5 ms·

Not the GP, but I feel the same. The reason is that my views haven't really changed, yet somehow my political positioning went from quite liberal to something m

Not the GP, but I feel the same. The reason is that my views haven't really changed, yet somehow my political positioning went from quite liberal to something most people, below a certain age, would consider conservative. I value: free speech, equality of opportunity, antiwar, anti political correctness, anti megacorp, and view the liberty of the individual mattering vastly more than than dictates of authority/hierarchy. More generally, I think politics has shifted such that left/right is no longer meaningful, as people tend to be much more split on libertarian/authoritarian world views - particularly on the degree to which accredited individuals ought be able to impose their views on society in an effort to 'tweak' people's behaviors. That nuance, more or less, immediately leads to the shifting winds on the issues I mentioned.

immibis 1y ago
All the values you cited are so vague they can encompass almost any position. For example, "antiwar" can mean refusing to bomb other countries to get their resources and it can also mean that if another country threatens to bomb your house you give them whatever resources they want. Free speech can mean free to challenge the government, free to spam or free to brainwash. Liberty of the individual to shoot or liberty of the individual to not be shot? I suspect that your individual position within each of those axes has drastically changed even though the axis labels have not. "Left" and "right" remain meaningful. Right means supporting stronger hierarchies and left means supporting weaker hierarchies. They have always meant this since they were originally coined about the french pro/anti monarchist parties. It's "liberal" and "conservative" that have poorly defined meanings. You will not find much right at CCC. Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - the part of the brain that processes fear is bigger in rightists - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary thing and it makes sense it remsins the same thing in each generation.
- ghostpepper 1y ago
  > Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - rightists have enlarged fear centers - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary difference and it makes sense it remains the same across time. can you point to a few studies on this topic? I am struggling to imagine how one would design a study to measure this
  - j4coh 1y ago
    Also curious what is a fear center and what an enlarged one would look like if removed via surgery.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      It was a 2011 study that found a 0.28 correlation in amygdalae size vs conservative political identity among a tiny group of college students. A replication attempt dropped that correlation to 0.068 which is basically nothing, and completely failed to replicate at all the other, even weaker, findings of the previous study. And the media called the amygdala the "fear center", which is dumb. It plays a key role in memory - especially long term memory, emotional processing, the understanding of social cues, and more. Removing it would render someone extremely mentally retarded. --- I'd also add on this issue that considering political issues among college students is itself silly. Our political positions on things is impacted by our life experience, and at the point of college one has very little life experience to formulate views off of. Political identity will often shift radically from age 20 to 40, which against suggests a genetic basis as being farcical - at least beyond the point that your brain structure will typically correlate, to some degree, with the development of skills, identity, etc.
      - immibis 1y ago
        I meant to say that the left/right divide is built in to humans, not that each individual human is predisposed to always be left or always be right. The rightward shift as people age is pretty easily explained by self-interest. When you start with almost nothing, you want a fair share because that's more than you have now. Once you climb the ladder, you don't want a fair share because that's less than you have now. Once you get above the average, you want to stretch the pyramid taller because that puts you at a higher absolute position, and the higher up you are, the more you want to stretch it. When you're below the middle, you want to shorten the pyramid because that puts you at a higher absolute position (the pyramid extends below the floor). But that's assuming wealth dynamics continue to work how they did for boomers. IIRC millennials were the first generation to shift leftwards with age, because they mostly didn't get to above-middle positions on the pyramid. It's the subtle things that keep society stable.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  They're not vague in the least, but pointing this out drives anger and cognitive dissonance in people because people want to imagine that they support these values, particularly if they did so when they were younger. For the most unambiguously and plainly obvious - free speech means free speech, not approved speech. You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism. [1] The meaning of the term has been edited to the point of completely redefining it, relative to its definition of 20 years ago [2], even though the definition of authoritarianism has itself not really changed in that time frame, and the older definition matches the normal definition (and connotation) of it vastly more than the 'modern' version. The study you mentioned was, even at the time of its publication, quite dubious - finding a negligible correlation (0.23) in amygdalae size in a very non-representative sampling. In a replication attempt that correlation was found to overstate it by more than 3x, finding a correlation of 0.068, which is essentially statistical noise. There's nothing there except clickbait media doing their thing. I'd also add that framing the amygdala as the 'fear center' is itself also quite ridiculous. There also remains the question of identity. I consider myself liberal. I imagine you would object. Who's right? Ah modern 'science', but there I go again challenging that hierarchy. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&oldid=6164229 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...
  - frickinLasers 1y ago
    > You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism. I'd say a more overt example is playing out on the national stage, where protests in support of (murdered, raped, and starving) Palestinians in Gaza are crushed, because the alternative is to have the executive branch try to extort a $Billion dollars from the host campus, putting universities in peril, to help buy another gold-plated plane or something.
  - immibis 1y ago
    "Free speech means free speech" is a tautology and does absolutely nothing to counter the idea that it could mean either freedom to oppose the government, freedom to spam, or freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. In fact it's very conspicuously a purely emotional statement with zero logical content; anyone who uses this response is conspicuously asserting that they don't care about logical argument. The assertion that Wikipedia has more content than it did in 2004 is also logically void.

immibis 1y ago

All the values you cited are so vague they can encompass almost any position. For example, "antiwar" can mean refusing to bomb other countries to get their resources and it can also mean that if another country threatens to bomb your house you give them whatever resources they want. Free speech can mean free to challenge the government, free to spam or free to brainwash. Liberty of the individual to shoot or liberty of the individual to not be shot? I suspect that your individual position within each of those axes has drastically changed even though the axis labels have not. "Left" and "right" remain meaningful. Right means supporting stronger hierarchies and left means supporting weaker hierarchies. They have always meant this since they were originally coined about the french pro/anti monarchist parties. It's "liberal" and "conservative" that have poorly defined meanings. You will not find much right at CCC. Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - the part of the brain that processes fear is bigger in rightists - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary thing and it makes sense it remsins the same thing in each generation.

ghostpepper 1y ago
> Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - rightists have enlarged fear centers - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary difference and it makes sense it remains the same across time. can you point to a few studies on this topic? I am struggling to imagine how one would design a study to measure this
- j4coh 1y ago
  Also curious what is a fear center and what an enlarged one would look like if removed via surgery.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    It was a 2011 study that found a 0.28 correlation in amygdalae size vs conservative political identity among a tiny group of college students. A replication attempt dropped that correlation to 0.068 which is basically nothing, and completely failed to replicate at all the other, even weaker, findings of the previous study. And the media called the amygdala the "fear center", which is dumb. It plays a key role in memory - especially long term memory, emotional processing, the understanding of social cues, and more. Removing it would render someone extremely mentally retarded. --- I'd also add on this issue that considering political issues among college students is itself silly. Our political positions on things is impacted by our life experience, and at the point of college one has very little life experience to formulate views off of. Political identity will often shift radically from age 20 to 40, which against suggests a genetic basis as being farcical - at least beyond the point that your brain structure will typically correlate, to some degree, with the development of skills, identity, etc.
    - immibis 1y ago
      I meant to say that the left/right divide is built in to humans, not that each individual human is predisposed to always be left or always be right. The rightward shift as people age is pretty easily explained by self-interest. When you start with almost nothing, you want a fair share because that's more than you have now. Once you climb the ladder, you don't want a fair share because that's less than you have now. Once you get above the average, you want to stretch the pyramid taller because that puts you at a higher absolute position, and the higher up you are, the more you want to stretch it. When you're below the middle, you want to shorten the pyramid because that puts you at a higher absolute position (the pyramid extends below the floor). But that's assuming wealth dynamics continue to work how they did for boomers. IIRC millennials were the first generation to shift leftwards with age, because they mostly didn't get to above-middle positions on the pyramid. It's the subtle things that keep society stable.
somenameforme 1y ago
They're not vague in the least, but pointing this out drives anger and cognitive dissonance in people because people want to imagine that they support these values, particularly if they did so when they were younger. For the most unambiguously and plainly obvious - free speech means free speech, not approved speech. You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism. [1] The meaning of the term has been edited to the point of completely redefining it, relative to its definition of 20 years ago [2], even though the definition of authoritarianism has itself not really changed in that time frame, and the older definition matches the normal definition (and connotation) of it vastly more than the 'modern' version. The study you mentioned was, even at the time of its publication, quite dubious - finding a negligible correlation (0.23) in amygdalae size in a very non-representative sampling. In a replication attempt that correlation was found to overstate it by more than 3x, finding a correlation of 0.068, which is essentially statistical noise. There's nothing there except clickbait media doing their thing. I'd also add that framing the amygdala as the 'fear center' is itself also quite ridiculous. There also remains the question of identity. I consider myself liberal. I imagine you would object. Who's right? Ah modern 'science', but there I go again challenging that hierarchy. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&oldid=6164229 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...
- frickinLasers 1y ago
  > You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism. I'd say a more overt example is playing out on the national stage, where protests in support of (murdered, raped, and starving) Palestinians in Gaza are crushed, because the alternative is to have the executive branch try to extort a $Billion dollars from the host campus, putting universities in peril, to help buy another gold-plated plane or something.
- immibis 1y ago
  "Free speech means free speech" is a tautology and does absolutely nothing to counter the idea that it could mean either freedom to oppose the government, freedom to spam, or freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. In fact it's very conspicuously a purely emotional statement with zero logical content; anyone who uses this response is conspicuously asserting that they don't care about logical argument. The assertion that Wikipedia has more content than it did in 2004 is also logically void.