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Notes -
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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