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taw comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong
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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...