From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat May 17 2003 - 00:25:28 MDT
Damien writes
> I remember reading of a study a few years ago trying to do
> regression on political positions, and finding that a large
> chunk, maybe a majority, of the variance could be explained
> by a single dimension, giving some support to the traditional
> spectrum.
Yes, I would have been astonished (and not a little skeptical)
if the study had concluded differently.
> OTOH, it wasn't an overwhelming majority -- 60%, maybe? --
> leaving a lot of room for fuzziness and error.
>
> OTGrippingH, there is at least one psych experiment where a group of people is
> split up randomly with each person being assigned one of two labels; the two
> utterly artificial and baseless tribes then start exhibiting distressingly
> tribal behavior. To me this suggest that just because we see humans cluster
> needn't mean there's a coherent reason for the clustering.
Well, yes, but in the case of political differences, the clustering
we see is real (as per your previous point). The only tragedy would
be if people did *not* think independently about new issues. As you
go on to write,
> And so we find things like war on drugs cutting across the spectrum, with
> defectors from both of the main sides, as I've said. And both sides get their
> litmus issues, and look oddly at someone who tries to hang out but disagrees
> with something, like gun control.
Yes, I'm sure that we've all experienced that. Years ago
I was the only libertarian I knew who favored a military
draft (I had not yet understood that the U.S. isn't really
a nation). And as early as 1970, neither my father nor I
had the slightest clue as to why most all the other
conservatives were getting excited by abortion.
So, so long as the clustering is not showing the unfortunate symptoms
claimed in that psych experiment (which I'm also a little skeptical
of), then no harm is done. Worse by far is polarization, which
manifests conservatives being quiet about certain outrages because
they can count on the liberals to be outraged, and vice versa.
Lee
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