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Lots of little things that suggest Shor is so deep into politics he can't remember what a regular person is like. For example: The single biggest way that hi
by cwp 6y ago
Lots of little things that suggest Shor is so deep into politics he can't remember what a regular person is like. For example:
The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different
from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions,
health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options...
He completely misses the fact that the liberal-conservative spectrum we see in American politics is pretty arbitrary and has more to do with tribalism then ideological coherence. For example, it would be "ideologically coherent" to be both pro-life and pro-gun-control. Or concerned about climate change and pro-nuclear-power. Or anti-racism and anti-immigration. So his conclusion is wrong. Highly educated people who follow politics are not more ideologically coherent, they're more ideologically conformist.
Another example:
At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just
an important fact of the world ...
Who's he talking about? Obama-Trump voters. He's looking at this sophisticated polling where they ask questions designed to probe for "racial resentment" and seeing no other way to interpret them. Ok... so why did they vote for Obama? Were they motivated by racism then? Did their motivation change between elections? These aren't rhetorical questions; I have no idea why Obama-Trump voters made those choices. But Shor is so deep in the numbers he can't see that his conclusion is nonsense.
- sideshowb 6y agoThanks for elaborating. Your points are both good - the first one in particular jumped out to me as well as I was reading the article. I do think clueless is overstating it a bit, but admittedly you prefixed it with "brilliant and" ;)