From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Fri May 16 2003 - 19:26:20 MDT
On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 03:53:48PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> > Somebody's already pointed out how extropians should be (indeed,
> > used to be?) above this kind of egregious false dichotomy.
>
> But is it really false? Now yes, it's true that *extropians* don't
> fit easily onto the usual left right continuum, and so that's why
> the Nolan chart exists. Though wordier, and more complicated, it
> gives a better picture of the reality, it seems.
Falseness: 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 suport to the traditional spectrum.
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.
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.
-xx- Damien X-)
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