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Notes -
Thanks for running this survey!
As I read the first half, I was thinking “but you can have more than two factors…” Lo and behold, you covered that. It’s probably for the best that you chose purple and green to represent the auth/lib dimension; I wouldn’t have been able to resist making an illegible 3D cloud of a graph.
How many of those 301 responses were from the Motte? And where else did you run the survey? I ask because there is a giant selection effect, one probably large enough to explain any age skew. You don’t find a lot of boomers on niche political Internet sites. Zoomers either, apparently, though I find that a little surprising. Those kids have had their chance to get into college and discover contrarianism.
Speaking of which—I don’t know how you’d design a survey to test this, but I would expect a very strong “contrarian” axis to political positions. Our unparalleled wealth and access to information, plus the balkanization of social circles, makes countersignaling very appealing. Especially for positions further from daily life (geopolitics) or the Overton window (eugenics). Were there any that clustered strongly with describing oneself as “Other”?
Some of the positions on your chart really fit the “idealist” label, but others merit a raised eyebrow. Is pro-choice, as understood in US discourse, a pragmatic, empirical stance? What about skepticism towards democracy? And how are old-fashioned values decoupled from any sort of idealism? There’s also that cluster of libertarian-adjacent concepts which are hovering around the conservative axis. It is very strange to see gun rights, a topic almost always grounded in appeals to natural rights, traditions, and the Platonic ideal of a struggle against tyranny, on the pragmatic side. The phrase “principled libertarian” describes a real phenomenon!
Finally, I want to comment on Ukraine. Clustering does not imply general approval, right? Imagine you had a very unpopular idea such that only one person approved. Then its placement on the quadrants would depend entirely on that person’s other answers. In other words, I’d want to know what proportion of respondents actually endorsed the idea before I used it to assert ideal-lib excess.
Perhaps it’s a moot point, because I’ll bite the bullet. Accepting a risk of nuclear war is realist as hell. It’s outright refusing to consider nukes that suggests idealism. Compare the fight over effective altruism and existential risk. Who is more idealistic: the researcher who shut up, multipled, and concluded AI risk outweighed short-term suffering? Or the one who dismisses such analysis on the same principle he’d use to avoid Pascal’s Mugging?
There are idealists at all levels, especially when you are asking survey questions without skin in the game. I keep trying to think of other labels for the axis, but I’ve had a tough time. Institutional trust, risk tolerance—these might describe the bottom-left/top-right trend, but not the vertical axis. You might be able to get a hypothetical/axiomatic division, based on epistemic certainty, but it’s better suited to a top-left/bottom-right split.
Appealing to—and accepting appeals from—statistics and measurement remains a meaningful category. “Realism” or “materialism” captures this, but “idealism” does not fit the opposite, since anyone and everyone will cite an ideal at some point. I’d go with something like “abstraction,” making it clear that the ideal can be hidden by, even incompatible with empirical measurements. Moving up the chart no longer implies that the ideals disappear—just that they’re more closely anchored to material examples.
Again, good work, and thank you for sharing your results.
I appreciate your thoughtful response! So much here I really want to respond to - I'll try to give a quick answer to everything I can.
First off, my other work has found a fourth factor of openmindedness vs skepticism, but I didn't have the survey space to include questions that would load on it - I deliberately excluded anything that might have loaded on it.
About half, and yes the sample was unusual - extremely introverted, extremely realist. All you need is variation to uncover the space, though, and the results were exactly in line with my findings from ten years ago.
I didn't look at this. I'm in a time crunch lately, but I'll just say this is a good idea, and I'll poke around to see what's there with "other" affiliation.
That's a point well taken, and you can see I really spent a lot of time vacillating on what to call this axis! But I'd say overall that killing the fetus, being cynical about Democracy, and arming yourself are "realistic." Ideally every fetus is a planned and wanted fetus, ideally the Right to Vote results in the best outcome, and ideally nobody needs a gun. But IDK, come up with a better name?
Right, and since you mentioned it, maybe I should give some info on proportion of respondents supporting each proposition. (That isn't much a problem with the Ukraine one, but Flat Earth was so universally disliked that it could very well have swung in some weird direction if I'd been unlucky.)
Granted (although the Ukraine one wasn't even that idealist). Other people have pointed out that I may not have reacted very sensibly to people's answers on the Ukraine item. Obviously I have values of my own which will affect my interpretation!
Mmm... I don't think it works. Rationalists are up-and-left, and they love abstraction. Empiricists like me are also up-and-left, and I also love abstraction. I admit to being somewhat idealistic, but generally my objection to anything at the lower end of that map is that it's all too idealistic, idealistic in a way that doesn't correspond to anything outside of a Disney cartoon. Similarly, I'm guessing that people at the bottom would admit to being somewhat realistic, but are seriously disturbed by the evident lack of idealism higher up. "What, we're just going to kill all the babies and accept the inherent racism in society? Don't we care about anything at all?"
(Yes. Yes we do care. We care about surveys. Also: making political maps)
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