5 ms·

The space (if it really is useful to think of as a space) of political opinions seems like it is probably many, many dimensional. The 1D thing is an obvious ove

The space (if it really is useful to think of as a space) of political opinions seems like it is probably many, many dimensional. The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification, but the 2D compass seems to be a not-obvious-simplification which is… much worse.

rootusrootus 4mo ago
> The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification In general I agree, but in recent history it works pretty well if the dimension you use is Trump rather than left/right (assuming you are in the US). He is the most polarizing leader I have seen in the US in my lifetime, and knowing whether someone is a supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.
- estearum 4mo ago
  The problem with this method is it will flip immediately upon new Trump utterances. See David Sacks having an absolute meltdown over Bernie proposing some type of partial nationalization of AI labs, then just a few days later radio silence on Trump proposing effectively the same thing.
- mrandish 4mo ago
  > knowing whether someone is a {Trump} supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints. If instead of "is a supporter" you'd said "agrees with Trump's positions", then even Trump himself might not correlate very well :-). I don't see Trump as a very useful proxy for nuanced political viewpoints since he's a populist who tends to change positions. I think many serious conservatives only align with him on an issue by issue basis because position-wise Trump isn't very consistent on traditional conservative issues. I suspect someone being "a Trump supporter" is, at best, either a proxy for being dissatisfied with the political status quo or for having a strong one-issue alignment with one of a handful of culture war issues Trump campaigned heavily on. Similarly, alignment with the current Democratic or Republican political parties isn't the proxy barometer it once was. As judged by how they vote on close, consequential issues, both of the major parties have largely abandoned several of their traditional positions - although they still may pay lip service to them when campaigning. Personally, I don't meet nearly as many people in recent years who claim to be 'all-in' on all the positions of either major party (especially as judged by how that party votes when they have a super-majority).
  - rootusrootus 4mo ago
    Speaking from my own experience, all of my friends who are currently identifying as Trump Supporters (this is a pretty tight filter now, we're getting down into Keyes Constant territory) are reliably "whatever Trump is currently for." Their positions change in lockstep with whatever Trump is currently saying, even as it toggles back and forth day by day, week by week. Their ideology isn't political, it is personal. My wider circle of conservative friends who have traditional ideologically conservative positions are mostly not Trump Supporters any more. For most of them starting a war in Iran seems to have been what finally tipped them over the edge.
    - joenot443 4mo ago
      I think using ones circle of friends voting habits as a proxy for the rest of the country is a doomed premise to begin with, respectfully. Someone else could come in here with the exact opposite anecdote; it's just not a very interesting point to make.
      - idiotsecant 4mo ago
        Is the point you're making here that trump supporters are largely not going to be for whatever policy he might come up with in a given week? Because....that doesn't match reality.
  - know-how 4mo ago
    [dead]
- xigoi 4mo ago
  I don’t agree with Trump on most things, but my beliefs also definitely don’t agree with most people who hate Trump.
  - idiotsecant 4mo ago
    Truly an enlightened centrist approach for the ages.
    - missinglugnut 4mo ago
      Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out. It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
    I can't make much sense of that. Can you give a few examples? As I interpret it, suppose that you disagree with Trump about the usefulness of tariffs. Now, I personally hate Trump (due to his many personality faults such as narcissism, bullying, lying etc) and I also don't think that tariffs are that useful, or at least not how Trump has tried to use them. So, does that mean that you don't agree with my views on tariffs or that you don't agree with my views on Trump or both?
  - rootusrootus 4mo ago
    You probably won't read this, because I didn't get back to looking at this thread for several days, but I'll leave this here on the off chance you do. I see far more predictive value in supporting Trump than opposing him. Lots of people oppose him for a variety of reasons. But people who are still fully on board at this point have had to take a number of twists in their ideological viewpoints in stride. Their ideology is clearly not something objective, it has a focus on a moving target. Informative, but not in any kind of vanilla left/right debate.
- know-how 4mo ago
  [dead]
patrickmay 4mo ago
I find the Nolan Chart (https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/ https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/) to be a better version of the 2D compass. You're absolutely right that more dimensions would be better, but finding the right orthogonal ones is difficult. The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.
- gherkinnn 4mo ago
  It says that I am very progressive, and yet I find that wing's usual baggage laughable. Monty Python knew it all along, the Judaea's Peoples Front are the worst, it's every man's right to have babies and anyway, what have the Romans ever done for us?
  - atomicnumber3 4mo ago
    The site is clearly libertarian, so they have a vested interest in trying to dunk on both the "left" and "right". When in actuality they're just lumpenproletariat who are going to get run over by the only people who have actual freedom in this country.
  - DangitBobby 4mo ago
    That doesn't make you not progressive FWIW
- almostdeadguy 4mo ago
  "Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights. Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
Of course its an infinite spectrum, but this is a classification problem.
cucumber3732842 4mo ago
Disagree. Things used to (and still are, when someone is really really grasping at straws to support a lie) be described as a single dimensional "spectrum". The popularization of multi-axis thinking is a huge step forward IMO. Even just for two axis the acknowledgement that it's multi axis opens the obvious rhetorical door to N axis which further inoculates against over simplification.
bjourne 4mo ago
I don't think a one-dimensional scale is an oversimplification at all. Option A: better lives for the great majority. Option B: better lives for the small minority of rich. The trick is to get people to voluntarily vote against their best self-interest.

rootusrootus 4mo ago

> The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification In general I agree, but in recent history it works pretty well if the dimension you use is Trump rather than left/right (assuming you are in the US). He is the most polarizing leader I have seen in the US in my lifetime, and knowing whether someone is a supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.

estearum 4mo ago
The problem with this method is it will flip immediately upon new Trump utterances. See David Sacks having an absolute meltdown over Bernie proposing some type of partial nationalization of AI labs, then just a few days later radio silence on Trump proposing effectively the same thing.
mrandish 4mo ago
> knowing whether someone is a {Trump} supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints. If instead of "is a supporter" you'd said "agrees with Trump's positions", then even Trump himself might not correlate very well :-). I don't see Trump as a very useful proxy for nuanced political viewpoints since he's a populist who tends to change positions. I think many serious conservatives only align with him on an issue by issue basis because position-wise Trump isn't very consistent on traditional conservative issues. I suspect someone being "a Trump supporter" is, at best, either a proxy for being dissatisfied with the political status quo or for having a strong one-issue alignment with one of a handful of culture war issues Trump campaigned heavily on. Similarly, alignment with the current Democratic or Republican political parties isn't the proxy barometer it once was. As judged by how they vote on close, consequential issues, both of the major parties have largely abandoned several of their traditional positions - although they still may pay lip service to them when campaigning. Personally, I don't meet nearly as many people in recent years who claim to be 'all-in' on all the positions of either major party (especially as judged by how that party votes when they have a super-majority).
- rootusrootus 4mo ago
  Speaking from my own experience, all of my friends who are currently identifying as Trump Supporters (this is a pretty tight filter now, we're getting down into Keyes Constant territory) are reliably "whatever Trump is currently for." Their positions change in lockstep with whatever Trump is currently saying, even as it toggles back and forth day by day, week by week. Their ideology isn't political, it is personal. My wider circle of conservative friends who have traditional ideologically conservative positions are mostly not Trump Supporters any more. For most of them starting a war in Iran seems to have been what finally tipped them over the edge.
  - joenot443 4mo ago
    I think using ones circle of friends voting habits as a proxy for the rest of the country is a doomed premise to begin with, respectfully. Someone else could come in here with the exact opposite anecdote; it's just not a very interesting point to make.
    - idiotsecant 4mo ago
      Is the point you're making here that trump supporters are largely not going to be for whatever policy he might come up with in a given week? Because....that doesn't match reality.
- know-how 4mo ago
  [dead]
xigoi 4mo ago
I don’t agree with Trump on most things, but my beliefs also definitely don’t agree with most people who hate Trump.
- idiotsecant 4mo ago
  Truly an enlightened centrist approach for the ages.
  - missinglugnut 4mo ago
    Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out. It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.
- ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
  I can't make much sense of that. Can you give a few examples? As I interpret it, suppose that you disagree with Trump about the usefulness of tariffs. Now, I personally hate Trump (due to his many personality faults such as narcissism, bullying, lying etc) and I also don't think that tariffs are that useful, or at least not how Trump has tried to use them. So, does that mean that you don't agree with my views on tariffs or that you don't agree with my views on Trump or both?
- rootusrootus 4mo ago
  You probably won't read this, because I didn't get back to looking at this thread for several days, but I'll leave this here on the off chance you do. I see far more predictive value in supporting Trump than opposing him. Lots of people oppose him for a variety of reasons. But people who are still fully on board at this point have had to take a number of twists in their ideological viewpoints in stride. Their ideology is clearly not something objective, it has a focus on a moving target. Informative, but not in any kind of vanilla left/right debate.
know-how 4mo ago
[dead]

patrickmay 4mo ago

I find the Nolan Chart (https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/ https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/) to be a better version of the 2D compass. You're absolutely right that more dimensions would be better, but finding the right orthogonal ones is difficult. The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.

gherkinnn 4mo ago
It says that I am very progressive, and yet I find that wing's usual baggage laughable. Monty Python knew it all along, the Judaea's Peoples Front are the worst, it's every man's right to have babies and anyway, what have the Romans ever done for us?
- atomicnumber3 4mo ago
  The site is clearly libertarian, so they have a vested interest in trying to dunk on both the "left" and "right". When in actuality they're just lumpenproletariat who are going to get run over by the only people who have actual freedom in this country.
- DangitBobby 4mo ago
  That doesn't make you not progressive FWIW
almostdeadguy 4mo ago
"Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights. Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.

nonethewiser 4mo ago

Of course its an infinite spectrum, but this is a classification problem.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago

Disagree. Things used to (and still are, when someone is really really grasping at straws to support a lie) be described as a single dimensional "spectrum". The popularization of multi-axis thinking is a huge step forward IMO. Even just for two axis the acknowledgement that it's multi axis opens the obvious rhetorical door to N axis which further inoculates against over simplification.

bjourne 4mo ago

I don't think a one-dimensional scale is an oversimplification at all. Option A: better lives for the great majority. Option B: better lives for the small minority of rich. The trick is to get people to voluntarily vote against their best self-interest.