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Konkvistador comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Distinguishing Liberal/Social Democratic seems silly, as the difference between Neoreactionary and Conservative is much greater yet they aren't on the poll, and in previous years they were about as common as self-aware Communists.
Also note that the majority of people who pick "Conservative" on LessWrong are probably going to be Neoreactionary in their preferences and one of the more important markers of that group is strongly dissaproving of right wing people who think they can change things by voting and a loathing for the useless and actually harmfull nature of US Republicans.
...really? I'm sure you've done the research and I haven't but may I see the data? I'd wager we may have more neoreactionaries than the prevailing rate but more than half of people self-identifying as conservative surprises me.
It was in Yvain's dark matter essay.
I think that "libertarian" is what you're likely to get when you take "conservative" and remove all the opinions associated with religion. And for obvious reasons, LW is going to have a very low percentage of people who are serious religious believers.
I don't know about that. For a simple counter-example, conservatives tend to love law and order, libertarians -- not so much.
A common simplistic understanding of libertarians is "conservative economically, liberal socially", but even then you don't get there from conservatives just by removing religion.
True, there are some non-religious issues which separate conservatives and libertarians, but someone doesn't have to believe in every libertarian issue to be a libertarian. Are there enough prominent non-religious issues such that someone who takes a conservative position on only the non-religious issues would be considered closer to the conservative side than to the libertarian one?
Don't you? Most issues where libertarians are socially liberal have the conservative side heavily influenced by religion.
Let's check internationally. In Japan, for example, religion (Shinto and/or Buddhism) is not a prominent factor in sociopolitical issues. So does this mean that Japanese conservative politicians are essentially libertarians? Doesn't look like that to me.
In Japan, Shinto is associated with Japanese nationalism. Just because it doesn't affect people's views on gay marriage doesn't mean that it has no effect on politics.
Recall that the original issue was whether libertarians are just conservatives less religion. Are you applying this claim globally or you think it's purely a US thing?
Going back up a thread a bit
I suggested law and order as a conservative issue. You think it's "heavily influenced by religion"?
"Most" is not "every issue".
Cladistically, libertarianism comes out of the Left, not the Right, and in fact shares fairly close historical ties with socialism. This is obscured somewhat by the fact that modern libertarians talk a lot like modern conservatives and tend to use "socialist" as a loose secular synonym for "the spawn of he whom we call the Desolate One", but that's a trend that started no earlier than the Seventies or late Sixties.
That surprises me. Pleasantly. Thanks!
Distinguishing "Liberal" & "Social democratic" seems very sensible to me, assuming the survey should have good discriminating power among as much of LW as possible. On the last survey the two most popular categories were "Liberal" (35%) and "Socialist" (32%); it's not as if either category is superfluous.
On similar grounds, I think there's a case for rolling the "Communist" category into the "Socialist"/"Social democratic" category to make a broader "Social democratic, socialist and Communist" category that still splits the more leftist respondents from the more centrist. One could then replace the old "Communist" category with a new "Reactionary" category, improving the survey's discriminating power while keeping the total number of categories constant.