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blacktrance comments on 2014 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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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