I think SV culture tends to be politically extremist, or to be more accurate fundamentalist, in whatever ideology it pursues. I see more hard-line libertarians,

I think SV culture tends to be politically extremist, or to be more accurate fundamentalist, in whatever ideology it pursues. I see more hard-line libertarians, but also more hard-line socialists, than in other subcultures. There's a long tradition of political extremism among engineers in cultures around the world; something to do with seeing society as a system simple enough that a single human being can understand the solutions to its problems. Hayek (who I disagree with on many points) even wrote a whole essay on it, with this very lovely point: "It is this awareness of being part of a social process, and of the manner in which individual efforts interact, which the education solely in the sciences or in technology seems so lamentably to fail to convey. It is not surprising that many of the more active minds among those so trained sooner or later react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar." https://mises.org/library/engineers-and-planners https://mises.org/library/engineers-and-planners Gambetta and Hertog tried to quantify this, and found that engineers were over-represented (drastically) in Islamist terrorist networks, and (less drastically) in Western right-wing extremism; and that Western left-wing extremists tended more towards a humanities education. I've read lots of newspaper write-ups of the book, but haven't gotten my hands on a copy, so I don't know their speculation on the causes of the left-right split they observed in studies. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html They also have older scholarly write-ups, which I should probably take a look at, e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-sociology-archives-europeennes-de-sociologie/article/why-are-there-so-many-engineers-among-islamic-radicals/91ED8BEFDE3793834667750B31575422 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-... EDIT: So, looked at that paper at last, and it seems the right-wing stereotype of SV people is likely true. They looked at Westerners to try to make comparisons, and while they found no overrepresentation in violent groups, they did look at surveys of political views of educated people by degree. The best data they could find was about faculty members from 1984, so keep the age and restricted subset in mind. "The results are startling (Table 7). The proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than in any other disciplinary group: 57.6 % of them are either conservative or strongly conservative, as compared to 51.1 of economists, 42.5 of doctors and 33.5 % of scientists, 21.4 % of those in the humanities, and 18.6 % of the social scientists, the least right-wing of all disciplinary groups. Only 1.4 % of engineers are on the left, as opposed to 12.9 % in the social sciences and 16.7 % in law. Perhaps this is an uncanny coincidence, but the four fields at the top of the conservatism scale – engineering, economics, medicine, and science – are the same four secular fields we found at the top of our main jihadist sample." They also cited a more recent Canadian study (1999) with similar results. Anyway, there are many other interesting findings in that paper; highly recommended.