[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[William Flynn Wallace]

Well, I am sorry for that, Samantha, but I was only interested in sharing
info about the test.  Most tests are just for conservative- liberal and not
for authoritarian-libertarian.

I don't even remember that article you refer to and probably would agree
with you about its deficiencies.  bill w


On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 6:31 PM, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:

>
> On 05/24/2014 09:53 AM, William Wallace wrote:
>
> This ignores the liberal libertarian.  See political compass.org for a
> relevant test.  Bill w
>
>
> The article is typical wordy nonsense.    I am a libertarian because I
> care deeply for people and human relationships - voluntary human
> relationships. Deep caring about people requires not initiating force
> against them.   Appreciation of the apparent fact that humans survive and
> thrive as creatures by using their general intelligences to reach their own
> conclusions about what is best for them seems to me to require making
> maximal room for people to make their own decisions and succeed or fail on
> that basis.    An appreciation for information requirements of decision
> making lead to believing that more localized decision made by those with
> more "skin the the game" will tend to be better than more centralized
> decisions of necessity made by those with less detailed local information
> and less interest in outcomes relevant to any of those actually locally
> involved.
>
> The so-called moral foundation theory of the article is a joke.  It simply
> asserts without philosophical basis that derived things like "respect for
> authority" are actually primary.   It includes things without definition
> such as "fairness".
>
> - samantha
>
>  Sent from my iPad
>
> On May 24, 2014, at 10:05 AM, James Clement <clementlawyer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>   Professor Haidt has made it to this list a number of times in the past.
>
>   A look at libertarian morality
>
>    - [image: Print]<http://www.scienceonreligion.org/index.php/news-research/research-updates/555-a-look-at-libertarian-morality?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=>
>    - [image: Email]<http://www.scienceonreligion.org/index.php/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&template=ja_purity_ii_sor&link=8b104ac2d32a9b1dfa5b2eaeac0d2e5029a8eb76>
>
>  Published on 29 June 2013  Written by Connor Wood Hits: 105
>
>
>  [image: Libertarian Porupine]You know your libertarian friend? The one
> who votes Republican but scoffs at “family values,” who posts Ron Paul
> quotes on Facebook and thinks taxes are a form of theft? Well, thanks to
> some new research, we now know more about him (or her). The results are
> both unsurprising and shocking. Obviously, libertarians prize personal
> liberty and freedom above just about everything, but they don’t value the
> tight, bonded relationships that people throughout history have depended on
> for survival. This means that libertarianism isn’t just a political stance
> – it’s a new way of looking at human social life.
>
> University of Southern California psychologist Ravi Iyer teamed up with
> University of Virginia colleague Jonathan Haidt (now at NYU) and several
> other colleagues to see how libertarians compared with ordinary liberals
> and conservatives in a massive online sample. Haidt is well-known for
> formulatingmoral foundations theory <http://www.moralfoundations.org/>,
> which claims that human morality can be understood as drawing on five basic
> instincts: harm avoidance, fairness, respect for authority, ingroup
> loyalty, and purity. Previous findings published by Haidt and his
> doctoral student Jesse Graham (who also contributed to this research) had
> shown that conservatives tended to emphasize all five of these<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379034> foundations
> equally, while liberals mostly ignored authority, ingroup loyalty, and
> purity, while strongly emphasizing harm avoidance and fairness.
>
> This pattern of moral profiles, which has been replicated across different
> cultures and nations, suggests that conservatives actually *feel* moral
> emotions differently than liberals, and vice-versa. But, of course, not all
> conservatives and liberals are the same. Libertarians are often lumped in
> with conservatives in contemporary American politics, but they tend not to
> share several of the traits of traditional conservatives – particularly
> respect for tradition and authority. Iyer and the other researchers run a
> well-known survey website, YourMorals.org, <http://www.yourmorals.org/index.php>and they
> decided to use this online platform to see whether these differences
> actually showed up in surveys measuring personality type, moral opinions,
> and similar characteristics.
>
> Crunching data from over 150,000 visitors who took online surveys at
> YourMorals.org between 2007 and 2011, Iyer and the other researchers found
> that libertarians<http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366> did,
> indeed, have a unique personality profile that distinguished them from both
> conservatives and liberals. As you might expect, libertarians rated
> themselves as economically conservative, but socially liberal. But perhaps
> more surprisingly, libertarians showed a moral profile that was distinctly
> their own: like liberals, they didn’t place much importance on the moral
> dimensions of authority, ingroup loyalty, or purity. But like
> conservatives, they didn’t emphasize the “liberal” dimensions of harm
> avoidance and fairness, either. This meant that, compared with liberals and
> conservatives, they actually seemed to feel fewer moral emotions, period.
>
>                                      [image: Ravi quote]
>
> Or did they? A new, sixth moral dimension, “liberty,” was tested on a
> small subset of the site’s total visitors,  and it seemed to garner the
> lion’s share of libertarian interest. Compared with both liberals and
> conservatives, libertarians more strongly endorsed the moral importance of
> both economic and lifestyle liberty. The authors interpreted this result to
> mean that libertarians actually felt a weight of *moral* concern when it
> came to being left alone to do what they wanted, or to decide how to use
> their own economic resources.
>
> No surprise, right? They’re called “libertarians,” after all. But
> remember: this emphasis on personal liberty seemed to come at the expense
> of other types of moral concern, such as fairness, respect for authority,
> or concern about harm to others. Libertarian morality not only showed an
> empirically different profile than that of liberals or conservatives, but
> it emphasized liberty and individual autonomy to an extraordinary extent.
>
> Another interesting finding had to do with personality. The so-called Big
> Five personality inventory<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits> breaks
> down personality into five distinct tendencies: openness to new experience,
> agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.
> Historically, many researchers have used the Big Five to look at the
> difference between conservatives and liberals. Generally, the most common
> finding is that liberals are much more open to new experiences<http://blog.steffanantonas.com/the-real-difference-between-liberals-and-conservatives.htm> than
> conservatives, while conservatives tend more toward conscientiousness and,
> in some studies, agreeableness. (Some researchers also think that
> conservatives may be less neurotic than liberals, and Iyer's findings
> mildly support this view.)
>
> [image: Libertarians less connected graph]In this study, Iyer and his
> colleagues found that libertarians again had their own unique personality
> profile. Like liberals, libertarians were significantly more open to new
> experiences than conservatives. And along with conservatives, they reported
> less neurosis than librals. But they were significantly *less* agreeable,
> conscientious, and extraverted than both conservatives and liberals. This
> finding stood up to multiple statistical analyses, leaving the authors to
> conclude that libertarians seemed to have a recognizable personality style:
> one that was highly open to new experiences and stimulus, emotionally
> steady, and not quite as motivated by getting along with others.
>
> Finally, libertarians seemed to enjoy *thinking* more than either
> liberals or conservatives. In a test of empathic versus systemizing
> tendencies, libertarians were the only group that scored higher in
> systemizing than in empathizing. In this context, empathizing refers to
> interest in other people, while systemizing refers to fascination with
> inanimate or abstract objects. Thus, libertarians showed themselves to be
> highly stimulated, not by other people, but by *things* and *ideas. *(See
> the graph to the right on libertarians' patterns of social
> connection.) This finding dovetailed with libertarians’ results on the
> Different Types of Love scale, which showed that libertarians reported
> feeling less love than liberals or conservatives toward different groups,
> including friends, romantic partners, and humanity in general. Meanwhile,
> they also reported higher need for cognition, or motivation to engage in
> thinking and problem-solving.
>
> Iyer’s findings paint a fascinating, if sometimes challenging, portrait of
> libertarians in today’s complex political landscape. Like liberals,
> libertarians are hungry for novel experiences and often dismissive of
> tradition, authority, and concerns about purity or sacredness. They’re also
> not as conscientious, detail-oriented, or agreeable as conservatives, and
> they’re much more stimulated by intellectual and abstract challenges (they
> performed better or tests of analytic thinking, too). In some ways,
> libertarians almost seem *more* liberal than liberals – further away from
> the warm confines of tradition, more on the edge of established cultural
> boundaries. In the past, human social arrangements were almost always
> tight, emotionally weighty, and powered by shared ritual, value, and
> religious tradition. If culture is a laboratory, libertarians are cooking
> up quite an innovative, and unprecedented, experiment indeed.
>
>  James
>
>
> On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 10:40 AM, William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  For me, it's about morality, the larger question.
>>
>> Few books that are called 'seminal' truly are, but this one is:
>>
>>  The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt (social psychologist).  In a
>> sense, he takes morality and does a factor analysis of it, coming up with
>> these categories:
>>
>>  Care (uncompassion to Ben), Fairness, Loyalty, Sanctity, and Authority.
>>
>>  People on the right use all of these fairly equally, but liberals treat
>> Care and Fairness as major factors and the others as rather minor or even
>> unimportant (or actually bad, such as the libertarians' attitude towards
>> authority).
>>
>>  Easily read by any college grad, this book will expand your
>> understanding of morality - guaranteed.  bill w
>>
>>
>> On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 1:22 AM, Ben Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Rafal,
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki
>>> <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > Some time ago I posted here about what my understanding of "leftism" -
>>> that
>>> > it is a current manifestation of the age-old human obsession with
>>> status. A
>>> > leftist is a status-obsessed (i.e. envious) hypocrite, predictably
>>> attracted
>>> > to the hierarchies of government bureaucracy, academia and mainstream
>>> > journalism.
>>>
>>>  I don't normally read this list but this caught my eye for some reason..
>>>
>>> I guess I qualify as a "leftist" if I have to be projected onto the
>>> left/right axis.  Certainly I'm 100x more leftist than rightist...
>>>
>>> I hate bureaucracy; I quit academia because I got sick of the
>>> bureacracy and the status-seeking BS; and I don't care for mainstream
>>> media much either...
>>>
>>> However, I come from many generations of leftists, even plenty of
>>> Marxists among my grandparents etc. (though my parents abandoned any
>>> form of strict Marxism in the late 70s on observing the reality of the
>>> Soviet Union, they remain fairly leftist...)
>>>
>>> To me leftism is about compassion and fairness more than anything
>>> else.   It's about believing the social contract should, normatively,
>>> include a responsibility for society to provide everyone some minimal
>>> level of help and opportunity.   It's about feeling it's morally wrong
>>> for a small elite, with power and wealth that is mainly inherited, to
>>> control nearly everything and take most of the goodies for themselves.
>>>
>>> Anyway I have a low estimate of the ultimate value to be gotten from
>>> in-depth discussion of politics on this list.  I just wanted to
>>> briefly speak out against your caricature of leftist politics...
>>>
>>> If anyone on the list is interested in some thoughtful writing in the
>>> leftist direction I'd suggest
>>>
>>> -- George Lakoff's various writings on the topic, e.g. Moral Politics
>>>
>>> -- Piketty's recent master work "Capital in the 21st Century" (which
>>> is flawed in ignoring exponential technological acceleration, but is
>>> an excellent, thoroughly data-driven summary of the economics of the
>>> last few hundred years.  Turns out the data is way more supportive of
>>> leftist than rightist thinking...)
>>>
>>> Rafal, it goes w/o saying I have great respect for your scientific
>>> work and your general stature as a creative, proactive human being.
>>> But I can't agree w/ your view on leftism.  IMO in a world without
>>> leftist activiism throughout the 20th century, but with other
>>> political factors roughly the same, the Western nations would now be
>>> far more extremely owned by small egocentric elites, and science and
>>> tech progress would be much less than they have been, as well as total
>>> human happiness being much lower.   (Of course, I can also envision
>>> other systems of gov't far better than anything current left or right
>>> politicos imagine.  But that's a different story.) .... Similarly,
>>> going forward toward Singularity, if we subtracted leftist
>>> thinking/attitudes and left other sociopolitical factors roughly the
>>> same, we'd end up with a pre-Singularity period in which small selfish
>>> elites simply owned everything and manipulated the Singularity path
>>> for their own personal good.  This would lead to all sorts of dangers
>>> and problems beyond the intrinsic moral aspects of uncompassion and
>>> unfairness...
>>>
>>> -- Ben G
>>>
>>>
>>> ;)
>>> Ben
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>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>
>>
>>
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