6 ms·

The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this ran

by BMc2020 4y ago

The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.

kodah 4y ago
Also worth mentioning that the window doesn't have a set direction in the short term. It can move back and forth, expand, and shrink fairly arbitrarily. It also largely depends on the spectrum parameters specified. I don't believe in it as a concrete, measureable thing; I do believe in it as a signal for disposition over time.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today. It’s one reason the old tend to be conservative. They were born at a fixed slice of the Overton window, which moved left, carrying them right.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    > Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today. 1800 is a weird baseline to pick, but even so I’m skeptical.
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      1900 works too. I was omitting an explicit mention of slavery, but a woman’s right to vote might be a better base.
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        1900 is even weirder to be honest. The shorter your time scale the more debatable the shift. Since 1800, despite abolition of chattel slavery, slavery has been constitutionally protected as punishment for crimes and along with it came the carceral state. Since 1900 there have been many voting rights expansions, and a continuous program not just to curtail voting rights but to undermine the concept of the validity of elections themselves. On a short enough scale, the trend line is probably what we’d call “leftward” today. But on a longer scale I don’t think that’s the case. Not that Marx would approve of this appropriation of his analysis (because it wouldn’t support his theory of progress either), but it was a “primitive communism” which came before feudalism and eventually capitalism.
arise 4y ago
The window is bifurcating. The political left and right have moved so far apart that "middle ground" ideas appeal to very few and the extremes have more viability.
- peatmoss 4y ago
  Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline. What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If you want to stand out in the primaries, you can't be a competent, coalition-building centrist. You gotta eat more babies than the next guy. Current political system reinforces extremism. I'm of the camp that believes we urgently need incremental reforms like Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries. It doesn't solve everything, but it's the reform we can do that gives us the most mileage today.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    First time I've heard this, great point. (The baby eating thing, not ranked choice voting) I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Falling off a cliff isn't so bad, it's the impact with the ground that we should worry about.
  - wnoise 4y ago
    Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FPTP. See the recent Alaska house election for an actual case. If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2. EDITTED-TO-ADD: In practice IRV and FPTP both suffer from the "center-squeeze effect": https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effect/ https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
m463 4y ago
I can't help but think of feynman's caltech speech about "cargo cult science" with respect to the charge of an electron. We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease. https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html

kodah 4y ago

Also worth mentioning that the window doesn't have a set direction in the short term. It can move back and forth, expand, and shrink fairly arbitrarily. It also largely depends on the spectrum parameters specified. I don't believe in it as a concrete, measureable thing; I do believe in it as a signal for disposition over time.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today. It’s one reason the old tend to be conservative. They were born at a fixed slice of the Overton window, which moved left, carrying them right.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  > Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today. 1800 is a weird baseline to pick, but even so I’m skeptical.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    1900 works too. I was omitting an explicit mention of slavery, but a woman’s right to vote might be a better base.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      1900 is even weirder to be honest. The shorter your time scale the more debatable the shift. Since 1800, despite abolition of chattel slavery, slavery has been constitutionally protected as punishment for crimes and along with it came the carceral state. Since 1900 there have been many voting rights expansions, and a continuous program not just to curtail voting rights but to undermine the concept of the validity of elections themselves. On a short enough scale, the trend line is probably what we’d call “leftward” today. But on a longer scale I don’t think that’s the case. Not that Marx would approve of this appropriation of his analysis (because it wouldn’t support his theory of progress either), but it was a “primitive communism” which came before feudalism and eventually capitalism.

arise 4y ago

The window is bifurcating. The political left and right have moved so far apart that "middle ground" ideas appeal to very few and the extremes have more viability.

peatmoss 4y ago
Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline. What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If you want to stand out in the primaries, you can't be a competent, coalition-building centrist. You gotta eat more babies than the next guy. Current political system reinforces extremism. I'm of the camp that believes we urgently need incremental reforms like Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries. It doesn't solve everything, but it's the reform we can do that gives us the most mileage today.
- sdwr 4y ago
  First time I've heard this, great point. (The baby eating thing, not ranked choice voting) I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Falling off a cliff isn't so bad, it's the impact with the ground that we should worry about.
- wnoise 4y ago
  Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FPTP. See the recent Alaska house election for an actual case. If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2. EDITTED-TO-ADD: In practice IRV and FPTP both suffer from the "center-squeeze effect": https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effect/ https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...

m463 4y ago

I can't help but think of feynman's caltech speech about "cargo cult science" with respect to the charge of an electron. We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease. https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html