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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on 2014 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Thanks. Maybe it's obvious for you but it does surprise me. Maybe it's more clear over ther in the U.S. I'm nonetheless surprised by the magnitude if they are only connected via such a unspecific bucket as 'left-wing'.
As Arnold Kling suggests, progressives think of issues on an oppressor-oppressed axis. Women, poor people, and immigrants are all seen as oppressed, which is why feminism, raising the minimum wage, and support for more immigration are positions that are often found together.
In my experience, libertarians tend to think highly of Arnold Kling's taxonomy, and liberals and conservatives do not. I regard it as a Turing test fail.
Could you elaborate on your experience? The liberal philosophizing I've seen seems to go even further than Kling does. He suggests a possibly-subconscious implicit common thread, whereas they often talk explicitly about "punching up versus punching down", or redefine various subcategories of prejudice to only mean "prejudice plus power".
I can think of cases where there's a clear position among the U.S. left wing but that position isn't unambiguously objectively described as "support the oppressed against the oppressor", but even in those cases the activism for that position is usually given that framing.
(Prefacing this by noting that I am not going to get into a normative discussion here of whether liberal values are better or worse than libertarian values. I'm only addressing the question of whether Arnold Kling is accurately framing liberal values.)
I'll leave speaking about what's wrong with the conservative frame for an actual conservative (from my also-outside perspective, it doesn't sound particularly accurate).
But as far as liberalism goes, I think what Kling describes might be an accurate depiction of, say, "social justice" blogs, but those are a subset of liberalism, not the essence of it, and it doesn't describe the way the blue tribe people I grew up around (New England, middle class, disproportionately Jewish) reasoned, nor do I think it captures the way the more wonkish liberal bloggers reason.
More specifically, libertarians think that only libertarians care about freedom, while liberals think that libertarians are privileging one particular, controversial, definition of freedom -- the negative liberty of freedom from government (and only government, and in some but not all cases, specifically Federal but not local government) coercion. The liberals I have always known also think that maximizing freedom is the goal, but we define it as something like the autonomy in practice to flourish. So for example, some (not all) libertarians think the Civil Rights Act reduced aggregate freedom, but pretty much all liberals think it increased it. There is a similar divergence in attitudes about net effect on freedom with regards to regulatory interference in freedom of contract between parties with unequal bargaining power. Etc.
In other words, liberals are perfectly willing to say they're for "freedom" as long as they're allowed to redefine "freedom" however they want.
Turing test fail? Where was blacktrance trying to pass as having a particular political position?
I think he meant that Kling, being a libertarian, failed the Turing Test when describing the framework behind the progressive and conservative viewpoints.
I get that. But he wasn't even TAKING the Turing test. He described it fairly accurately, if in terms that people on the inside wouldn't have used. So?
The problem is that he didn't describe it accurately. He described it with a very simple bias that is different from the actual view and makes bad predictions oi you try to use it to think instead of using it to caricature political opponents.
I'd suggest that the description was pretty good for being so short. In particular, it was adequate to explain this one feature that someone was not able to anticipate, and a lot of other major features, and it is in fact true of many - not all - components of the left.
Correct.
Can you expand on the last sentence?
— Wikipedia
I'm pretty sure it's more than just that, a lot of feminist ideas are about helping typically underprivileged communities. I've seen a lot of stuff on feminist areas about helping the poor and the undocumented as an extension of that.
That's simply the inside view of blacktrance's point.
How do you know?
I mean, we have (at least) two hypotheses. 1: lefties classify people on a scale from "oppressor" to "oppressed" and favour the oppressed. 2: lefties are interested in helping people in bad situations, and there are some categories of people who are systematically much more likely to be in bad situations. It looks as if lefties themselves tend to say #2, whereas various non-lefties say #1.
One explanation, indeed, is that #1 is correct and #2 is what the poor self-deluded lefties think they're doing. Another is that #2 is correct and that #1 is what the poor deluded non-lefties mistakenly see it as. Why should we favour the second of these over the first?
(I'm mostly a leftie. It looks to me as if there's some truth in both #1 and #2, but it seems to me that #1 is a consequence of #2, a special case, more than it's a fundamental motivation that gets rationalized as #2. I expect there are people for whom #1 is primary but don't see any reason to think that's the usual case. It seems like the obvious way for someone to feel #1 but need to deceive themselves that #2 is their real motivation would be if they are themselves in an "oppressed" group, so that #1 is a matter of self-interest. I think a majority of the lefties I know -- and for that matter of the non-lefties -- are fairly "privileged" and for those the "#1 primary, #2 is rationalization" account seems awfully implausible.)
[EDITED to add: 1. I would be interested to hear from either of the people who downvoted me why they thought this comment merited a downvote. It looks OK to me. 2. In the 8 hours since it was posted, I am down 31 karma points. I wonder what account name The Artist Formerly Known As Eugine_Nier is using now.]
I'm not a progressive, but I don't see 1 and 2 as mutually exclusive. 1 is just a different way of stating 2 - leftists classify people on an oppressor-oppressed axis, where the oppressed are people perceived to be in bad situations.
I think "oppressed" is more specific than "in a bad situation", and "oppressor" is much more specific than "in a comfortable situation".
Saying that lefties classify people on an oppressor/oppressed axis suggests that they're addicted to what's sometimes called "politics of envy" -- it's not enough to help the poor, the rich must be made to suffer becaucse they are evil oppressors, etc. I'm sure there are people who think (and feel) that way, but I think it's a straw man if presented as an analysis of how lefties generally see the world.
I think most lefties would agree with me that when people are in bad situations it doesn't have to be because anyone's oppressing them. They might just have been unlucky, or they might in some sense have done it to themselves (one place where Left and Right commonly disagree: on the left, this is not usually taken to mean that they shouldn't be helped). And I think most lefties would agree with me that someone very comfortably off is not necessarily oppressing anyone.
(There are some who would say that our society systematically favours some groups and screws others over, to the benefit of the former at the expense of the latter, and that that means that being a rich straight white educated able-bodied man does make you in some sense an oppressor. I, and I think many others, largely agree with the first bit of that but think the conclusion that the rich (etc.) are oppressors is misguided: to benefit from an oppressive system is not necessarily to be an oppressor. And I, and I think many others, think "oppressed" is too strong and too specific a word to describe the ways in which things are bad for most statistically-disadvantaged groups.)
I agree, but at the time I posted this blacktrance had yet to make their post.