared with Reagan and Bush, he certainly has a very different reputation.
EDIT: I would have said that without having looked at the link or having been alive at the time.
How is the Southern Strategy related to atheism? It seems to have been an appeal to ethnocentrism. What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
My first response is that human societies are like ecosystems in that it’s difficult to only do one thing to them; moreover, to understand this it’s probably better to see the “appeal to ethnocentrism” as more of a strategic meme intended to shift the voting behaviors of an entire group. The Republicans simply wanted to expand the “vote Republican” behavior, identified a likely population, and then found something easy, near and dear to get them motivated: States Rights (at the time used as a justification for segregation). Former Dixiecrats flock to the Republican Party in droves and change its makeup—where it used to be a party of the Northern cities, it’s now becoming the party of rural, Southern conservatives.
This is the late 60s. The culture wars are already in swing. And the Republicans are now fast gaining ground among a population that is largely rural-to-suburban, quite ethnically-homogenous and xenophobic, for whom the church is the center for much of civil as well as religious society,
Martin Luther King has just been assassinated. There are riots among African-American communities over this. The Black Power movement comes to prominence, changing the flavour of much of the civil rights movement’s dialogue (King terrified people enough with his civil disobedience). Demonstrations against the Vietnam War are a regular occurance and shown on nightly news programs—very often the flag is burned. The hippie culture is spreadiing drugs and free love.
The new Republican contingent is quite amenable when Nixon starts talking about a side dish of Law And Order next to States Rights. The seeming paradox simply does not matter here. As the Republican party demographics and representation shift over the next decade, federalism in areas relating to the culture war becomes a key part of voting trends and and policies within this bloc. Explicitly religious and ethno-nationalist rhetoric become critical parts of communication within this group. The Creation Science movement comes to prominence, not as a quirky little subcultural thing barely anyone thinks about much but as a platform of the more extreme segments of the religious right. Republican atheists find themselves part of a deeply-divided base. They probably don’t like it much, but the Southern Strategy seems to be very successful, at both state and federal levels, so they get lots of the attention at a party level.
It takes a while for this all to shake out. Some of the atheists jump ship; others are in traditional Republican strongholds where this is not such a point of tension but find themselves increasingly-outnumbered as the party grows into a new population and thus, less-prioritized by the Party in general.
This new Republican movement is not only successful in the South—pretty much anyplace where demographics match up somewhat closely is a new Republican hotspot waiting to happen. The Lower Midwest, the Rockies and the Southwest all see inroads of this new brand as well.
The Republican Party is becoming more hostile to atheists. The Democrats are staying steady or slowly becoming more receptive, but critically, their new Civil Rights platform means that they’re growing steadily in urban areas in the North and the upper East Coast, as well as California. These areas are better breeding grounds for atheists—high population densities, higher income, higher rates of education, more diverse in many ways and sometimes more tolerant of that diversity, sometimes even in matters of civil law.
Not available to me offhand, but I’m not necessarily describing a net shift in religiosity, but rather a redistribution of certain forms of it within the population, as indexed to Party affiliation.
Not sure, but they’ve generally been consistently higher for a long time. That’s where we get the term Bible Belt which has been around since the late 1920s. Moreover, the Lost Cause was early on heavily connected to religion.
Empirically, Nixon was ok on science issues. For example, Nixon was essentially responsible for both the founding of NOAA and the EPA. If one wants to hang this on a specific Republican President, Reagan seems easier, given that he made multiple deeply uninformed comments about science.
The “etc.” was meant to cover the other listed demographic characteristics: young age, American, childless… If you add all those, the actual number of LWers satisfying all of them should drop below ~40%.
Adding in American, no children, works with computers, and less than 30 drops it to 10%; education is a bit tougher to code (ideally, you would want to index it by age). Most of the work is being done by “American,” “less than 30,” and “works with computers.” (No children, conditioned on being less than 30, does almost nothing.)
While this is usually true, I suspect that these measures will not all be independent (i.e. there will be some people who are outsiders to Less Wrong in many ways) and that combined with the fact that there are huge supermajorities (rather than simply majorities) of these populations will mean that most LWers are in fact highly typical.
Either way this doesn’t address the core claim of whether these characteristics select for Libertarianism. I don’t have the time or experience with spreadsheets to figure this out immediately but we could certainly look at that as an empirical question. Looking back my earlier reply was really outside the spirit of your first post so I apologize for that.