[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[Anders Sandberg]

spike <spike66 at att.net> , 23/5/2014 6:41 PM:


 

>…Rightest tend to be in favor of the free market and that's good, but they also tend to be in favor of creationism and that's bad.

Eh, a lot of that kind of thing is an artifact of our American two-party system, which isn’t really two parties, but rather huge coalitions of unrelated small parties who don’t really like their own fellow travelers.  

My notion is that everything doesn’t collapse down to right or left.  
It depends on the country. I did some principal component analysis of voting patterns in different countries, and the number of dimensions varies. In the US most voting is explained by just a 1D scale, which we could call "left-right". In Sweden there was 2-3 dimensions, to some degree a mix between left-right and large scale and small scale visions of society. UK also has about 2. In Norway there was 4 (various splits left-right, rural-city, religious-nonreligious etc). 
One can create various scales, like "the world's smallest political quiz" that shows social vs economic liberalism. I like Postrels dimension of dynamism vs. stasism: how much do you think the future should be freely explored vs. how much do you think it needs to be controlled (or avoided)? But in many places many dimensions get squeezed together because of the game theory of party politics. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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