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taw comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong
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Only an American could have written something like that... Political "ideologies" apparently do not translate between countries in any way. It's like asking Muslims if they feel closer to Catholics or Lutherans.
The test has also a problem with extremely low "probability" events like "God existing". There's really no meaningful number between a vague "theoretically possibly just extremely unlikely" (and number of 0s you put there doesn't really mean anything) and "literally impossible 0%" here.
Scandinavia == Socialist was hard for my Eastern European brain to process.
Also Moldbuggians (there are bound to be a few considering so many LWers read Unqualified Reservations) will be saddened one can't put Jacobite / neocamerialist / restorationist / reactionary in there.
Scandinavian countries (+ UK and Netherlands, which seem to cluster closer with them than with the rest of EU) top most indexes of "economic freedom" / "ease of doing business" etc. And they still have monarchies over there, with state-church separation happening only recently, or not yet. And Sweden has large private school system etc.
Or they have huge taxes, very comprehensive welfare state system, allow gay marriage or some other type, have a lot of out of wedlock marriage, extremely high rate of women participation in workforce etc.
Depending on which features you focus on, you can make them appear "extremely liberal", or "extremely conservative" by US metric. It will be stupid categorization either way.
"Out of wedlock marriage" would be a neat trick. :-)
That, or typical, depending on just how you cut things...
Scandinavian countries top the indexes on metrics other than taxation, government spending and "labour freedom" while the monarchs (and arguably, the churches) are mainly if not solely symbolic. If labels are ignored I think "socially permissive, high taxes, major redistribution of wealth" describes these countries very well.
Also, US Republicans and UK Tories aren't that great a natural category; the UK Conservative Party is currently moving to legalise gay marriage, for instance.
Politics is simply incomparable between countries. Usually various parties are clustered around some country-specific consensus, and distance between mainstream parties within a country is much smaller than distance between consensus centers between countries or even across time. Neither positions nor even issues are similar.
You may as well ask in survey if someone is pro-EU or anti-EU. Most people in Europe have some opinion about it, and in many countries it's a major area of contention, but asking non-Europeans about it is quite ridiculous.
Yes, but I don't think a broader, more abstract classification would be infeasible or completely useless. For example, I like the one of The Political Compass.
Asking for political compass scores on the survey could be nice, indeed. Plotting Less Wrongers on the 2d charter, one dot for one person could revel interesting clusters.
I always thought it was a typically a 3D charter. Socially Authoritarian/Libertarian, Fiscally Liberal/Conservative, and Foreign Policy Interventionist/Isolationist.
I don't think the foreign policy is anywhere near as important as the other two: for example, most people are seldom directly affected by it. And in small, neutral countries such as Switzerland such an axis would be nearly meaningless.
I don't know about this considering the massive amounts of globalization we have now. Foreign Policy is a pretty big, complicated topic. Outsourcing, wars, foreign aid, military alliances, sanctions, etc.?
What? Switzerland has had a pretty big history of isolationism. If anything they have a very strong view. How is that meaningless?
Because an individual's score on such a scale would tell something about their country but very little about the individual.
That's the exact same argument as the other people saying the political ideas of Socialist/Liberal/Libertarian is completely dependent on country. That doesn't have anything to do with Foreign Policy.
It doesn't contain the foreign policy axis (and the "fiscally liberal/conservative" is named "economic left/right", which is less ambiguous than "liberal/conservative").
Some people also include a different "politically authoritarian/libertarian" axis, different from the "socially authoritarian/libertarian" (which does make sense, for example Cuba nowadays is very liberal socially speaking, but not so much politically speaking), but the Compass doesn't, it keeps it simple down to two axis.
FWIW, I've just taken the test for the umpteenth time, and I score Economic Left/Right: -5.38, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.13. (Through the years I've always been in the southwestern quadrant, but when I was younger I used to be a little bit northwest of where I'm now.)
Political Compass is just more vagueness and American bias.
Plotting that would have some entertainment value, little more.
What? It's British, actually...
Sounds to me like you're talking about a probability of 0+epsilon, which is mentioned in the survey as what "0" will be interpreted as. Did you find that unsatisfactory for some reason?