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The Two Kinds of Moderate

• c2the3rd 7y ago
  What annoys me most about this kind of position that I haven't seen addressed enough is the assumption that politics is some kind of grocery basket of personal taste where positions on issues are all independent opinions. Anyone who thinks about politics seriously and argues politics with people needs to base their opinions on something besides personal preference. This means trying to develop moral and logical principles and goals on which to base positions. When people do this, opinions on many topics will be highly correlated.
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  I can hardly call myself left or right or moderate or up or down or whatever, because my ideas are difference from other people's ideas (although some are same, they aren't what can be simply called as left/right and so on). Left/right is not describing all of the issues anyways, I think, and many things are just not as simple as one way or other, anyways. Even then, some people whose ideas may be generally called left/right may not agree with everything anyways. But I suppose they may be correct that such independent ideas may be considered as moderates by these measurements, and may also be correct that a lot of people hate them for it. They say that on a scale from 0 to 100 your opinion might be any number, on average 50 but may be anything. I think that is not good enough because your ideas might not match the range like that so well, I think.
• youdontknowtho 7y ago
  PG mentions in footnote 2 that " the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left. Or perhaps that they are more confident, or more resigned, or simply more disorganized" This is not the case. The far-right police doctrinal purity very well, actually. They have built multiple pipelines for taking ideas that were once extreme and moving them to the moderates, who they then push to adopt these ideas lest the be called out as "Republican in name only (RINO)" or whatever the du jour insults are. I don't know about the current state of things, but the far right used bank robberies to finance operations across multiple fronts back in the 90's. They used the proceeds to fund groups in different regions. The far right is dangerous in a way that "the left" hasn't been since the 1960's. I think its telling that PG's really concerned with ideologies that are a threat to his financial/class interests, thereby validating a point maid be leftist critiques of wealthy people like PG. So, way to prove their point, PG-man. The history of the far right is really interesting and I would recommend it as a field of reading for anyone interested in American history.
• deleted 7y ago
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• urs 7y ago
  I like this part: “The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk.” I think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift. The “accidental moderate”, in fact, shifts their opinion independent of the shifts of the window. I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.” Additionally, by even defining two types of moderate, there is a sense that the word “moderate” means something already. I don’t know, I feel like there could be a better word, maybe if you think of it as a graph there’s a graph-related term, but it’s not coming to mind!
  • msla 7y ago
    > I think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift. You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation. > I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.” "Moderate" means "restrained" or "mild" as opposed to "extreme" or "severe" and has nothing to do with splitting the difference between whatever you think the extremes are. As a side note, a lot of people seem to not really know where the extremes actually are, and falsely attribute ideas to people. Deliberately splitting the difference is a tactic, something done to avoid seriously offending any part of the audience in order to keep viewership and readership numbers high. It also does horrible things to the facts when one side is right and one side is wrong and the news feels the need to pretend everyone has an equal claim to being correct.
    • war1025 7y ago
• zozbot234 7y ago
  Tl;dr: Everything in moderation, including moderation.
• hnhg 7y ago
  I'm intrigued by how this analysis fits in with increasingly 'tribal/team politics' - do intentional moderates try to appease every team? Thinking out loud, I think this piece misses that aspect of team-seeking behavior. I know people who will recognise a good point against their side but will strive to ignore it because it works against their sense of loyalty to the team. I increasingly believe there are relatively few people who don't want/need that sense of identity. [edit: the article doesn't really talk about sense of belonging, which I think is inherent in a lot of this discussion]
  • ajb 7y ago
    Indeed. I think a more useful definition is someone who does not exclude either side, from the set of people whose needs politics should address. Let's call that an 'ethical moderate'. Left and right could be thought of as differing in whose behavior they think needs to change, to improve the world: the wealthy and connected, or the poor and disconnected. The more hardline you are, the more you think that that behavior doesn't just need to change, but is reprehensible and deserving of exclusion from consideration. So you can be an 'ethical moderate' without necessarily holding centrist opinions. It may be that this means it should be named something else, but I think it's a useful way of thinking.
    • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Well, not holding position X merely because X is the [conservative | liberal | Democratic | Republican | left | right] position might be considered "moderate", in one sense of the word. Holding position X purely because tribe Y holds it makes you a committed (ie, not moderate) member of tribe Y.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    Great example of this going around in the British press today: https://twitter.com/alexvtunzelmann/status/1210340425124458498 https://twitter.com/alexvtunzelmann/status/12103404251244584... The small child at the top with the horn and red jacket is framed as Good, despite embarking on an illegal foxhunt at the end of which a fox will be killed with dogs. The "lawyer killing a fox with a baseball bat after it attacked his chickens" story immediately below is framed as Bad. As the tweet says, you have to know the team loyalties for this framing to make any sense. (The Telegraph is of course not any kind of moderate)
• theraido 7y ago
  I got a bit confused by the terms, but it just landed. The intentional moderate has the intention to be moderate on all issues whereas the accidental ends up in a the center when you consider the whole range of issues. Somewhere in there maybe is a different idea about 'tolerance'. The first might have a 'Live and let live'-position. The other actually believes plurality of lifestyles is a good thing. Somewhere along those lines ;)
• pterrys 7y ago
  Group thinking should of course always be questioned, but I do not believe it is useful to equate any form of moderation with cowardice. Especially in the modern political climate. http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/ http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/ https://www.quotes.net/mquote/770097 https://www.quotes.net/mquote/770097
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Cunning is more like it. Playing both sides against the middle.
• CPLX 7y ago
  Good thing this article has been posted. We’ve been short of billionaires willing to share their opinions about why we should consider the incredible increase in concentrated wealth and the resurgence of monopoly business practices as “moderate” while the idea that maybe we should, you know, consider doing something to stop that, as “extreme” and “far left”. There’s a couple tells in the article. But here’s a pretty clear one: > Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
  • zozbot234 7y ago
    There are plenty of impressive folks who aren't especially rich. And plenty of rich folks who support increased taxation or regulation, especially as a means of keeping competitors at bay and securing their own monopoly business practices.
  • gms 7y ago
    Curious: why not take the words at face value rather than redefining them in a way that annoys you?
    • tomlockwood 7y ago
      Isn't it possible that by posing a question that supposes the post you're questioning redefines something, you've created a case of the negative type of redefinition you're implying is happening?
      • randallsquared 7y ago
        In case you didn't read the top comment, the redefining was in the text and quite literal, not something that had to be supposed or inferred: > You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
• toyg 7y ago
  This is a very American perspective, occasionally a bit flippant (dismissing 100+ years of Marx-influenced intellectuals in politics and economics as “not smart” is definitely not smart, particularly after 2008) and overall mediocre. There is a lot of stereotyping, and it doesn’t account for the interest axis, i.e. the fact that a lot of very smart people simply do not care for organised politics in any way, shape, or form. More importantly, it lacks knowledge of consensus mechanics beyond Overton, which is why it struggles to get to grip with the right side of the spectrum - which is, historically speaking, the most consistently successful side, at least in the short or medium term when any new political issue arises. Dismissing that as “I don’t know” shows embarrassingly poor subject knowledge. So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a much older and experienced person, somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person has done very little effort to actually study this particular field in depth. Maybe it’s an attempt at showing that one can be not-smart about certain topics? If that were the case, I don’t think we really need it - Twitter and Facebook remind us every hour of every day that it is indeed the case.
  • hnhg 7y ago
    It's PG's habit of using his own arbitrary measures of intelligence as a proxy for worthiness, and where these measures of intelligence are usually a function of the ability to make money.
  • peisistratos 7y ago
    > OP: In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves. In 40 years, the USSR, whose economy was about the size of Brazil's in 1917, and who waged a civil war and repelled two waves of invasions (the first of which included an invasion by the USA after WWI) - this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth, to where it could repel an invasion by continental Europe, then launch the first satellite, man on space, moon probe and whatnot. For a country that Lenin considered to be in a holding action waiting for revolution in the west. I find that impressive. The western anti-Marxists went through an array of nonsense in the 20th century - "The End of History", the idea that Keynesian or monetarist or whatever remedies would smooth out the business cycle. Marx predicted worsening economic crises like in 2000 or 2008, with accompanying unemployment, overproduction and a falling of profits. Lenin predicted an unquenchable and self-destructive drive for imperialism.
• simonh 7y ago
  As a British moderate conservative, the differences between US and UK (arguably European) politics are fascinating. What moderate means is so different. For reference I’m a lifelong conservative voter that grew up under Maggie Thatcher. We do have a middle of the road Liberal Democrat party, but to my mind they maintain their position in the middle ground by dodging the hard issues. They are intentional moderates in that respect and I just don’t trust them to tackle really tough issues effectively. So I’m a moderate conservative because the Conservative party is generally an effective party of government that often leans moderate for practical political reasons. Often enough that I’m ok with it, cripplingly badly thought out referendums aside. Looking at the US political landscape there’s no question in the 80s I would have been a Reagan Republican, but gradually over the last few decades my respect for Republicanism has collapsed. It’s turned itself into a radical ideology that doesn’t even seem conservative, or concerned at all with things conservatives everywhere usually obsess over. The democrats have recently lurched left in response though, so while I found myself, to my own bemusement, generally cheering on Democratic candidates and presidents in the last few decades, now I’m worried they’re ‘doing a Corbyn’ and indulging in outlandish and fantastical economic policy positions that are always a temptation for the left. That leaves me in the wilderness in US political terms. So I can’t support the Republicans because they are immoral jerks who are selling out democracy, undermining the rule of law and sold out on their international security position for partisan posturing long before Trump showed up. And I can’t support the Democrats any more because they are indulging in crazy leftist economic fantasies.
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    As a British former moderate conservative who's abandoned the party, though in truth I feel the party has abandoned me, I see a UK conservative party that has followed a very, very similar transition. Moderate conservatism has just been kicked out of the party. It's now a radical ideology captured by libertarian think tanks in American image -- and several of them funded by the US. The conservative party is now the ERG party or Way Forward party. There is no space in the party for a Dominic Raab, Ken Clarke or Michael Heseltine, or One Nation policies -- once the bastion and bedrock of post-war conservatism, or even being in favour of a mild exit deal with the EU. Just dogmatic pursuit of blind, disproven policies for the benefit of a tiny minority such as the joke of austerity, closure and gutting of services many former Conservatives actually built and developed in former decades. For all her dogma on the Poll Tax, Thatcher could listen and understood the scientific advice, privatisation of many services that were eventually sold off were, to her, beyond the pale. She had her limits too, she did not and could not understand society, and people within it. Thatcher's first set of ministers contained Whitelaw, Lord Carrington -- possibly the last high ranking UK politician of any party with an innate sense of ethics and standards, Heseltine, Pym, Prior and many others I forget, who wouldn't be welcome in today's party, let alone get a ministry. Plenty to bring some balance to cabinet, to moderate the extremism of the mad monk who invented Thatcherism -- Keith Joseph. Of course Joseph was the creator of one of those first extreme libertarian think tanks, the Institute of Policy Studies. One Nation Conservatism, and moderate conservatism is dead. There's a radical party that uses the same name. They even adopted a bunch of US Republican voter suppression tactics in this election, page 48 of the manifesto. Promoting the suppression of democracy as policy aim! Gerrymandering constituency boundaries, picture ID to vote in a country that requires no ID -- knowing full well that hits the poor and minorities hardest (Who might well not be inclined to vote Tory), politicising the Judiciary. No, the Conservative party of yore no longer exists. Before long we'll be back to buying votes.
• somberi 7y ago
  To quote the comedian Chris Rock (from his "Never Scared"): "Anyone that makes up they mind before they hear the issue is a fucking fool, OK? Everybody… No, everybody’s so busy wanting to be down with a gang – “I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal.” It’s bullshit. Be a fucking person. Listen. Let it swirl around yo head. Then form yo opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, OK? I got some shit I’m conservative about, I got some shit I’m liberal about. Crime, I’m conservative. Prostitution, I’m liberal. "
  • Reedx 7y ago
    Yep. Relatedly, reminds me of a quote from Skin in the Game (Nassim Taleb): "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
    • youdontknowtho 7y ago
      "If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels" It reminds me of how fatuous Nassim Taleb can be, certainly. That quote basically deletes any historical context and actual belief held by those groups. It reduces the actual differences that they have to a bumper sticker level of depth. Not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't find it that helpful, and I'm also not particularly a fan of Taleb.
• AlexeyMK 7y ago
  Consider https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... for another take on political centrism/general tribalism. A bit (err, quite a lot) lengthier but it gets to some interesting ideas about the inevitability of tribes. Stephenson's Seveneves also comes to mind as a book-long meditation on the same topic.
• noir-york 7y ago
  There is a significant qualitative difference between ideologues (left or right) and, to use Graham's terminology, 'accidental moderates' or the 'intentional' ones. Ideologues assume that there is a single version / source of the truth whether it is a religious text, or a secular one (Marx, Hayek, etc). 'Intentional moderates' are not monist (as are idealogues), but to the contrary triangulate. If anything, intentional moderates reject the notion that there is an objective position. Accidental moderates - idealised - are actually just being reasonable and weighing different considerations, thus arriving at a considered position. Intentional moderates may not necessarily be cowards. To take an exampe: most people are ignorant of economics and so their position on, say, the interest rate is not an informed one. Intentional moderates use a centrist heuristic in the belief that the reasonable answer is somewhere between the two extremes. There is nothing wrong with this; one cannot expect voters to be experts or even well informed on all the posible issues of government.
• CM30 7y ago
  > Whereas an accidental moderate's opinions will be scattered over a broad range, but will, like those of the intentional moderate, average to about 50. I think this describes my own political opinion to a tee. I agree with some stuff on the left, some stuff on the right and the moderate/centrist opinion on some others, and it probably equals out as centrist. Still, I'm not sure I'd say this is a rare thing by any means. Indeed, I suspect a large percentage (maybe even majority) of the population has beliefs from all sides/corners of the political spectrum. It's just that the current voting system in places like the US and UK encourages everyone to band with 'one side or the other', and groups a bunch of people/groups that likely disagree in many cases together as one party. Plus given most people's mixtures of said beliefs are different to others, your average politician/party ends up having to appeal to a certain 'tribe' in order to get elected, since the percentage of people who 100% agree with a certain mix of beliefs is too small to get anyone a majority.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    This describes my own views perfectly as well. WRT. the perceived amount of "accidental moderates" being small, I don't think it's just because of voting systems. I see two other factors. 1) When you speak up on some issue, people tend to immediately pigeonhole you into a drawer with a political affiliation label on it. I've been called an illuminati NWO supporter by some, a Marxist by others, roughly in the same time, just because I voiced my opinion on two different topics. 2) "Accidental moderates" are not a uniform group. I'll bet that you and I have plenty of differences of opinion - on one issue, I'll be leaning left and you'll be leaning right, on another issue, it'll be the reverse. So once someone wants to leverage group support for one of their positions, they essentially have to sign up with one of the extreme, well-defined groups, that support that particular position. And while internally, they're still an "accidental moderate", to the outside, they just look like another partisan.
    • vorpalhex 7y ago
      I agree with your general take, but I want to expand on what I think you were getting at with (1) some. Polarizing issues is a very real phenomenon where by disagreeing on one issue your positions on other, entirely unrelated positions is assumed. I've had people assume I was pro private-prisons because of my view of tax rates, or assume I was against marijuana legalization because of my views on second amendment rights. The problem with polarizing issues is that it acts to reinforce the tribal mentality. The truth is that most people have relatively complex opinions when they get to genuinely think about them and they almost never fit in clean political tribes. Yet it's to the benefit of a given group to try and lump-sum everyone in or out of it.
• SethMurphy 7y ago
  In our current political system the accidental moderate seems left out. How do they choose the right candidate when the campaign system is wholly based on ideology? Sure, accidental moderates may have great opinions, but how does one put those in action in the current political climate within a political framework. They would seem to be best living outside the system, with no label defining the political affiliation or ideology, while the moderate is free to be wooed by the right or left choice of any given election.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > How do they choose the right candidate when the campaign system is wholly based on ideology? They don't. Perhaps that is why the voter turnout is so low everywhere. For instance, myself, I cannot in good conscience support any of the political parties that exist in my country. I agree with each of them on few points, and strongly disagree on most.
• arh68 7y ago
  I'm not convinced there are any intentional moderates. Isn't this just one big straw man? Noticeable lack of specifics, not even historical figures. Honestly it comes off like "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why". I think there's definitely something to the idea, but I wouldn't carve up the world into These People and Those People. If anything, we're more like calico cats and we all exhibit both behaviors simultaneously. Yes, I think the Overton windows "centers" some of our views, but I can't consciously tell you which ones without thinking about it first.
  • coldtea 7y ago
    >I'm not convinced there are any intentional moderates. Well, I know tons of those. People in journalism, and other high profile public related posts, are often such. They don't want to offend any side, and reap the benefits of both. Some politicians are also like that. I know people in media personally who have more extreme positions in private talks, but their public opinions are carefully calculated to advance their career. >Noticeable lack of specifics, not even historical figures. Honestly it comes off like "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why" Why do people on HN think everything is a big science paper? The post is observations about society, from someone who has lived in one for 5+ decades and paid some attention. It's not some sociology paper or nation-wide poll results. It's like people can't think without polls and figures, or have relegated their opinions to the "experts" and their stats...
    • bovermyer 7y ago
      While "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why" is a bit too dismissive, your dismissal of a desire for factual data is disturbing. One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience. This is true even if they have a sharp mind, decades of experience, and the best credentials. The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.
      • coldtea 7y ago
        >While "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why" is a bit too dismissive, your dismissal of a desire for factual data is disturbing. I find the over-reliance on second hand ("factual") data, charts and figures, disturbing. People have to learn to observe, think, and understand themselves. Not just passively consume pre-made charts and statistics (which are the easiest thing to manipulate). And learning how to spot BS statistical claims wont help when the raw data can be themselves cherry-picked, manipulated, and diced in tons of ways. Not to mention that live experience is 360 (if one tries), where data will always paint less than the whole picture. One could arrange for great "official" charts and figures for every country -- and most countries do. Unless one gets on the field and talk to the people on the street and the workplace, and try to check the reality in various situations, they can have a totally BS picture painted for them by the statistics and "factual data". >One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience. Well, you're not 10000 people. You're just one, like everyone else is. In the end, whatever you're fed or read or watch, you have to make up your mind for yourself. >The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia. Nor should fact checking and bias analysis start and begin with data people are handed down from official or other sources. Those can range from perfectly accurate to badly compiled to totally and mischievously misleading (for saving face, incompetence, for profit, etc). If you lived in USSR, would you trust the official data, or you would try to balance things and do direct observation? You shouldn't blindly trust "facts" and "figures" anywhere else either...
• SamReidHughes 7y ago
  > Intentional moderates are similar to those on the far left and the far right in that their opinions are, in a sense, not their own. The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. Well, no, not at all. People on the left and on the right tend to have a worldview and attitude that is the foundation of their stances on issues. It is not a coincidence that support for welfare spending, tolerance of theft, illegal immigration, fat acceptance, and decrying of objective standards in education all come from the same side.
  • emiliobumachar 7y ago
    Why do the policy packages vary so much from country to country?
    • SamReidHughes 7y ago
      They don't. Edit: Not in the sense that they're scrambled up. Party lines can be drawn differently, specific policies can be different. In the same sense, policies differ at different times in history, too. Edit II: I note your question presumes there are universal far right and far left attractors -- that's not anything I meant to imply.
  • philwelch 7y ago
    Ideologies are more multipolar than that.
    • SamReidHughes 7y ago
      Oh I'm well aware :-)
  • smolder 7y ago
    It'd be a stretch to say political opinions are for the most part a result of internal reasoning and self-formed world view, rather than indoctrination by a social group that suffers hard from confirmation bias. People are, overall, NOT good at thinking critically, and tend to accept the paradigm to which they have to most exposure. They tend not to reach outside of their bubble for clues about what could be wrong with their paradigm. It's more work.
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• whyoh 7y ago
  >the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. I don't think you can reduce political arguments to who is "right" and who is "wrong". Politics and moral questions are not mathematical problems. We fundamentally don't all agree on what the final outcome (of a society, of life) should be. Maybe 99% of us can agree with something like "happiness" or "peace", but those are way too vague and the devil's in the details.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    Eventually this ends up with a million people dead and everyone saying "well that was probably bad, maybe we should have tried to prevent that". Just because we cannot guarantee certainty or outcomes doesn't absolve us from the moral responsibility to try.
    • whyoh 7y ago
      Ok, but this is not what I was getting at. When PG says that the left and right are equally "wrong", he's suggesting that they are both trying to arrive at THE solution, but just taking different paths. I don't think this is fundamentally true and if you view political struggle from this perspective you're going to miss the full picture.
      • noir-york 7y ago
        It is indeed true - the extreme left and right (along with the religious extremists of any religion) all believe that they have the One True Solution, and have historically been ready to murder millions who they believe stood in the way. So yes, both the extreme left and the extreme right are not only wrong, but morally repugnant. The whole point of classical political liberalism is of how to get multiple incompatible ideas of what is the good life (broadly understood) to coexist peacefully. Without it there is only tyranny or chaos.
    • TuringTest 7y ago
      > Just because we cannot guarantee certainty or outcomes doesn't absolve us from the moral responsibility to try. I think the point is that different people will try different things, often opposing each other.
• sornaensis 7y ago
  Eh this essay is a bit off to me. The issue with modern US politics, or our politics in general I guess, is the tendency for two groups to emerge, one of which everyone generally has to belong to somehow. Most people are pretty rational about most issues when you discuss them individually, but you end up with a few ''foundational''-- and unquestionable --ideas that people have to fall exactly on one side or the other. I won't name any specifically but I think everyone knows some of these immediately. So you have individually rational persons who have to congregate on either one side or the other, and these issues end up being the deciding factor of which group you must join, dividing many people who otherwise agree on a lot of stuff, perhaps without even realizing it.. It's pretty similar to religious fracturing to me now that I think about it. Groups who agree on everything except one or two ideas and that makes all the difference. Very rare are the persons who fall heavily to one side of everything.
• pjc50 7y ago
  The famous MLK speech on moderates: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h... > First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. This is the problem with the "intentional" moderates: their position isn't a coherent one, it's instead pure unwillingness to engage. I understand people being conflict-averse, but it can lead to being backed into a corner by the people who are not afraid of conflict.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It may be an unpopular view, but I disliked this quote ever since I saw it. There is value in order. In particular, there is value in order over justice, when justice is pursued with scorched earth tactics that risk leaving everyone worse off, even those that were meant to be helped. To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it. Are the people seeking justice willing to risk a nuclear war with China just to force changes? Would that help anything? I worry about this, because I see that quote (along with an abuse of Popper's paradox of tolerance) thrown around a lot these days, by people who I don't at all trust to be of good will. The times we're living in are of great potential, but they're also incredibly fragile. Too much pressure, too much disruption, and the civilization may break down - which means not just rolling back a good thousand years of progress, but also leaving the next hundred or thousand generations stuck in these conditions on a thoroughly broken planet. You can't just reboot a technological civilization. Which makes me think that there is a solid argument to be made for minding the order, and not jumping to extreme action in pursuit of justice. EDIT: I suppose this may be the "accidental moderate's" answer to the complaint about "intentional moderates". It's not about unwillingness to commit, or being extremely conflict-averse, or trying to appeal to all sides of the issue. It's about refusing to engage in actions - or call to actions - that lead to too much of collateral damage.
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• CameronNemo 7y ago
  Right and left are arbitrary constructs necessitated by a first past the post voting system. Change the electoral system and you will see much more diverse and meaningful party affiliation. >The effect of a system based on plurality voting is that the larger parties, and parties with more geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties with more evenly distributed support are left with a disproportionately small share. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
  • scarmig 7y ago
    This is not accurate. Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those. In fact, you can look at how each politician votes (without explicitly coding votes as left or right). This itself forms a space equal to the number of votes taken. But that vote space can be projected into a much lower dimensional space that captures most of the information about the vote space. If you go so far as to collapse it into a one dimensional space, that corresponds to the traditional left/right axis, and this holds through both history and internationally. The second issue is a bit more varied, but most of the time the left/right axis dominates whatever that second dimension is. Look up DW-NOMINATE for more info.
    • CameronNemo 7y ago
      DW-NOMINATE was developed by US political scientists to study the US House and Senate. Higher dimensionality is present internationally, and I believe that attempting to reduce those dynamics to a left/right spectrum limits our understanding of politics. >Poole and Rosenthal note in Chapter 11 of Ideology and Congress that most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): "These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29 Static parliamentary majorities are not necessary in a presidential system.
    • redisman 7y ago
• apu 7y ago
  > the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong Graham's sleights of hand used to be better hidden. The "far left" and "far right" are not fixed points in ideological space (even within a single country).
  • totalZero 7y ago
    I agree and I would go even further. Ideas don't exist in continuous space.
• taneq 7y ago
  It never occurred to me that people would tailor their political views to try and be "moderate". The whole idea feels kind of dirty to me, your political views should be your honest opinion.
  • ksdale 7y ago
    I don’t know that I’d call myself a moderate, but my honest opinion is that many strongly held views disturb me precisely because they tend to be so strongly held by those who seem to hold them, rather than being wrong in themselves, or because they require their adherents to brook no opposition. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I believe that people who say they have all the answers can safely be assumed to be wrong about a great many things, and strong political ideologies are, in essence, claims to have all the answers. I’m open to a lot of ideas, and I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with policies that are way outside the Overton window, but I think what feels dirty to me is holding political opinions so strongly that it makes our fellow humans the bad guys.
    • bhelkey 7y ago
      > I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with policies that are way outside the Overton window I am curious, what are some examples?
      • edmundsauto 7y ago
        Not OP, but as a thought experiment, I tried to think of some things that are un-discussable because of one side or the other. Maybe universal healthcare, completely gov't paid? That's socialism to the right -- can't try that. On the other side, maybe ending hate crime legislation? Or striking down Roe v. Wade, and letting each state be their own experimental ground? Ending minimum wage?
      • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        A party of the right nationalising a business, considering it, talking openly about it. It was the UK Conservative party who nationalised Rolls Royce, almost immediately sold off cars, and kept Aero Engines a while. Otherwise they'd no longer exist as the RB211 engine had broken them. Larger government. State ownership does not guarantee incompetent or inefficient. The right used to believe in many of the things that have become unthinkable. The Tories also wanted to improve services, built social housing, added libraries and social care. Pre war UK used to permit the various cities around the UK to form municipal corporations. They were used for power generation, water, rail and tramways among other things, and mostly worked very well indeed -- with the city getting service and income, but being quite hands off from the modern perception of centralised control. See also the various towns and cities that have put in their own broadband, far better than the private sector offer, in more recent years... Clean Air Act UK was brought in by the Conservatives in 1956. The right used to be much more amenable to environmental and health regulation. Well regulation in general. Now they avoid, neuter and talk down regulation, and slim down the bodies who once oversaw said regulation. Specific, I think, to the UK, the astonishing degree of centralisation brought in since 1974. Nearly all of it under the Tories. Yet Labour is perceived as the party of state control. Neither party talks of giving real power back to the regions and cities, they both mostly talk against it. There's other examples on the left, and probably similar examples the other side of the Atlantic.
• youdontknowtho 7y ago
  "and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong" I disagree with this in the strongest terms. I realize that the people on this site lean right, and arguing politics isn't really cricket, so I won't go into to why. The "center" is a political ideology that pretends that it's something else. Also, being good at one thing doesn't make someone's opinion about everything else important.
  • youdontknowtho 7y ago
    tough crowd.
  • phnofive 7y ago
    In context: > Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. I disagree as well, but it could be revised to: > and the [accidental moderate believes that] far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. This would make the definition somewhat more sensible, though I'd still disagree with it. I wasn't able to turn up demographics for the site, so I can't outright disagree with you on the political leanings of HN, but I'm curious to know what they are.
• asdfman123 7y ago
  Ah yes, the old "No one thinks for themselves except people like me" argument. > openly being an accidental moderate requires the most courage of all If he thinks that having middle-of-the-road opinions requires the most courage of them all, he has had an extraordinarily easily life in which he is used to be hailed as brilliant. It seems as though due to his comfortable position in life he has never faced any significant opposition to anything he's said, anything he's done, or anything he is. I might be wrong, and I respect the opinions of "accidental moderates" who are acting in good faith, but I cannot imagine how you'd come to the conclusion that holding moderate viewpoints requires any real courage at all. > Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates "I am only impressed with people exactly like me." Someone needs to write a similar pithy thinkpiece about how people who experience a lot of success should stick to what they know and not assume it gives them valid insight into other parts of life.
  • grawprog 7y ago
    I always assume most people hold moderate viewpoints and the people with extreme viewpoints just tend to be the loudest. At least that seems to be the case with most people I meet anyway.
    • asdfman123 7y ago
      And people with extreme viewpoints usually feel that way because they have some very strong belief system, like the idea that human life should take precedence over private property, or the idea that taxation is theft. If you start with one of those assumptions, then it pushes you pretty strongly to one pole or another. Often times people like that do think for themselves. They just think differently than you do.
    • _bxg1 7y ago
      But the social pressure from the vocal minorities - especially when amplified by social media - pushes other people towards those extremes out of fear of being ostracized.
    • SkyBelow 7y ago
• Apocryphon 7y ago
  I know that the dictum to keep politics off of HN has been a dead letter for some time- especially since tech has become overtly non-apolitical in the last few years- but it's still funny to see pg himself breaking that rule.
  • jpitz 7y ago
    How is he breaking it?
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      This is an essay on politics. It goes to show that people in tech are acknowledging more that the industry is not apolitical and has a very real social and political effect on the world at large, and are so dropping the pretense of lacking political interest. That and like the rest of the world, the tech industry has become increasingly politically polarized over the last half decade.
      • namirez 7y ago
        To be fair to PG, perhaps, someone else shared his post on HN so he didn't break any rules. On a different note, I guess in the age of Facebook, it's not possible for tech to remain silent on politics whether we like it or not.
        • jpitz 7y ago
          This is exactly the reason I asked the question. PG didn't post this on HN.
          • namirez 7y ago
            Agreed! But I believe the admins are ignoring their own rules by allowing the link to remain on the front page.
      • wbronitsky 7y ago
• namirez 7y ago
  > For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left. Or perhaps that they are more confident, or more resigned, or simply more disorganized. I just don't know. This is a typical complaint by the so called moderates who feel unappreciated by the left (whatever that is). But I yet to see an example of the far left who has any meaningful policy impact. All I see is a lot of whining about college campuses. Perhaps the far left in the US political landscape is Bernie who by most measures would be a moderate in other industrial nations. I don't know, but I have a hard time following what PG is trying to say here.
  • redisman 7y ago
    It really is a bizarre setup, I think it's mostly generated by the reality-distorting effect of the ubiquitous "far-right opinion" programming on radio and Fox News and now online. The far left is supposedly in control of everything despite only controlling a handful of seats of power in the past century.
    • ip26 7y ago
      It's a common trope, e.g. a few years ago the GOP argued it couldn't pass any laws (despite controlling the Executive, Judiciary, & both chambers of Congress) because of the obstruction of the left. Or see various conspiracies that involve a weak, stupid, inept, and foolish government conducting a vast, brilliant, collaborative coverup of the most sophisticated technology on earth.
  • slumdev 7y ago
    The far left in the United States mostly doesn't exist. The corporatist center-left has given up on meaningful economic policy change and mostly just panders on abortion, gay marriage, and gender identity.
    • nottorp 7y ago
      Yeah, what left in the US? They have no idea what "left" is...
• CriticalCathed 7y ago
  > Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. I don't think I can take seriously an essay that so flatly and flippantly claims this as fact. This is a masturbatory essay.
• PaulAJ 7y ago
  > For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. IME the far right despises them as dupes of their favoured conspiracy theory.
• justin66 7y ago
  It is so peculiar that anyone believes the United States possesses a "far left" as a force in politics. This requires one to ignore political science and ideology, not to mention the practical politics of the rest of the world, and simply place people on a continuum and draw a line near some perceived median.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    I think drawing a line near the median is really the only thing that makes sense. These concepts are relative by nature. Generally, when speaking of how far to the right or left someone is in the US, I think of it as relative to other americans, not to the rest of the world, and especially not relative to some absolute concept of right and left (which falls apart quickly if you give it some thought, as norms change over time)
    • justin66 7y ago
      > These concepts are relative by nature. Okay, the concepts are relative by nature (arguments about the two-dimensional nature of the left-right axis notwithstanding). In that case, place the concepts (or perhaps the individual ideologies that bundle the concepts) on a distribution and draw a line near the perceived median. That's the sort of thing you see in some poly-sci texts, and it makes sense. My point was that it is a mistake to place people on a left-right distribution based on their positions and call the people in, for example, the first quartile the "far left." > I think of it as relative to other americans, not to the rest of the world, and especially not relative to some absolute concept of right and left The problem is, applied universally this approach of quantifying things would make it appear as though every place possesses the same diversity of political thought, whether you're talking about Europe, the United States, or North Korea. This is simply not the truth. edit: another problem is that it can cause people whose views are much closer together than, for example, socialists vs fascists, to view each other as being on opposite ends of an ideological spectrum and combatants in a bitter ideological struggle, even though that's objectively ridiculous. Remind you of anyplace?
      • 7y ago
• fizzyfizz 7y ago
  pg has written some good essays. Unfortunately this isn't one of them. As is increasingly the case, the core of pg's argument is a variant of the Appeal to Authority: the "impressive people" that pg personally knows. And there is also an Ad Hominem; one doesn't want to be anything like the nasty people who are continually mean to him online. It is certain that pg does know some very impressive people, and that he attracts a lot of attention from Twitter leftists looking to score cheap points. However, this argument is vague and dependent on faulty assumptions. Not only can it be easily dismissed, it probably proves the opposite of what he intends. I think we can assume those impressive people are likely all drawn from the small coterie of technology startup founders and investors. From this and other essays, it's become clear that pg believes that success at becoming a startup founder (just like pg) is almost identical with being an impressive person. But it's well-known that this group already comes from a relatively narrow slice of humanity. Upper-middle-class or upper-class, likely white, likely gone to a university in America. It would not be surprising if their opinions were roughly in alignment. Even so, the "impressive people" have not taken public stands that we can verify. We only have pg's assessment of their stances as being roughly centered around a mean, and we only have pg's assessment of where the mean is. (It's rare indeed for someone to self-identify as an extremist!) This is an informal essay, so perhaps asking for even one example is too much rigor. And, as pg often reminds us, his friends have all kinds of interesting opinions they can't reveal in public any more, due to political correctness. Luckily we have pg who valiantly is willing to stand up in public and allude to a large number of people who agree with him, but are just off-camera. Anyway, since we are left to merely imagine, let's also imagine that we asked pg's interlocutors about other topics. What would their opinions be on, say, technology startups and business? They'd probably say they were good for the world, and good as a career path. There might be a relatively univocal assessment of taxes as being too high, the barriers to founding businesses as too onerous, and that some ideas popular outside the tech industry (like mandated key escrow, or fact-checking social media posts) are all ludicrous and counterproductive. All defensible opinions, but my point is, we can imagine them all being in close agreement on issues relating to their industry. So let's take pg at his word that if we have a cohort of people who have self-selected an industry and risen to success, their opinions about that industry are both informed and in close agreement, and their other opinions might be defensible, but randomly scattered around a mean. Is this really that surprising? pg wants us to believe that the relative moderation of his impressive friends proves something. That not only is moderation a virtue, but the virtuous are moderate. But accidentally, he may be revealing that technology startup success is more random than he thinks. That it selects for people with some narrow range of skills, but success is awarded with a high degree of randomness. And since there is no reason for this cohort to be in alignment on any other matter, they are more or less randomly scattered around the median opinion of an upper-class American university technology student. ... PS: pg started his career as an essayist with "Beating the Averages", and now he asserts that being average is actually good!? Okay, maybe that's a cheap shot, but we're all looking to justify ourselves and be loved, I guess, and as we pass through different stages of life that doesn't change. pg used to write about the hidden virtues of high school nerds, minority programming languages, and young founders who weren't from California. I found it easier to be a fan. Today he mostly writes about the hidden virtues of the Silicon Valley elite. While that might actually have some merit, it's a bit of a harder sell.
• k__ 7y ago
  "the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong" To me, at least, it seems that the left is less consistent than the right. But I have to admit, I don't have much to do with the right movement. The left is a bunch of groups who mostly dislike each other to some degree, because they have the feeling the other group will be seen as part of their own group and work against them. Communists, anarchists, anti-imperialists, anti-germans. The only thing they have in common is that they all despise like the misanthropic tendencies of the right.
  • DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    > Communists, anarchists, anti-imperialists, anti-germans. The only thing they have in common is that they all despise like the misanthropic tendencies of the right. Here's a working theory I'd love to discuss: Having friends all over the political spectrum, I think some policy topics reveal differences in how most left-leaning / right-leaning people understand human nature. My conservative friends generally hold that humans tend towards laziness and greed, and that any social policy which fails to consider that will fail before long. E.g., Marxism, UBI, or universal healthcare. From their perspective, liberals who advocate such policies are being stupid, short-sighted, and will ultimately cause more harm in the long-run. They see liberals as wanting to run experiments whose outcomes are predictably bad. My liberal friends hold that because conservative policies accept the worse aspects of human nature as inevitable, they end up cementing the status quo, which is unacceptably bad. E.g., feudalism, Citizens United, etc. They see conservatives' unwillingness to change as (at best) heartless or (at worse) an evil self-serving power-grab. In the end, each side finds the other's stated policy justifications so unbelievable, they conclude those public justifications are a just smokescreen for secret, nefarious purposes.
    • k__ 7y ago
      I don't really know who is wrong or right. I don't like the base assumption of conservatives that "humans tend toward laziness and greed" as if it was a law of nature. I think the point is more that people want to get the most out of the system (money, meaning, fun, etc) with the least amount of work (they don't like to do) necessary. In the systems conservatives have in mind, the outlooks are so bleak that doing nothing and sitting at home seems like the logical next step when giving people an UBI or something. On the other hand I don't like the base assumption of leftists that capitalism and money is the root of all evil. Money is just a way to make "value" more tangible, the problem is that people simply don't value stuff that should be valued. This has nothing to do with capitalism or money, those are just the metrics that show what's wrong with our value systems.
• elyobo 7y ago
  > Whereas an accidental moderate's opinions will be scattered over a broad range, but will, like those of the intentional moderate, average to about 50. This is only the case if left and right are equally right and wrong, which is unlikely to be the case. The average place of an accidental moderate could be anywhere, even to the left of the left or the right of right right.
  • lukevdp 7y ago
    You are not a moderate if you are “left of the left” or “right of the right”.
    • elyobo 7y ago
      No, but his definition of "moderate" isn't anything to do with those, it's just "thinks for themselves instead of taking on a group of positions" - which can land you anywhere, potentially.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    It's not about whether they are equally right and wrong, but if they are equally far from the median or average viewpoint. And I'd say it is very likely that they are. Almost by definition, in the sense that right and left are relative terms. That being the case, I think PG is correct that accidental moderates should tend to average in the middle. In general.
    • elyobo 7y ago
      I don't think it works out that way. Thinking about politics as a single left/right continuum might make it seem like it would, but * measuring distance to know how "far" they are is hard, so hard to say how far any given position is from the "median or average" viewpoint * hard also to measure not just the distance, but how common such a position is, which you'd need to do as well * harder still to do this over many different positions * harder still when you realise that, of course, the left/right thing is an incredibly simplified (although sometimes useful) way of looking at a complicated set of topics For any individual "moderate" it seems very unlikely that they will end up "in the middle" even across a range of political topics. For an aggregate of all "moderates", then it'll end up somewhere, but no reason to assume that it will be in the middle of things (even if you could determine where such a middle even was).
• hindsightbias 7y ago
  “Or more precisely, you have to be independent-minded about the ideas you work with. You could be mindlessly doctrinaire in your politics and still be a good mathematician. In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves” I’m wondering if all the science heroes from that era were pro-Eugenics from a science or political position.
• rdtsc 7y ago
  Where the median is depends where the extremes are. Overton window I think is the fitting term here. The Overton window in the US might be shifted such that in other countries a moderate here might be perceived to be quite right wing there. Chomsky put it well when describing this phenomenon: --- The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. --- > I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left I think it is because left opinions, even in mainstream media and social discourse do not get the immediate push-back and derision, but are treated more of like confusion or maybe immaturity. Say, if we see someone waving the Soviet flag in the streets at a protest we just sort of shrug at it instead of have a visceral reaction to it.
• m_ke 7y ago
  There are two types of "accidental" moderates in America. Rich fiscal conservatives who are socially liberal but don't want to pay their fair share ("libertarians") and the blue collar union workers who are socially conservative for religious reasons. There is no far left in America, the "leftist" candidate is campaigning on radical ideas like universal health care and free public education, things that every other first world country already provides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers... https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/policies/is-beginning-secondary-education-tuition-free?filter=crc https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/policies/is-beginning-seco...
• smolder 7y ago
  It occured to me that two people moderate on average could have polar opposite views, and I wonder how my views might line up, as well as how homogenous Paul Graham's network of accidental moderates are. Having polar opposites that are both "in the middle" seems to be a clear illustration of why the left vs right analogy is lacking.
• rossdavidh 7y ago
  While I am what he calls an "accidental moderate", there is an argument to be made for the intentional moderate stance. If you think the damage from your error is proporational to the square (or some higher exponent) of the actual error, then an intentional moderate will have far fewer (perhaps no) fatal errors. They may choose 50 when they should have chosen 30, but they won't choose 100 when they should have chosen 10. If the damage from the one is like (50-30)^2=400, and the damage from the other is (100-10)^2=8100, then you can have a lot of modest, intentional moderate errors that don't add up to the damage of the one thing an accidental moderate is really, really wrong about. As usual, there is a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1170/ https://xkcd.com/1170/ Again, I myself am mostly an accidental moderate. But I think he's underselling the case for intentional moderates.
• ineedasername 7y ago
  I understand the concept of intentional moderate as he explains it, but I honestly have never met anyone who formulates their beliefs that way, who deliberately tries to find a middle point on the spectrum regardless of the specific details. Of course that could be my social circle, which is why it would be a lot more constructive if Graham had given a bit of concrete example on this. Especially given that just about everyone on any side of the political landscape will assert that they do in fact think about each issue independently. I doubt many people would say, "I believe this because it's a conservative belief and I am conservative so I must believe it". No, they will say, and believe, that they have formed their own opinions, and they just happen to align pretty much exclusively with conservative (or liberal) ideology.
  • narag 7y ago
    I know a lot of people that proudly says that virtue is in the middle. They think that the middle is a definite entity and extremes are caused by some flaw in character or interests. I'm usually uncomfortable talking politics because I have "radical" ideas from both sides. I believe in public healthcare and education for good reasons, mostly experience and observation. For most everything else I could be defined as libertarian. I'm also pretty skeptic of decentralized power: municipalities tend to create idiotic regulation and pork barrel politics, I'd rather have laws passed by national parliament. So I can tell you exactly where a conversation with intentional moderates go astray, wheter they call it that to themselves or not.
• tptacek 7y ago
  It just can't be the case that this kind of content, which would never ordinarily survive on the front page if written by someone else, has a place here simply because Paul Graham wrote it. I say this as a moderate, of the accidental variety, myself! But if this would get shot down if it appeared in The Atlantic or The New Republic --- and it would, and should --- it shouldn't get a pass just because Harj Taggar and Patrick Collison reviewed it.
  • tyre 7y ago
    strong agree. This isn't a nuanced or deeply explored post on the topic of moderates. Same as the previous post that was on here this week or last. Name brand carries a lot.
    • jamiequint 7y ago
      The fact that the argument is not complex does not mean it is not deeply explored.
      • topaz0 7y ago
        Yeah. The fact that it is not deeply explored does, though.
  • glangdale 7y ago
    The PG quote that leads the essay on the topic of PG's extra-curricular rangings ("Dabblers and Blowhards") seems apposite: 'I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it' https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm Edit: the essay itself seems... not very perceptive. Notably, putting things on a continuum between far left and far right and imagining that everything is somehow a process of picking out options on this continuum seems amazingly reductive. Further, the dig on "intentional moderates" also seems to miss the point that many intentional moderates might well be seeking to function politically - so picking out moderate positions in the range of public opinion might be a case of keeping your powder dry and being effective, not compulsively trying to be a moderate because it's nifty. This was very much the case with the way Obama analyzed his own politics (turning the huge ship, very slowly). Not saying I agree with that but the assessment of "intentional moderates" really feels like a cartoon.
• aj7 7y ago
  First time I only got two paragraphs into a PG post.
• pgsbathhouse 7y ago
  It's strange that if you're going to write this type of essay, it might behoove you to define right and left in your own words so the audience has a baseline for what you're really talking about. Otherwise you're just saying "I'm right and everyone else is totally clueless. If you don't pick any side you actually have the most ~ ~ enlightened ~ ~ opinion." I expect nothing less from PG but it's hilarious to see him just blandly admit how intellectually out of depth he is. He's basically ignored the most rudimentary topics in political science and just flat out spread his academic ignorance for the world to see.
• alexandercrohde 7y ago
  I find it disappointing so many HN comments don't understand this post has nothing to do with politics really. It's general to any set of tribal belief set A and B.
• dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Radical centrism, or else!!
• aidenn0 7y ago
  Besides "buying in bulk" there's also a question of "first principles" vs "empirical." Republican/Democrat is more of "buying in bulk" these days as partisanship has aligned more with polarization. On the other hand, consider Libertarian/Communist. Those both make policy arguments from first principles. They aren't so much buying policies in bulk as generating policies from a set of axioms. Many "intentional moderates" take it as axiomatic that the truth always lies in the middle, and thus are also generating policies.
• mncolinlee 7y ago
  There is some great theory around moderation which goes far beyond this piece. David Lakoff's book "Don't Think of an Elephant" is a classic. Moderation is rarely a choice. There's an old expression, "The only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill." It's not saying that moderates are extinct or undesirable. Rather, left and right political views mostly come from a history of life experiences that drives people either towards empathy for strangers or towards fear of strangers. The combination of these worldviews and the human desire for having a community or clan drives people into parties in opposition to each other. For most moderates, their experiences instead drive them to prefer either worldview depending upon which issue is being considered. Their experiences are not totally based on seeking safety or showing empathy. They are not middle of the road on most issues, but have a diverse set of opinions. Their opinions are diverse enough to not feel fully accepted into either party and to adjust their own views into alignment, unless their country has a middle party. This seems to be what Graham calls deliberate moderates. There are also moderates who become moderate because nuance is important to smart policy. Fully left or right ideas both tend to overshoot evidence-based decision-making. I believe this is what Graham refers to as accidental moderates. However, the roadkill metaphor still applies because even accidental moderates still have life experiences that lead them to a worldview as well as the human desire to belong to a group. Even those who apply past policy-based evidence to develop a nuanced view will have a human desire to try to fit themselves somewhere into the partisan political landscape of their environment. It's not easy being the odd one who doesn't fit.
• bsder 7y ago
  > and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. This is a flat assertion with no evidential backing whatsoever solely meant to make the sayer feel better about not challenging incorrect beliefs. If history is a guide, the middle are very rarely on the correct side of a divisive issue when all the dust settles.
• jasaloo 7y ago
  What a delightfully garbage take! Also: “The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. You don't get to pick and choose.” PG has clearly never encountered two leftists in the same room together. We argue on critical issues more than a thanksgiving dinner table.
  • throwlaplace 7y ago
    i'll never understand people's preoccupation with other people's ideas on things it is known those people are not experts on. paul graham has a phd in computer science. he is a successful startup founder and vc. that is the extent of what i'm interested in his opinion on. if a famous political theorist started opining on the organization of software or product/market fit or angel investing how many people here would take them seriously?
    • enraged_camel 7y ago
      >>paul graham has a phd in computer science. he is a successful startup founder and vc. that is the extent of what i'm interested in his opinion on. Smart people are much more likely to believe that they have intelligent and well-informed opinions on areas outside their expertise. PG himself is no exception.
      • throwlaplace 7y ago
        of course but why is that other people indulge them (or even are taken in)
      • clairity 7y ago
        intelligence is correlated with (and arguably defined by) insight, so that's a reasonable, if fallible, belief. intelligence doesn't guarantee insights in areas outside expertise, but it's certainly more promising in that regard. what's baffling are the high expectations in the populace for the general opinions of famous but not demonstrably intelligent people, e.g., many actors, tv personalities, singers, etc. (comedians are a notable exception, as insight is integral to their craft).
• lisper 7y ago
  Ron's first law: all extreme positions are wrong.
• r00fus 7y ago
  It seems kind of a reductionist view of political association. A multi-dimensional (at least 2 axis) model [1] would probably be more enlightening in terms of why high profile personalities view things that seem "accidentally moderate". Example: Sanders disagreed with Beto's gun buyback citing both the constitutionality and the fact that the only way to round up the guns would be invasive police searches which could lead to a despotic act, despite the potential for reduced gun violence. This viewpoint is both shared by hard left and hard right. [1] https://www.politicalcompass.org https://www.politicalcompass.org
• tchaffee 7y ago
  Why is an article about someone praising how smart and brave their own politics are, on the front page of HN? Definitely not what I come here to read.
• p_monk 7y ago
  Neoliberals like PG love to pretend that their ideology - neoliberal capitalism - is not actually an ideology. It is ideological framework, just as much as Marxism. The notion that neoliberals are above the fray of ideology and independently minded, might be comforting to them, but it's a lie. Across the globe, PG and his ilk fit squarely in the various right and centre-right parties.
• tunesmith 7y ago
  He's conflating "think for yourself" with "averages to 50". Sure, it's silly to think one side is absolutely right, but it's also silly to think that the "average" rightness is right in the middle between the two sides (even if you grant the use of a linear model).
  • abernard1 7y ago
    > but it's also silly to think that the "average" rightness is right in the middle between the two sides (even if you grant the use of a linear model). Thank you for this. He has that post where he talks about "What you can't say" [1]. His basic premise is that it's naive to think that you'd believe the same things you do now by default if you lived in a different time period. The posted article above seems pretty contradictory to me. Its notion of what is "moderate" is essentially anchored to the environment where a person lives. Would moderation be a virtue in an authoritarian country? [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
• anigbrowl 7y ago
  I enjoy pg's essays but must say this one strikes me as unusually trite. For context I would be one of his 'accidental moderates' who has since moved far to the left - though not universally, and despite my tongue-in-cheek bio I'm not a Marxist. [2] For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left. Or perhaps that they are more confident, or more resigned, or simply more disorganized. I just don't know. As a long-time student of the far right I can answer this easily: they do despise moderates, but being fascist, they plan to rule over them and figure (with some basis in fact) that the moderate middle will just go along with their program because it's expedient to do so. As this treats of loaded topics I might as well clarify my own understanding by saying that I think the far left is characterized by its antipathy to property rights (and arguably individual rights in general depending on the particular dogma they adhere to) while the far right is characterized by its antipathy to human rights (and arguably the existence of distinct populations in general depending on the particular dogma they adhere to).
• michaelmrose 7y ago
  I don't think this work is particularly insightful. I think most people in America aren't accidental moderates or "intentional moderates" or hardcore liberals/conservatives. I think most of them have limited opinions or investment in politics. Their experience is more akin to their patronage for a sports team than a system. They repeat things important figures for their side say and some of them can be bothered to vote depending on how much their side has stirred them up recently but they don't actually care much. For those that do care. The people that Graham is liable to label intentional moderates are most apt to have as rich an opinion as accidental ones. Not expressing strong positions in public in America is how you avoid having to hear other people's strong opinions that you don't much care to hear. In America it's not courageous to hold strong opinions from both sides of the aisle especially as a rich person. Most people will experience zero downsides. For those public figures that do they start off so much better off than most of us that their maximum downside is still much better off than most of us.
• CriticalCathed 7y ago
  > Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. I don't think I can take seriously an essay that so flatly and flippantly claims this as fact.
• mythrwy 7y ago
  What about situational political preference? Star Trek economy is all well and good and I think it is the eventual outcome, but in a specific time and place, with specific people and their baggage, the immediate best way forward may be something other than what I would prefer. Didn't Marx say politics went through stages? Feudalism to capitalism to socialism or something? He might have had a really valid point on this. We can't jump from primitive barter economies to interstellar travel. Besides, even though I like certain ideologies, I can't help but see the practical on the ground results of faulty, corruptible humans trying to implement them and it seldom turns out for the good from what I've observed. I have to imagine we will get there over time, perhaps with non human AI at the helm.