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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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CAN YOU RECOGNIZE LEFT-WINGERS FROM RIGHT-WINGERS FROM FACE ALONE?

I've seen numerous people on Twitter etc. claim that they can indeed do this, so I've created a quiz to test this claim. This quiz has 20 Finnish MP's essentially selected randomly (I took their photos from the Parliament's webpage, organized them alphabetically using medium icons and then just removed the middle part of this collage, leaving a bit over 20 photos: after removing the Swedish People's Party members for not fitting the ideological scale that well and taking one out for wearing a party pin, I was left with exactly 20 photos). Note: pics are displayed in randomized order.

The MP's represent six parties, but all you have to do here is select: Left or Right? Those representing the parties Social Democrats, Greens and Left Alliance are Left, those representing the parties Centre, National Coalition and The Finns are Right.

I will offer one hint: you cannot use tie color/dress color (ie. politicians wearing party-color dresses and ties) to make consistently correct guesses.

16/20.

I judged based on how plastic they looked in the photo; the more fixed in a horrified rictus they were the more Right I assumed they were; based on US political memes.

I will offer one hint: you cannot use tie color/dress color (ie. politicians wearing party-color dresses and ties) to make consistently correct guesses.

I scored a pretty stinky 12. But I will say, the problem is fashion for politicians is different in Finland! There are quite a few left wingers with a haircut that is pretty explicitly right win in the US. There is the classic "Republican haircut". Also, while female politicians can be hot in either party, its in very different ways.

14/20

;-)

14/20. I’m gonna say that’s mostly luck.

10/20, couldn't've gotten a more perfect score if I clicked randomly.

I got 11/20 as a Finn, which is pretty clearly a failure and shows I don't really follow local politics. Seems to shows physiognomy doesn't work, at least for me.

Most of them are of course backbencher-equivalents (I'm quite autistic about knowing politicians myself, but had to check the parties of several of them myself), but it's interesting that a Finn would do similarly to Americans, considering all the discussions about cultural markers.

12/20, is that better than guessing? I did judge one guy on tie colour and was right. I don't think you can sort people into "right/left" unless relying on stereotypes like gammon or "rainbow hair, piercings, must be progressive".

I have a feeling people say "I can tell if X is left or right" based on "do I think X is ugly or not", with a side of "I think left wing/right wing is wrong and bad so only ugly and stupid people support it".

12/20, is that better than guessing?

No. It's within the mean + 1 standard deviation of a binomial distribution with Pr(success) = 50%, for 20 trials. Well within the 95% CI threshold.

Any test more than 17/20 or less than 3/20 would be "unusual" given very very naive statistical assumptions+conventions.

13/20 Maybe half I felt like I could probably tell and was usually right, but the other half I was really just guessing. I'm not confident it wasn't just luck though. People are talking about physiognomy below, but I think style is probably more informative.

If that's what you did, you should be getting 15 correct. Since 10 is what you'd get by guessing all of them by chance, 13 really won't let you distinguish between these two scenarios.

What do you mean? Guessing half gets me 5 on average, which leaves me with 8/10 for the ones I thought I might be able to guess. There's also a large element of luck.

I would average 15 if I knew for sure what half of them were and guessed the rest, but I wasn't close to knowing for sure what any of them were.

Similar here.

While I do think that it is often possible to identify political affiliation "at a glance" I think it has more to do with style, posture, resting expression, etc... rather than someone having a "progressive cheekbones" and other such nonsense.

Agreed. I've claimed some ability at this, but it's based on more than a picture. It's more cues about neuroticism, self-confidence, demeanor.

Lol, I only got 8/12, I suck. I don't think I got a single woman right either. Honestly I suspect most of the ones I got right were gay men who were left-wingers. I'm gay myself, I think I just have good gaydar.

Verdict: Women are an enigma wrapped in a mystery, covered in... something I have no interest in.

If you didn't get a single woman right, then you did very well at classifying them. You just need to go with the opposite next time and you'll get a perfect score.

None of the ones I posted are openly gay.

12/20.

Guessed all randomly (effectively, even trying did not work). Strong prior that anyone who is saying they could notice a pattern is under some strong placebo (confirmation bias) or is working with IQ much superior to mine. As @DaseindustriesLtd already mentioned, a test like this would work in the US where you can infer from various demographic markers (even within the same race/ethnicity), and might only work in a country that is (geographically) large and ethnically stratified along political lines like the US, Brazil, India.

As of writing this post. The mean score is 11.625/20 and the standard deviation is 2.57. A binomial distribution with p = 0.5, n = 20, would have a mean = 10 and a standard deviation = 2.33. FWIW

is working with IQ much superior to mine. As @DaseindustriesLtd already mentioned, a test like this would work in the US where you can infer from various demographic markers (even within the same race/ethnicity),

Also, right vs. left mean different things outside of the US. Conservatism in the US is quite the opposite of the more paternalistic style of conservatism elsewhere.

Yeah, we are probably not even trying to find the same variable. If there is some kind of latent personality trait that manifests in one's face, it would probably predict libertarianism vs authoritarianism more (as per big 5 priors), which is more or less nonexistent as a consideration outside of the US.

I'm not sure libertarian vs authoritarian is really the variable that makes US conservatism/liberalism such a different divide from elsewhere in the world- both parties have things they tend to be authoritarian on and things they tend to be libertine on(although you're correct that the hyper-libertarian "get off my property and leave me alone" mentality is pretty unique to the republicans). Instead I think it's because conservative and liberal whites are ethnic groups who vote in favor of their ethnic interests and against the other's ethnic interests, largely with ideology as window dressing. That's not to say that there are no real ideological differences- abortion is obviously one, for example- but I don't think libertarian/authoritarian is a relevant axis to compare them on.

Left wing female politicians had smiles like they expected to drug you into idiot happiness for your own good. Right wing female politicians had smiles like they were looking forwards to eating your liver. Didn’t notice any patterns with the men.

Got 15/20. Don't really know what criteria I was using. Softer faces are more leftist?

wider faces lean right? I dunno of how much scientific truth there is to this.

I really wish we had access to the machine learning stuff on this that came out last year. It seems like nobody's touched it since, but 70% accuracy is a good sign there's something there. Unless it was just detecting external clues, like selfie angles or club vs bar or bathhouse vs rodeo lighting.

Missed opportunity for "Finnish" button.

10/20. (Tried to look only at the facial features). At that, I had near 100% mistake ratio in the beginning, and since your quiz provides instant feedback (IMO it shouldn't), I seem to have calibrated on the go for whatever signal there is in this data, instead of using any priors.

How extreme is your set, policy-wise? It is plausible that physiognomy doesn't work in reasonable (boring centrist) political systems. It can only work in principle when politics follow from some biological ground truth, and that implies divergence that begins far below the level of intelligent analysis and personal experience, the stuff of gut feelings, moral foundations and broad outlook – the product of gender, and hormones, and norms of reaction, crudely bundling together propositions that can well diverge under scrutiny. (Moreover, the absence of party choice crushes nuance and disincentivizes people with nuanced opinions from rising through the ranks).

In the US, a «left-winger» politician who can be robustly identified even without tribal dress or markings (to the extent that can be isolated) is someone like Lori Lightfoot or Scott Wiener; archetypal right-wingers are abundant in team Trump. Those are people far from the center of the Overton window, approaching street and campus combatants and appealing to the sentiment of such crowds. And in general, I think, American politics is more identitarian, racial, hormonal, biological than it should be in normal human societies.

Your set, meanwhile, looks like normie bureaucrats with some policy or platform differences, sorted into that line of work by common mechanisms that make white-collar people want to bother with governance.

For example, let's take your right-most party:

The Finns Party,[4][5][6] formerly known as the True Finns (Finnish: Perussuomalaiset, PS, Swedish: Sannfinländarna, Sannf.),[note 1] is a right-wing populist political party in Finland.

Ville Pernaa, political scientist, described the party's 2015 electoral program by saying that the Finns Party combines elements of both right-wing and left-wing politics along with populist rhetoric.

The party's supporters have described themselves as centrists.[74] The party has drawn people from left-wing parties but central aspects of their manifesto[75] have gained support from right-wing voters as well.[76][77][note 3] The Finns Party has been compared by international media to the other Nordic populist parties and other similar nationalist and right-wing populist movements in Europe, whilst noting its strong support for the Finnish welfare state.[80][81][72]

The Finns Party has proposed more progressivity to taxes to avoid the establishment of flat taxation. The party has called for the raising of the capital gains tax and the re-institution of the wealth tax. According to the party, the willingness to pay taxes is best guaranteed by a society unified by correct social policies – the electoral program warns against individualist policies, which weaken the solidarity among citizens. "The willingness to pay taxes is guaranteed by having a unified people", the program reads (p. 46).[85]

Removal of the obligatory character of the second official language (Swedish in Finnish-language schools and vice versa) in curriculums on all levels of education, freeing up time for the learning of other foreign languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian (especially in the eastern part of the country).

Those folks are, dare I say, National Socialists. Americans do not have National Socialists outside of jails and obscure extremist forums – they have high-T red-faced boors who advocate for generalized Pride In Our Team, and tax cuts for the rich (because Screw Them Parasites), and Religion, and generalized distrust of weirdoes and aliens and loquacious eggheads, and who like Strong Masculine Leaders Who Tell It Like It Is.

Biological methods work best in the realm of biological phenomena. Nothing new here.

...But I would like to test this hypothesis with American politicians. Can someone assemble, say, 40 of the less-known ones?

Scott Wiener

If this guy was a German, I would peg him as an FDP politician, a market liberal.

Seconded, it's downstream of tribal identifications and the theory only applies as written to white Americans. Efforts to identify left and right with cosmic ideals and determine if the Reformation was left or right wing fail because it's all downstream of tribal identifications, then good for my tribe versus bad for my tribe. I suspect that is somewhat genetic.

So inasmuch as D=antiwhite and R=prowhite, white people who are pro tribe identify one way and white people who are anti tribe identify the other. But black people with the pro tribe gene are going to vote D, as are most Mexicans, gays, Jews, and Asians although less clearly than whites and blacks. Class is another confounder, and in societies without similar racial politics probably ruins the project.

I don't think this is accurate at all, though though I can see how such a claim would be convenient for those wishing to push identity politics.

As much as the terms get abused both in general and on theMotte in particular, I still think that the terms "right" and "left" point to important differences in philosophy and political approach. Allowing the pro-IdPol crowd to redefine Left and Right along tribal lines requires us to com up with a new name for the existing split, and seeing as IdPol seems to be particular to one side of that split I'd rather just push back against the redefinition.

Having read a lot of history, and not just history but old history, IE stuff from when a lot of the events described were still within living memory. It seems obvious to me that there are two distinct intellectual traditions/schools of thought that arose in the aftermath of the 30 years war, with the followers of guys like Calvin, Hobbes, and Montesquieu forming one and the followers of Locke, Kant, and Rousseau the other. While these two schools of thought might correlate to tribal affiliation with different groups showing an affinity for one or the other. However the match is far from 1 to 1. What they do match almost 1 for 1 though which side someone finds themselves on during the French Revolution, or English Civil war.

So in short, I reject your framing.

Democrats are not anti-white so much as they are pro-identity politics. Ditto Republicans are not so much pro-white so much as the are unabashedly "Nationalist/Pro-America". That "the only valid form of Nationalism is Ethnonationalism" and that "America = White supremacy" is a load of bullshit pushed upon us by woke propogandists and their allies on the alt-right who both dream of overturning the existing constitutional order in favor of a system of racial spoils.

I, in turn, reject your framing. I, too, have read a lot of history, including plenty of contemporary historiography. I agree with you that

It seems obvious to me that there are two distinct intellectual traditions/schools of thought that arose in the aftermath of the 30 years war, with the followers of guys like Calvin, Hobbes, and Montesquieu forming one and the followers of Locke, Kant, and Rousseau the other.

And that works for upper class educated white Christian men during those times in those relevant places. A hypothetical neutrally situated free man who reads Hobbes and reads Locke and decides which he likes better, that might well predict

... which side someone finds themselves on during the French Revolution, or English Civil war.

But of course, most people aren't neutrally situated, most people find themselves on one side or the other of the Revolution because their family or their friends or the other men in their town joined that side and they followed along. You might later take up the ideology associated with that side, but you were a Cavalier or a Roundhead before you knew why. I'm going to cite some historical fiction, because it's a fun scene in a classic movie. In Master and Commander where Jack Aubrey is getting his crew hyped up for battle against the French ship.

Capt. Jack Aubrey: Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? NO! Want to call that raggedy-ass Napoleon your king? NO! You want your children to sing the "La Marseillaise?" NO!

It is blindingly obvious that nobody on that ship besides Aubrey and the Doctor has serious opinions on Rousseau and Calvin. Maybe some of the other officers are aware, at a sixth grade level, of the ideology involved but it is highly doubtful they'd have seriously read about it. But there all the men are, shouting about the guillotine and Napoleon, as though it all means something to them. Their position on those questions is more tribal than intellectual.

So on a spectrum between our hypothetical neutral educated man, and the illiterate cheering crew on Jack Aubrey's ship, where do we put everyone else?

If we're going to argue that political ideology has any kind of genetic or heritable aspect, which I'm not sure I agree on, it can only work when examined fully in context. It makes zero sense to say that one has an inherent genetic predisposition towards Marxism, or an inherent genetic predisposition towards Milton Friedman, without considering how those economic ideologies are going to impact your actual life. A rich man who is a Marxist would probably be exercising a different genetic pathway than a working man who is a Marxist. That's the point, if we're going to talk about a gene or a set of genes that impacts both your facial/physical structure and your ideology, it's a different set of genes depending how you are situated.

Consider this quote from a South African radical:

He seemed to relish having chosen a side, to have a politics to fall back on when complicated moments like this arose. And he had relished talking about Andile Mngxitama, an adversary who had chosen a side just as he had, and who spoke plainly about making whites bow down in the face of a black power that Roche was convinced was swelling and would soon engulf the country. “If that’s how Andile sees it, then I respect it a great deal,” he said. “To that I only say we must fight it out, and let’s die like men.”

As you say, the alt-right and the woke left have a lot in common, they know their side. But more than that, your white Proud Boy and your Black NFAC have a lot in common. And your white guilt wokies and your Republican Stepin Fetchits have a lot in common. If there's anything genetic to politics, I'd look at that similarity before I'd look at how people read Hobbes and Rousseau.

Which, to come back to the question of the Finnish MPs, is the point: you can't translate "Oh, dudes who become leftists will be like ____" to other countries and other contexts without thinking about race, religion, class, history, regionality. Those all determine whether High T or low sociability men will be rightists or leftists.

It is blindingly obvious that nobody on that ship besides Aubrey and the Doctor has serious opinions on Rousseau and Calvin.

Sure, I would even go so far as to suggest that it is unlikely that anyone on the ship other Doctor Maturin has more than a vague idea of who Rousseau and Calvin were, much less what they were about. On the flip side I think it is equally blindingly obvious that most of the named characters have very strong feelings about loyalty, discipline, personal responsibility, the natural state of man, the fundamental role Government, the burdens of Command, etc... And that there the real substance of what I'm talking about. It's not about whether one identifies as a Hobbesian, Rousseauan or whatever, it's about where your priorities lie are when the chips are down.

Amusingly your own comment illustrates a lot of those differences.

Your assumption that "what works for upper class educated white Christian men during those times" is going to be fundamentally different from what works for any man in any time is perhaps one of the first and most obvious.

You say "I'd look at that similarity before I'd look at how people read Hobbes and Rousseau." and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm observing that the ideological distance between the white guilt liberals, woke progressives, alt-rights ethnonationalits, and Landian-accelerationists is tiny compared to the differences between any of them and the median Republican. Furthermore I'm making the observation that one's assumptions about loyalty, discipline, personal responsibility, the natural state of man, the fundamental role Government, the burdens of Command, etc... is a major component of that distance.

Democrats are not anti-white so much as they are pro-identity politics.

Pro-identity politics for everyone except for white males (especially heterosexual white males), who are expected to be universalist.

No it's pro-identity politics all around. Have you not noticed that the most vocal "white-nationalists" (Spencer, Yiannopoulos, Fuentes, Yarvin, Et Al) always seem to be former marxists from schools like Berkeley and University of Chicago? This is not a coincidence.

They're now heretics, though, not Democrats. They learned the lesson without the appropriate exceptions.

Heretics they may be, but they till have more in common with their fellow democrats than they do anyone outside the party.

Many of these guys are admittedly boring centrists, people who join parties that have existed for 100+ years and have spent that duration swapping the governance of Finland between them. It's politicians precisely from those parties who tend to have 50/50 correct/wrong guess results, for the most parts. I'll give a more exact breakdown tomorrow.

An American version would probably work best with a collection of state representatives or state senators. One would probably have to be rather an extreme a political autist to confidently recognize state senators or representatives from a state you haven't lived in from pictures.

We could try with, say, Alaska- statistically few people live there, and their politics spreads out across the whole spectrum(albeit weirdly and republicans win the big ticket races).

Fun. It'd be great if you could share the results on next week's thread so we see which ones people are most likely to be wrong about.

I was planning on sharing them tomorrow. However, my current thinking is that I'll make another quiz with 20 other pols after that, to see if getting a grip on certain ways Finnish pols of left or right look might help people answer better. After that a more comprehensive post on analysis on Monday.

14 . It seems the women are easier, they have more available choices in appearance, and so give off more information.

I did slightly better than chance overall, but I got every woman except one right.

Don't have a great explanation, but clearly whatever physiognomy I was doing is pretty accurate for women and not very for men.

15, though I have been watching "Occupied" on TV.

12/20, hardly better than chance.

The quiz might be more revealing if it's demographics were a bit more limited (eg just men or just women).

9/20. Didn't look at clothing, some have said that that's the key. I don't think physiognomy works when everyone involved is an upper-class white person, as shown in this classic.

Can you explain the joke to me? Are they the same guy or something?

That was my first thought too, primed on mention of physiognomy I think; they're different guys with the right and left labels swapped. I think they're coded the misleading way by their clothing more than there's any physiognomy going on.

The guy on the left is actually a conservative activist, and the guy on the right is John Fetterman, newly elected Democrat Senator for Pennsylvania. Fetterman leaned heavily into the assumption that he was a conservative during the campaign.

I got 14/20. After getting properly calibrated it was not too difficult but the sample size is a little too small. Constantly being thrown new examples that shift the entire distribution around is rough early on. Like, someone who would clearly be left-aligned in the Anglo world is apparently right in Finland, okay, which means this guy who is pretty borderline is actually on the right, etc. I think with 50 or so examples most people would be able to achieve 80-90% accuracy.

Seems pretty heavily culturally coded and I imagine there is a lot of overlap with Sweden. One such reliable indicator is if the men look dishevelled, then they are practically 100% chance of being left/green. I'm not sure this signaling really exists in US politics and it could even be interpreted as being rural and thus republican i imagine.

Nope, rural elites make very clean and tidy public appearances.

The disheveled don’t give a shit look is mostly left wingers, although usually figures like fetterman or Bernie who are more about economic issues than social.

It's actually pretty funny, but no matter how much people make fun of rural Republican politicians for their very clean cowboy hats and boots that have never seen a horse (let alone a cow), they don't dare go for the dishevelled working-man look because the grooming standards in congress are so high and there's a terrible risk people might think you actually work for a living.

14/20; Clothing helps a lot.

Nope, I got 10/20.

I got 12 out of 20. I suspect I would do better if they were all American because I'm American, and Europeans look more blue tribe as a whole compared with Americans to me.

14/20. Mildly better than chance, went solely off intuition and zero thought. Literally 'left or right? click!'.

I think I would've done worse if I'd thought about it.

15/20 but i did take clothing into account but also things like hairstyle, jewelry etc - if somebody wears Christian cross on a necklace it is a hint. I do not understand the face constraint here - there is a meme about blue hair and other signifiers for allegiance.

I mainly meant that in some countries it might be, for instance, that left-wing male politicians wear red ties, as a rule, and right-wing ones wear blue ties, as a rule. There's no such consistency here. I'll expand on it a little bit.

Don't people mean that they can identify regular people by appearance, not the special subspecies that is Finnish politicians?

I believe people generally mean that when you have a neon-haired woman (white or not) who has a lot of tattoos and piercings they are probably a left-winger and when you have an older chubby (white) man with sunglasses, chinbeard and military-crop hair they probably are a right-winger. However, there's not really a good method for taking a sampling of people at large and assigning them to left/right categories, so politicians will have to do. Finnish politicians are generally unrecognizable to everyone outside of the country (well, many of them would be inside the country as well, to those outside of their area), so it's as good a sample as any.

8/20. So no better than a random guess.

This does leave me wondering a bit as to the distribution of which ones people are most likely to get right or not, though; I hope you'll break the results down by member.

Yes, I'll wait until tomorrow and give a breakdown then.

Nope! I can't, I got 8/20 lol. Although I can spot Finnish green party members it turns out. Which I think is the point people are getting at when they say they can spot a lefty or righty - not that everyone can be put into a category based on looks alone, but that there are facial characteristics that make you dramatically more likely to belong to a category. Danger hair and fish face? Probably left wing. Fifties haircut and fish face? Probably right wing. Mullet? Probably left wing unless you are somewhere rural. Completely clean shaven bald? Right wing or dying or black.

I know a lot of clean shaven bald left-wingers. I'd just generally associate clean-shaving bald head with being a typical modern response to the first notable signs of male-pattern hair loss among men, these days.

Yeah I was trying to stick with the theme but I couldn't think of a more right wing haircut. I was going to go mullet but actually I don't think I've seen a right wing guy with a mullet for at least a decade. Really what I look for is evidence of the use of face moisturiser, it's pretty accurate.

12/20.

I got 7/20. So, maybe some people can but I evidently can't.

It isn’t obvious that Finnish politicians are the central example of American left / right.

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