From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 11:49:26 MDT
Anders says
> Your version of libertarians/authoritarians seems to mirror
> Postrel's stasists and dynamists well too.
Indeed. It was partly her book that got me thinking about the kind of new
issues and divisions that are emerging in politics.
>
>
> Real political views are far more complex than can be expressed in
> a few dimensions; we are essentially projecting down a
> high-dimensional space (that might even have a weird metric) into
> 2D or 3D. Different projections reveal different properties and
> make them separable, a good projection shows the most salient
> differences clearly (similar to a principal component
> decomposition).
Absolutely. Constructing a model of political beliefs is inherently
problematic, not least because the "defining issues" change over time. Can't
be avoided though if we are to make sense of political divisions. A slightly
different way of coming at this is to construct a model that sorts people
out not on the basis of beliefs but of what style of argument they find
persuasive, so making overt content less important than rhetoric. It's the
tropes used in argument that then become important.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 23 2003 - 11:59:44 MDT