Nornagest comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong

94 Post author: Yvain 05 December 2011 10:49AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 05 December 2011 08:51:37PM *  5 points [-]

2009:

  • 45% libertarianism
  • 38.4% liberalism
  • 12.3% socialism
  • 4.3% (6) conservativism
  • "not one person willing to own up to being a commie."

2011:

  • liberalism 34.5% (376)
  • libertarianism 32.3% (352)
  • socialism 26.6% at (290)
  • conservatism 2.8% (30)
  • communism 0.5% (5)

I generally expect LW to grow less metacontrarian on politics the larger it gets, so this change didn't surprise me. An alternative explanation (and now that I think of it more likley) is that the starting core group of LWers wasn't just more metacontrarian than usual, but probably also more libertarian in general.

Comment author: Nornagest 06 December 2011 07:51:59PM *  2 points [-]

The relative proportions of liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism haven't changed much, and I don't think we can say much about five new communists; by far the most significant change appears to be the doubled proportion of socialists. So this doesn't look like a general loss of metacontrarianism to me.

I'm not sure how to account for that change, though. The simplest explanation seems to be that LW's natural demographic turns out to include a bunch of left-contrarian groups once it's spread out sufficiently from OB's relatively libertarian cluster, but I'd also say that socialism's gotten significantly more mainstream-respectable in the last couple of years; I don't think that could fully account for the doubling, but it might play a role.