From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 07:03:09 MDT
On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 05:06:50PM +0100, Steve Davies wrote:
>
> Optimistic libertarians (classical liberals/libertarians)
> Optimistic authoritarians (socialists/social democrats)
> Pessimistic libertarians (most Anglo-Saxon conservatives)
> Pessimistic authoritarians ("Throne and Altar"/conservative revolutionaries
> of the German and French type)
Your version of libertarians/authoritarians seems to mirror
Postrel's stasists and dynamists well too.
> Anders' model is better because by separating out the attitude to
> technology and science it enables you to locate some groups who
> otherwise pose problems such as fascists.
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).
Mike Lorrey:
> Anders, this is a really good explaination, and something which
> libertarians can easily grasp. Do you think you could put this
> together in flyer form for the Escape to New Hampshire conference
> next month? Adding a technology axis maps us into the liberty
> sphere really well.
I'll see if I can make a flyer or webpage based on it, with some
commentary.
> Perhaps we need a new Worlds Shortest Political Quiz?
Natasha:
> It's David Nolan's "Worlds Smallest Political Quiz" (1969). It
> doesn't work well because its 10 questions require quantifying by
> people who take the test.
Yes, I saw that the original quiz contained issues that have since
then changed party valence, like abortion and gun control. And even
then, judging attitudes is always messy. I think the benefit of the
quiz is that it shows the difference between different approaches,
and that is often a good wake up call for people.
> At ExI, we are working on a "Worlds Smallest Futurist Quiz, and
> I'm working on a version for my talk at the TransVision
> Conference. For this, I was planning on solicitating Ander's
> keen mind :-)
I would be delighted! After all, there are different kinds of
futures and futurists too. However, that sounds somewhat different
from the inherently political quiz I suggested in this thread.
>I'm not sure just how to does this for a futurists' quiz, but at
>least I've got the first 2 questions. The night before last, my
>mother, Max and I tossed around a few ideas and this was provoking
>because of the differences between an 85 year old and baby
>boomers. We focused on biotechnological questions and my mother
>proved to be extropic in her thinking here. But not everywhere!
>I think that to design a balanced quiz, it would require either a
>person who is very sharp or a team of people from diverse
>backgrounds to test the questions.
I think we need to think about what the quiz should reveal or be
used for. One approach is to show the assumptions about the
speed/size of future changes and one's valence to it (e.g. Bill Joy
is close to our idea of the size and speed, but not that it is a
good thing, while many conservative thinkers are negative but do
not believe any real change is on the horizon). Another approach is
to look at how radical changes are conceivable within different
areas, and how well these can be integrated into coherent world
models of the future.
> I'm just a beginner with this sort of thing, so I don't have
>enough experience to know right now. With a futurist quiz, the
>design issue would be to help people rate their own ability to
>accept change and to adjust to change. Its pretty obvious that not
>everyone is futurist thinking in all areas. Politics and religion
>are probably the most backward areas for futurism.
This seems like a third approach: to see how people react to change
individually rather than how they perceive it. One could factor it
along how much change people expect and how they expect to cope
with it, which would likely reveal the distinction between
optimists/pessimists and future-aimed and past-aimed people.
In many ways I think quizes are less revealing than the chart
itself.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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