What percentage of educated Westerners would you guess are to the right (as operationalized below) of you on economic questions?
Sorry, I find this survey terrible. I don’t know how to answer most of the questions. Questions like the above require me to have more knowledge than I personally have (about the internal state of billions of educated Westerners). You are supposed to do this work for us by asking 5 to 10 representative questions with which we can strongly agree/strongly disagree, etc, and then use that information to categorize responders.
The way this survey is written I don’t even feel comfortable submitting my response, because the percentages are wild guesses. Further, I don’t even know what it means to be “left” or “right” on race and gender issues. Also, the categories in the first part contain multiple, sometimes conflicting labels. It’s really hard to know how to respond to those, as well.
I say all this as someone with concrete political beliefs! If you asked me specific questions, I would happily answer them. But I’m not comfortable speculating about the political beliefs of people occupying an entire hemisphere.
This is a good summary, but a post like this is greatly strengthened by links to external resources to justify or expand upon the claims it makes. If I didn’t know anything about the topic, some of the text would be unclear to me, and I would want the ability to click around and learn more. For example:
What is the sunk cost fallacy? (Link to wikipedia/LWwiki)
There is some recent evidence about rationality as a treatment for depression
Also, I think one of the first reactions a typical person will have is, “Rationality? Of course I’m rational.” To start from square one on this topic, you have to explain to people that, surprisingly enough, they aren’t. Politely, of course. Then you can start talking about why it’s important to work on.
All that said, I think the examples given are great; they’re salient problems for most people, and you can make a good case that rationality will improve one’s outcomes for those problems.