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I... I notice that I am confused. How could such a large percentage of people get these easy questions wrong? Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as an ontological statement?
I'm confused too. Now I'm wondering if that figure seems so unrealistic because I don't expect blatantly obvious stupidity to come from libertarians. Would I find it just as surprising if a different political group believed an equally stupid thing in such numbers? Perhaps not.
I'm still skeptical.
Well, 31% of progressives said that a company with the largest market share in a particular area is a monopoly, and as noted above, 40+% of conservatives think that a dollar does not mean more to a poor person than it does to a rich person.
Wow. Just wow.
I have to admit, I've stopped even being amazed by this sort of thing. My working theory is that about 40% of questions on surveys get answered without actually bothering to read the question.
Unfortunately, there's a correlation between political leanings and chance of getting this sort of thing wrong - conservatives were more likely to get the former question right, and progressives more likely to get the latter one right.
(nods) You're right, of course. I shouldn't even have made the comment, I'm just in a depressed and cynical morass at the moment.
Sorry about that. Perhaps stay away from politics for a bit, and remember that this data on the averages tells you very little about the few super-important outliers.
(And that people who aren't paying attention are more likely to answer based on their political party's position, probably.)
Oh, the depressed cynicism is coming from an entirely different channel (I just came out of a staff meeting at my office); it's not a result of this exchange, just simultaneous with it. I'll get over it.
Though I do in fact stay away from politics in the sense you mean it here, for precisely the reason you have in mind...it does not do wonders for my mood. Although the exercise of defending the reasonableness of my political opponents and looking for holes in the positions of my political allies is one I find valuable, albeit generally best done in the privacy of my own mind.
In any case, thanks for your concern.
Yeah... yeah. It's all a little disheartening.
Now I'm confused. I expect any significant political party (or similarly wide grouping of people) to produce blatantly obvious stupidity.
But you've been around here a while, you know all this stuff. So what am I missing? Why would you expect libertarianism to be an exception? (If there is a LW-appropriate answer.)
Much respect to the people who answered "don't know".
(As a science nerd from childhood, it pained me to admit this, but knowing the layout of the solar system has no direct benefit for most people.)
I suppose so. And it's a little harder to generate using Sovereign Reason while in the middle of a quiz.
Lots of LWers are libertarians, far more than in the general population. Also a significant subset of Libertarians like to think of themselves as being driven by reason (which I think is a situation somewhat similar to the one with polyamory btw).
Obviously this dosen't imply that Libertarians will on average be significantly or even measurably more rational or less blatantly stupid, but hey our brains are wired to be stupid in that way! :)
True enough. Ah, c'est le cerveau.
More that I didn't have a primed cache for "idiotic things people might say in support of libertarianism" that would be on the order of stupidity of "we aren't causing shitloads of global warming" or "there are WMDs (at the appropriate time)". Just a primed cache for "somewhat naive and oversimplistic things people might say in support of libertarinism". The more mainstream stupidities I am already desensitized to.
(Note that this train of thought is all along the lines of a "What is the nature of my confusion?" inquiry.)
Well, true enough. The first things in that category that come to mind for me are "the free market solves everything always without downsides" and "the government is going to kill me unless I stockpile canned goods and ordnance," but they're much less prominent views than the others.
Though, it's a rapidly growing party. Give them time, I'm sure they'll come up with something idiotic to champion.
Curious, one of the top entries in my primed cache of "idiotic things people might say in support of libertarianism" is "we aren't causing shitloads of global warming". It's the one of the most popular topics among libertarian columnists, beating out smoking, PC at the BBC, Europe and Laurie Penny. True, American Libertarians generally seem to be more contrarian than the sort we get in the UK, but I seem to remember both Bryan Caplan and Will Wilkinson making similar observations about the other side of the pond.
A couple of ideas:
(1) The centrality of markets to libertarian thinking. Anyone who knows enough economics to even bother identifying as a libertarian should be fairly unlikely to get questions like this wrong -- questions that don't go at all beyond an Econ 101 grasp of supply-and-demand and marginal utility.
(2) The lack of an explicitly libertarian option as a major party in US politics. Because of that, not many people really default to self-identifying as libertarian. Thus, libertarians are self-selected for relatively high levels of political and economic knowledge.
(I've done my best to phrase these as neutral statements and not arguments on the merits of any political position -- thus as "LW-appropriate answers"!)
I don't find that self identification as a libertarian demands any degree of economic fluency, any more than social conservatism demands familiarity with the contents of the Bible.
I think you're missing a large component of libertarians: People who want to be outsiders or contrarians. If you watch the documentary The Most Hated Family in America about the Westboro clan, you'll find that one of the converts proudly declares that he foolishly used to believe libertarianism, until he found the teachings of Fred Phelps. He's now in one of the most outside groups in American culture. I think this is a big draw for some people, and it attracts them to cults, conspiracy theories, and unpopular political/philisophical theories.
I don't know what percentage of libertarians they make up, but I'm sure they exist. 30% wouldn't surprise me.
I think these are good ideas. But still, it's "the third largest and fastest growing political party in the United States" (according to 'Kipedia)! As such, I'd be surprised if libertarians in general could apply econ-101-level reasoning across the board, even in support of "enemy soldiers".
I don't think people were compensated for correct answers.
For the people taking the survey, selecting one answer had no more utility than another (except maybe if fucking with a survey can be considered fun). Therefore, I don't think that you call it stupidity for anyone to select one answer rather than another. It just didn't matter.
The stupid thing is the answer, not the person giving it. Heck, it's politics. Giving an answer because it happens to be correct rather than sending the optimal signalling would be the stupid thing.
On the other hand, if you compensate people for the right answer, they start using the criteria of "what do I think the survey-maker thinks is the correct answer", which may not be the same as "what do I think is the correct answer".
Or contributing to a trend that suggests "people ascribing to my ideology are less likely to believe stupid things."