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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 05/24/2014 09:53 AM, William Wallace
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:EEC76E09-9A80-46BB-AC5E-2A06C6DAAEFE@gmail.com"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
<div>This ignores the liberal libertarian. See political <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://compass.org">compass.org</a>
for a relevant test. Bill w<br>
<br>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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".<br>
<br>
- samantha<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:EEC76E09-9A80-46BB-AC5E-2A06C6DAAEFE@gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div>Sent from my iPad</div>
<div><br>
On May 24, 2014, at 10:05 AM, James Clement <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:clementlawyer@gmail.com">clementlawyer@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">Professor Haidt has made it to this list a
number of times in the past.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<h2 style="margin:15px
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A look at libertarian morality</h2>
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<dl
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<dd style="margin:0px;padding:0px 5px 0px
0px;border:0px;display:inline">Published on <span
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">29 June
2013</span> </dd>
<dd style="margin:0px;padding:0px 5px 0px
0px;border:0px;background-image:url(http://www.scienceonreligion.org/templates/ja_purity_ii_sor/images/icon-user.gif);line-height:15px;display:inline;background-repeat:no-repeat
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Written by <span
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">Connor
Wood</span> </dd>
<dd style="margin:0px;padding:0px 5px 0px
0px;border:0px;line-height:21px;display:inline">Hits: <span
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">105</span></dd>
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<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px"><img
moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://www.scienceonreligion.org/images/Libertarian_Porupine.jpg"
alt="Libertarian Porupine" style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 2px solid rgb(255, 255, 255);
float: right;" height="139" width="200">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.</p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px">University
of Southern California psychologist Ravi Iyer teamed up
with University of Virginia colleague <span class="">Jonathan</span> <span
class="">Haidt</span> (now at NYU) and several other
colleagues to see how libertarians compared with
ordinary liberals and conservatives in a massive online
sample. <span class="">Haidt</span> is well-known for
formulating<a moz-do-not-send="true"
title="MoralFoundations.org"
href="http://www.moralfoundations.org/"
target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(123,165,102);margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">moral
foundations theory</a>, 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 <span class="">Haidt</span> and
his doctoral student Jesse Graham (who also contributed
to this research) had shown that <a
moz-do-not-send="true" title="Graham et al. PubMed"
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379034"
target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(123,165,102);margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">conservatives
tended to emphasize all five of these</a> foundations
equally, while liberals mostly ignored authority,
ingroup loyalty, and purity, while strongly emphasizing
harm avoidance and fairness.</p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px">This
pattern of moral profiles, which has been replicated
across different cultures and nations, suggests that
conservatives actually <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">feel</i> 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, <a
moz-do-not-send="true" title="YourMorals.org"
href="http://www.yourmorals.org/index.php"
target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(123,165,102);margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">YourMorals.org, </a>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.</p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px">Crunching
data from over 150,000 visitors who took online surveys
at <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://YourMorals.org">YourMorals.org</a>
between 2007 and 2011, Iyer and the other researchers <a
moz-do-not-send="true" title="PLOS ONE"
href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366"
target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(123,165,102);margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">found
that libertarians</a> 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.</p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px">
<img moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://www.scienceonreligion.org/images/Ravi_quote.jpg" alt="Ravi
quote" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 1px
solid rgb(255, 255, 255); vertical-align: middle;"
height="41" width="300"></p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px">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 <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">moral</i> concern
when it came to being left alone to do what they wanted,
or to decide how to use their own economic resources.</p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px">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.</p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px"><span
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">Another
interesting finding had to do with personality. The
so-called <a moz-do-not-send="true" title="Big Five
Wikipedia"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits"
target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(123,165,102);margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">Big
Five personality inventory</a> 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 <a
moz-do-not-send="true" title="Steffan Antonas blog"
href="http://blog.steffanantonas.com/the-real-difference-between-liberals-and-conservatives.htm"
target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(123,165,102);margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">liberals
are much more open to new experiences</a> 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.)</span></p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px"><img
moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://www.scienceonreligion.org/images/Libertarians_less_connected_graph.jpg"
alt="Libertarians less connected graph" style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 2px solid rgb(255, 255,
255); float: right;" height="312" width="350">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 lib<span
style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">rals. But
they were significantly <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">less</i> 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.</span></p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px"><span
style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Finally,
libertarians seemed to enjoy <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">thinking</i> 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 <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">things</i> and <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">ideas. </i>(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.</span></p>
<p style="margin:15px
0px;padding:0px;border:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Segoe
UI',Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:18px"><span
style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">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 <i
style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px">more</i> 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.</span></p>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>James</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 10:40 AM,
William Flynn Wallace <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com" target="_blank">foozler83@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">For
me, it's about morality, the larger question.<br>
<br>
Few books that are called 'seminal' truly are, but
this one is:<br>
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">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:<br>
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">Care
(uncompassion to Ben), Fairness, Loyalty,
Sanctity, and Authority.<br>
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">
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).<br>
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148)">Easily
read by any college grad, this book will expand
your understanding of morality - guaranteed. bill
w<br>
</div>
</div>
<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5">
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, May 24, 2014 at
1:22 AM, Ben Goertzel <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:ben@goertzel.org"
target="_blank">ben@goertzel.org</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px
#ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi Rafal,<br>
<div><br>
On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Rafal
Smigrodzki<br>
<<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:rafal.smigrodzki@gmail.com"
target="_blank">rafal.smigrodzki@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
> Some time ago I posted here about
what my understanding of "leftism" - that<br>
> it is a current manifestation of the
age-old human obsession with status. A<br>
> leftist is a status-obsessed (i.e.
envious) hypocrite, predictably attracted<br>
> to the hierarchies of government
bureaucracy, academia and mainstream<br>
> journalism.<br>
<br>
</div>
I don't normally read this list but this
caught my eye for some reason..<br>
<br>
I guess I qualify as a "leftist" if I have
to be projected onto the<br>
left/right axis. Certainly I'm 100x more
leftist than rightist...<br>
<br>
I hate bureaucracy; I quit academia because
I got sick of the<br>
bureacracy and the status-seeking BS; and I
don't care for mainstream<br>
media much either...<br>
<br>
However, I come from many generations of
leftists, even plenty of<br>
Marxists among my grandparents etc. (though
my parents abandoned any<br>
form of strict Marxism in the late 70s on
observing the reality of the<br>
Soviet Union, they remain fairly leftist...)<br>
<br>
To me leftism is about compassion and
fairness more than anything<br>
else. It's about believing the social
contract should, normatively,<br>
include a responsibility for society to
provide everyone some minimal<br>
level of help and opportunity. It's about
feeling it's morally wrong<br>
for a small elite, with power and wealth
that is mainly inherited, to<br>
control nearly everything and take most of
the goodies for themselves.<br>
<br>
Anyway I have a low estimate of the ultimate
value to be gotten from<br>
in-depth discussion of politics on this
list. I just wanted to<br>
briefly speak out against your caricature of
leftist politics...<br>
<br>
If anyone on the list is interested in some
thoughtful writing in the<br>
leftist direction I'd suggest<br>
<br>
-- George Lakoff's various writings on the
topic, e.g. Moral Politics<br>
<br>
-- Piketty's recent master work "Capital in
the 21st Century" (which<br>
is flawed in ignoring exponential
technological acceleration, but is<br>
an excellent, thoroughly data-driven summary
of the economics of the<br>
last few hundred years. Turns out the data
is way more supportive of<br>
leftist than rightist thinking...)<br>
<br>
Rafal, it goes w/o saying I have great
respect for your scientific<br>
work and your general stature as a creative,
proactive human being.<br>
But I can't agree w/ your view on leftism.
IMO in a world without<br>
leftist activiism throughout the 20th
century, but with other<br>
political factors roughly the same, the
Western nations would now be<br>
far more extremely owned by small egocentric
elites, and science and<br>
tech progress would be much less than they
have been, as well as total<br>
human happiness being much lower. (Of
course, I can also envision<br>
other systems of gov't far better than
anything current left or right<br>
politicos imagine. But that's a different
story.) .... Similarly,<br>
going forward toward Singularity, if we
subtracted leftist<br>
thinking/attitudes and left other
sociopolitical factors roughly the<br>
same, we'd end up with a pre-Singularity
period in which small selfish<br>
elites simply owned everything and
manipulated the Singularity path<br>
for their own personal good. This would
lead to all sorts of dangers<br>
and problems beyond the intrinsic moral
aspects of uncompassion and<br>
unfairness...<br>
<br>
-- Ben G<br>
<br>
<br>
;)<br>
<span><font color="#888888">Ben<br>
</font></span>
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