Yeah, exactly! It's also simply not a useful type of statement even when made in good faith. It assumes all issues fit on scales. For example, there are people

Yeah, exactly! It's also simply not a useful type of statement even when made in good faith. It assumes all issues fit on scales. For example, there are people today who call themselves feminists, and have extremely different views about LGBTQ+ rights compared to others who call themselves feminist (notably around the BTQ+ part). I really don't know who is the more "extreme", since that implies that I am referencing an agreed upon "center" which these positions differ from, and that simply doesn't exist. There is no agreed upon "center" for anything. Both claim to be feminists, and claim the other side is wrong, and neither would consider the other either more "extreme" or more "centrist". This is just one example, but I would argue that this holds true in nearly every case: Reducing something to a scale with "extremes" on each side mostly just shows how the speaker perceives other positions and is otherwise not very useful. CS stuff: IMO a better mental model would be non-Cartesian. Perhaps a weighted graph, where the vertices are ideologies (or, to be more granular, people), and the edge-weights represent some fuzzy metric of overlap of beliefs.