I wonder if the left-right axis is simply out of date. The opposing teams in politics have changed several times since the 1770s from city vs farm and Whigs vs Tories, maybe its time for another change. Left vs right has worked as a shorthand for state vs market this last 100 years but this no longer seems to capture the main divisions. Certainly many people on the left have been left behind by identity politics and wokery that seemed to come from nowhere and one can hardly describe MAGA-fans as pro-market. I think the authoritarian vs libertarian has become a more significant division but the political parties have just not caught up yet.
Agreed - Rick suggests that it's rationalism vs. postmodernism (or something along those lines) rather than libertarianism/authoritarianism. I'm not sure which axis is most relevant to understanding the two large groups now... but also this comment touches on a related issue which is that the axes best suited to explaining current relevant factions can be somewhat different from the best axis for explaining fundamental variance in worldviews across the broad sweep of history - as Rick points out during the liberal consensus your view of truth wasn't super relevant to understanding factions but it might be very central when viewing a longer history. Also, rather than framing left/right as outdated I see it as a cluster shorthand rather than identifying a consistent axis if that makes sense...
It is in fact individualism vs collectivism, with modern conservatives and modern progressives both falling deeply in the collectivist end. Also, the Enlightenment was exactly a rejection of collectivist ideas, and it was the embrace of the individual, the recognition of his sanctity that resulted in the early success of the U.S. Both progressives and conservatives today reject Enlightenment ideas.
I think a lot of it is our lousy two-party system here in the US encouraging people to think in binaries. But as Regan is alluding to, it's a multidimensional space and you have to pick a few axes to talk about. And you can't put more than 2 on a graph.
Brilliant. No one seems to want to discuss the values conflict between left and right in detail. The disagreement between whether humans should have constraints versus whether they shouldn't lies, in my mind, at the heart of the liberal vs conservative conflict.
This is why, while I see a fair amount of baloney on the left, I'm onboard with that team. Liberalism is at it's heart a project to LIBERATE individuals from social burdens and constraints. At it's most extreme, where I reside philosophically, everyone is free to do whatever they want. Society and the state are, by definition, oppression since they constrain the individual. No constraint is tolerable. I'm not ignorant of the discord of this stance with left-wing cancel culture (which I view as absurd) but liberating individuals from constraints still places me on the left.
Right-libertarianism has it's appeal as does anarchism but both of those camps seem to have some absurd fundamental, universal concepts about how people should behave and how they would behave given a society that's unconstrained by law.
Taken to it's natural conclusion my worldview doesn't bode well for the future of humanity without the advent of robot caretakers. Still... given that my goal is the complete liberation of all individuals from the human condition I'm still doubling down. The ideal human state is where every individual is empowered to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they choose. Any other existence is simply intolerable.
This is interesting and touches on something I mentioned in my comment responding to Paul. Libertarian economics is typically interpreted as an expression of a constrained vision, but it can also be the expression of an unconstrained vision as you lay out here. The key thing that makes your vision unconstrained imo is where you say:
"Still... given that my goal is the complete liberation of all individuals from the human condition I'm still doubling down. The ideal human state is where every individual is empowered to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they choose. Any other existence is simply intolerable."
Unconstrained vision typically means you think A LOT of improvement is possible and that therefore a lot of sacrifice to move in the right direction is warranted.
But the constrained interpretation of libertarian econ is: individual knowledge is not sufficient to plan or decide what others should do with their time/resources and instead a system which assumes selfishness and yet can produce socially desirable results is the best we can do (makes me think of Hanania's "the humble capitalist")
Excellent. I subscribed to Rick's Substack because of this post.
I discussed your piece with Claude, telling it, "I think that, given contemporary associations with the word "liberal," many of the people Rick describes as "liberal" would not self-identify as such."
Claude suggested reframing as either "Enlightenment rationalism vs post-modern identitarianism" or "empirical universalism vs subjective lived experience."
I said, "Alas, adopting either of those sets of terms would shrink the set of people interested in the discussion to a tiny fraction of the size of the people interested in a tension between liberalism and wokism."
To which Claude responded:
*laughs* Exactly right. This highlights a key challenge in discussing these ideas:
More precise terms = smaller audience
- "Empirical universalism vs post-modern identitarianism" is technically accurate
- But eyes glaze over
- Signals "academic discussion ahead"
- Loses general reader immediately
"Liberalism vs wokism" = accessible entry point
- People know what these terms mean (or think they do)
- Feels relevant to current debates
- Attracts broader audience
- Creates engagement
It's the classic problem of having to choose between:
- Technical precision that limits reach
- Popular language that sacrifices some accuracy
- Academic rigor that puts people to sleep
- Accessible framing that oversimplifies
Sometimes you have to use the imperfect but widely understood terms to get people into the deeper discussion. After all, a perfectly precise argument that nobody reads doesn't change many minds.
The terms Liberalism and Tyranny still are accurate and have value. It is the deceit of individuals that have corrupted the concepts. Morality is centered in an individual's life and its derivatives. It is our responsibility to find a way to keep the true concepts alive.
Thank you! Will make sure to cover it in a future post - my next one will be on the potential structure of the system and then I plan to cover some of the low dimensional models
What's the best low dimensional representation of political ideology? I couldn't love the framing of this any more!
This is biased by my years in AI/ML, but I'd argue for discovering all the dimensions, including a potential dominant one, through iterative construction of data and analysis. By necessity some of that will have to be informed and shaped by the kinds of philosophizing you explore in this post, which will influence the outcome of course. But I think one will still do better that way.
One of my favorite things to ponder in this space is the shifting over time of how views cluster. There was a time when William Jennings Bryan had a mass following. He was a pro-apartheid racist, fanatical fundamentalist evangelical, and so left you could argue he was socialist in terms of labor and markets. That's a combo that didn't exist for nearly 100 years but could possibly come back in an altered form given our ongoing reshuffling.
Which brings me back to a pet peeve of mine that goes by the name Sowell. Even in his political philosophy the man should be ignored. His economics is so fraudulent. Totally typical 2nd half of the 20th conservative economics. His causal identification is bald faced lying over and over masquerading as analysis. Mathy (as in truthy) ideology. His primary axis as you present it strikes me as similar. Lots of work to obscure the fact that what he's really doing is building a framework to make it easy to cast his own ideology as the clear choice and those he disagree with as risible and not deserving too much serious consideration.
Yes, I agree on the data analysis approach informed by existing concepts… but it’s actually hard to think about how to come up with a spanning set that you can start the dimensionality reduction from which doesn’t reflect your existing bias.
On Sowell, I get what you’re saying to a degree, but I think it’s tempered by seeing the constrained/unconstrained as a spectrum rather than a binary. Everyone is in between the two extremes, both sides of the extreme appear absurd in his framing, and so arguments are around how reasonable it is to shift society towards more or less of a constrained approach
I've been thinking about how one might build a dataset since I read your post this morning! I agree it would be tough. My first thoughts are you'd need to draw from a bunch of different kinds of sources. I realized I wanted to put caveats everywhere below, so I'll just say it here. Strongly agree with you that there's big opportunities for researcher degrees of freedom everywhere here. Would be very easy to predetermine whatever outcome you (as in the person doing the research) are biased towards.
1) Definitely a big survey. My thought is you'd want something like a blend of big 5 type questions and more explicitly political/social ones. Would be an interesting project on its own just to design many versions of this and see what effects question choice and wording have.
2) Something to do with legislation. I could imagine various approaches mixing bill language itself over time, congressional records, newspaper articles (and online journalism commentary for most recent period)... Lots of questions here about what extracts good info without veering too much into encoding the outcome. Something along the lines of new AI interpretability research (Anthropic's remains the best given their internal access to Claude, but lots of good stuff out there) extracting meaningful embeddings from modern LLMs could be interesting?
3) Somehow bringing in broad culture. Encodings of social views as extracted from popular culture: books, theater (at least pre-radio/tv?), radio, tv, movies, etc.
4) Economic data, including distributional data.
5) Cross-country comparative data. Something like a political philosophy version of the economic history data Piketty put together for Capital and Ideology?
I hope some quantitative kid going into a PoliSci PhD takes this up. Super cool!
On Sowell I agree it's much less bad as a continuum. Though I gather from your comments that Sowell mostly presents it as binary, which jibes with my prior that he's mostly interested in building a castle from which to feel haughty about his own prior beliefs (like his empirical work is) :shrug:
I like the attempt to straddle the simplification-complication axis. I wonder if it doesn't run in to the same problem of arguing over who occupies what point on the axis, and if that isn't just a permanent feature of human politics as an inherently tribal activity. Anyway, I'm intrigued and I subscribed.
Wow I just want to say what a technically excellent article. Discussing both empirical attempts to quantify ideology as well as discussing the qualitative theories that would explain today's cultural divide (in the US at least).
I enjoyed reading this a lot!
I will leave discussion of the actual content as an exercise for the other commentors 😬
Ayn Rand theorized that the binary went as deep as the mind-body divide (ref. Descartes). Or, if you prefer, ying-vs-yang.
The theory is that people find it hard to reconcile the dichotomy. They shift from one side to another, but most tend to cluster in one side of the other.
When it comes to politics, the theory says, that some want to control the body and others want to control the mind. In other words some want to control abortion, drug use, (i.e. values, thoughts, the mind) etc., while others want to control the means of production (physical sustenance, the body).
One problem is that people are mixed. The bigger problem is that parties are not clearly on one side or the other. Party also morph over time. When we think left versus right we tend to think Democrat versus Republican. But we know that's not true either.
I don't know if there is some small dimensional way of getting a better conceptual handle on all of this. I hope you can figure it out. Good luck.
Hmmm: trad, constrained,mildly postmodern/metamodern? First dimension makes sense.
Second dimension reminds me of a classic religious tension in Genesis. You have man made in the image of God but the first story is disobeying and the second he kills his brother. Fallen man, original sin, depravity etc... different flavors of similar idea. From a game theoretic perspective there is no natural benevolence arising from unbridled rationality but constrained by institutions. Quite the opposite in fact, strong institutions are needed to enforce collaborative outcomes which are often utility maximizing. I betray my bias here, but this feels more like an order/chaos or institution/anarchy dimension. Are institutions enabling the person or unnecessarily constraining? If this is a continuum, I sort of like Texas: more order than Mexico but less contained than the Northeast or Germany. (Nevada has a really interesting progressive but chaotic vibe.)
Third dimension needs to be refined. I'm struggling with classifying astrology and fundamentalist religion. It is pseudo-rational universal vision. There is a universal truth which we access through reading stars or a religious text. Maybe this is a facts/universals vs relational differentiation? While there is some tension in emphasis, I see very few normal people operating at the extremes. Most people move between some sense of universal applicable intuition and cultural/relational intuition seamlessly. Maybe this is just a recasting of order/chaos the rational aligns with constrained thinking while postmodern is unconstrained (every person is good in their own story)?
Great comment as always! Yes, think the parallel to original sin is interesting as an expression of the constrained vision.
The constrained vs. unconstrained does to some degree map to order/chaos, but it depends on your view... for example libertarian economics is normally seen as an expression of the constrained vision, since individual knowledge is not sufficient to plan or decide what others should do with their time/resources and instead a system which assumes selfishness and yet can produce socially desirable results is the best we can do (makes me think of Hanania's "the humble capitalist"). But someone else might see that as the unconstrained vision - just let people do what they please and remove constraints and things will work out.
Third dimension I'm still thinking about too as it's tough to clearly apply and realism is relevant as well, in addition to rationalism as opposing postmodernism. I'm reading something relevant to this now though so maybe will have better formed thoughts next time I write.
I'd be curious to see if there's much in the literature that applies a factor analysis approach to political economy in a similar way it was applied to personality to create big 5. I don't suppose you've already looked for this?
I'm still in process - there's been some work, political compass theory is quite well known, and Haidt's moral foundations are certainly a related project... but as I'll lay out briefly in my next post, what exactly you want a worldview to measure and how you would collect data which covers the appropriate variance is very complex to think through... more on this soon!
I haven’t read A Conflict of Visions but the terms chosen for the unconstrained/constrained binary seem subtly judgmental to my ears, where “unconstrained” comes across as possibly fanciful and naive since nothing in reality is unconstrained while “constrained” sounds realistic, serious and grounded.
Other possible choices could’ve been ambitious/unambitious (wrt to broad-based human flourishing) or optimistic/pessimistic. Steven Pinker used utopian/tragic which I like because neither sound particularly attractive.
It reminds me of the use of “neuroticism” in the big 5 personality traits instead of say emotional sensitivity or valence.
He does explicitly describe it as a tragic vision in the book - I’m only about 25% through but it’s great so far. I think tragic utopian would work. It’s interesting though because I actually think for people who are unconstrained, the word constrained does sound negative. As in, I think it’s more neutral than you do and that to a constrained person unconstrained sounds fanciful but that it wouldn’t sound that way to an unconstrained person. Which do you identify with?
Huh, that is interesting. I see what you mean. Not sure if it can be constructed as a spectrum but I have historically leaned towards the unconstrained/utopian vision now tempered with acknowledgement of the complexities, trade-offs and higher order effects of various policies (but without wanting to prematurely limit ambition for broad-based flourishing or abandon the least fortunate).
feel like there should be a way to slip between Scylla and Charybdis along the lines of pragmatic progressivism, or progressive pragmatism, viz., it’s constrained but only till we figure out how to unconstrain it.
like … the unconstrained” mindset seems like it maybe reads to constrained-mindset people as “just pick up the whole system and kick it over a cliff!” and no. no i don’t want to do that. you want to do the situation analysis and develop an actual strategy with tactical planning and risk mitigation and a phased approach and build in pivot points where you’ll course-correct and —
but the overarching vision is absolutely to get the goddamn constraints off
to the degree feasible, with tradeoffs we deem acceptable; not in blithe disregard of tradeoffs even being a thing
so when i see constrained/uncobstrained come up in this way i have a strong ambivalent reaction, because on the one hand: cool model! intuitively useful! but on the other hand: welp, here’s yet another goddamn binary i’m gonna have to drag myself out of bed to queer
I think it depends on the degree to which you think of it as a spectrum vs binary - sowell says it’s somewhat of a spectrum but also implies that it predicts many core values and stances which forces it more into a binary. The way I think about it is: is this more like the core branch on a decision tree which determines overall worldview, or more like a spectrum on one axis which can be combined with various other positions on other orthogonal axes? Will touch on this in my next post
Sowell: "There are not only degrees in each vision but also inconsistent and hybrid visions. Moreover, beliefs in visions are not static. Both individuals and whole societies can change their visions over time."
Do you think it's maybe feasible to just run this study? I'm not quite sure how we would elicit a comprehensive list of worldview descriptors but it's a wild idea to toy around with.
I wonder if the left-right axis is simply out of date. The opposing teams in politics have changed several times since the 1770s from city vs farm and Whigs vs Tories, maybe its time for another change. Left vs right has worked as a shorthand for state vs market this last 100 years but this no longer seems to capture the main divisions. Certainly many people on the left have been left behind by identity politics and wokery that seemed to come from nowhere and one can hardly describe MAGA-fans as pro-market. I think the authoritarian vs libertarian has become a more significant division but the political parties have just not caught up yet.
Agreed - Rick suggests that it's rationalism vs. postmodernism (or something along those lines) rather than libertarianism/authoritarianism. I'm not sure which axis is most relevant to understanding the two large groups now... but also this comment touches on a related issue which is that the axes best suited to explaining current relevant factions can be somewhat different from the best axis for explaining fundamental variance in worldviews across the broad sweep of history - as Rick points out during the liberal consensus your view of truth wasn't super relevant to understanding factions but it might be very central when viewing a longer history. Also, rather than framing left/right as outdated I see it as a cluster shorthand rather than identifying a consistent axis if that makes sense...
It is in fact individualism vs collectivism, with modern conservatives and modern progressives both falling deeply in the collectivist end. Also, the Enlightenment was exactly a rejection of collectivist ideas, and it was the embrace of the individual, the recognition of his sanctity that resulted in the early success of the U.S. Both progressives and conservatives today reject Enlightenment ideas.
I think a lot of it is our lousy two-party system here in the US encouraging people to think in binaries. But as Regan is alluding to, it's a multidimensional space and you have to pick a few axes to talk about. And you can't put more than 2 on a graph.
Brilliant. No one seems to want to discuss the values conflict between left and right in detail. The disagreement between whether humans should have constraints versus whether they shouldn't lies, in my mind, at the heart of the liberal vs conservative conflict.
This is why, while I see a fair amount of baloney on the left, I'm onboard with that team. Liberalism is at it's heart a project to LIBERATE individuals from social burdens and constraints. At it's most extreme, where I reside philosophically, everyone is free to do whatever they want. Society and the state are, by definition, oppression since they constrain the individual. No constraint is tolerable. I'm not ignorant of the discord of this stance with left-wing cancel culture (which I view as absurd) but liberating individuals from constraints still places me on the left.
Right-libertarianism has it's appeal as does anarchism but both of those camps seem to have some absurd fundamental, universal concepts about how people should behave and how they would behave given a society that's unconstrained by law.
Taken to it's natural conclusion my worldview doesn't bode well for the future of humanity without the advent of robot caretakers. Still... given that my goal is the complete liberation of all individuals from the human condition I'm still doubling down. The ideal human state is where every individual is empowered to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they choose. Any other existence is simply intolerable.
This is interesting and touches on something I mentioned in my comment responding to Paul. Libertarian economics is typically interpreted as an expression of a constrained vision, but it can also be the expression of an unconstrained vision as you lay out here. The key thing that makes your vision unconstrained imo is where you say:
"Still... given that my goal is the complete liberation of all individuals from the human condition I'm still doubling down. The ideal human state is where every individual is empowered to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they choose. Any other existence is simply intolerable."
Unconstrained vision typically means you think A LOT of improvement is possible and that therefore a lot of sacrifice to move in the right direction is warranted.
But the constrained interpretation of libertarian econ is: individual knowledge is not sufficient to plan or decide what others should do with their time/resources and instead a system which assumes selfishness and yet can produce socially desirable results is the best we can do (makes me think of Hanania's "the humble capitalist")
Excellent. I subscribed to Rick's Substack because of this post.
I discussed your piece with Claude, telling it, "I think that, given contemporary associations with the word "liberal," many of the people Rick describes as "liberal" would not self-identify as such."
Claude suggested reframing as either "Enlightenment rationalism vs post-modern identitarianism" or "empirical universalism vs subjective lived experience."
I said, "Alas, adopting either of those sets of terms would shrink the set of people interested in the discussion to a tiny fraction of the size of the people interested in a tension between liberalism and wokism."
To which Claude responded:
*laughs* Exactly right. This highlights a key challenge in discussing these ideas:
More precise terms = smaller audience
- "Empirical universalism vs post-modern identitarianism" is technically accurate
- But eyes glaze over
- Signals "academic discussion ahead"
- Loses general reader immediately
"Liberalism vs wokism" = accessible entry point
- People know what these terms mean (or think they do)
- Feels relevant to current debates
- Attracts broader audience
- Creates engagement
It's the classic problem of having to choose between:
- Technical precision that limits reach
- Popular language that sacrifices some accuracy
- Academic rigor that puts people to sleep
- Accessible framing that oversimplifies
Sometimes you have to use the imperfect but widely understood terms to get people into the deeper discussion. After all, a perfectly precise argument that nobody reads doesn't change many minds.
The terms Liberalism and Tyranny still are accurate and have value. It is the deceit of individuals that have corrupted the concepts. Morality is centered in an individual's life and its derivatives. It is our responsibility to find a way to keep the true concepts alive.
Don’t forget my three axis model: oppressor /oppressed, civilization/barbarism, and liberty/coercion
Thank you! Will make sure to cover it in a future post - my next one will be on the potential structure of the system and then I plan to cover some of the low dimensional models
What's the best low dimensional representation of political ideology? I couldn't love the framing of this any more!
This is biased by my years in AI/ML, but I'd argue for discovering all the dimensions, including a potential dominant one, through iterative construction of data and analysis. By necessity some of that will have to be informed and shaped by the kinds of philosophizing you explore in this post, which will influence the outcome of course. But I think one will still do better that way.
One of my favorite things to ponder in this space is the shifting over time of how views cluster. There was a time when William Jennings Bryan had a mass following. He was a pro-apartheid racist, fanatical fundamentalist evangelical, and so left you could argue he was socialist in terms of labor and markets. That's a combo that didn't exist for nearly 100 years but could possibly come back in an altered form given our ongoing reshuffling.
Which brings me back to a pet peeve of mine that goes by the name Sowell. Even in his political philosophy the man should be ignored. His economics is so fraudulent. Totally typical 2nd half of the 20th conservative economics. His causal identification is bald faced lying over and over masquerading as analysis. Mathy (as in truthy) ideology. His primary axis as you present it strikes me as similar. Lots of work to obscure the fact that what he's really doing is building a framework to make it easy to cast his own ideology as the clear choice and those he disagree with as risible and not deserving too much serious consideration.
Yes, I agree on the data analysis approach informed by existing concepts… but it’s actually hard to think about how to come up with a spanning set that you can start the dimensionality reduction from which doesn’t reflect your existing bias.
On Sowell, I get what you’re saying to a degree, but I think it’s tempered by seeing the constrained/unconstrained as a spectrum rather than a binary. Everyone is in between the two extremes, both sides of the extreme appear absurd in his framing, and so arguments are around how reasonable it is to shift society towards more or less of a constrained approach
I've been thinking about how one might build a dataset since I read your post this morning! I agree it would be tough. My first thoughts are you'd need to draw from a bunch of different kinds of sources. I realized I wanted to put caveats everywhere below, so I'll just say it here. Strongly agree with you that there's big opportunities for researcher degrees of freedom everywhere here. Would be very easy to predetermine whatever outcome you (as in the person doing the research) are biased towards.
1) Definitely a big survey. My thought is you'd want something like a blend of big 5 type questions and more explicitly political/social ones. Would be an interesting project on its own just to design many versions of this and see what effects question choice and wording have.
2) Something to do with legislation. I could imagine various approaches mixing bill language itself over time, congressional records, newspaper articles (and online journalism commentary for most recent period)... Lots of questions here about what extracts good info without veering too much into encoding the outcome. Something along the lines of new AI interpretability research (Anthropic's remains the best given their internal access to Claude, but lots of good stuff out there) extracting meaningful embeddings from modern LLMs could be interesting?
3) Somehow bringing in broad culture. Encodings of social views as extracted from popular culture: books, theater (at least pre-radio/tv?), radio, tv, movies, etc.
4) Economic data, including distributional data.
5) Cross-country comparative data. Something like a political philosophy version of the economic history data Piketty put together for Capital and Ideology?
I hope some quantitative kid going into a PoliSci PhD takes this up. Super cool!
On Sowell I agree it's much less bad as a continuum. Though I gather from your comments that Sowell mostly presents it as binary, which jibes with my prior that he's mostly interested in building a castle from which to feel haughty about his own prior beliefs (like his empirical work is) :shrug:
I like the attempt to straddle the simplification-complication axis. I wonder if it doesn't run in to the same problem of arguing over who occupies what point on the axis, and if that isn't just a permanent feature of human politics as an inherently tribal activity. Anyway, I'm intrigued and I subscribed.
Thank you! And yes, very fair point…
Wow I just want to say what a technically excellent article. Discussing both empirical attempts to quantify ideology as well as discussing the qualitative theories that would explain today's cultural divide (in the US at least).
I enjoyed reading this a lot!
I will leave discussion of the actual content as an exercise for the other commentors 😬
Thank you so much, Noah! I'll be continuing on this topic in my next post - very happy to know other people also find these questions compelling :)
Ayn Rand theorized that the binary went as deep as the mind-body divide (ref. Descartes). Or, if you prefer, ying-vs-yang.
The theory is that people find it hard to reconcile the dichotomy. They shift from one side to another, but most tend to cluster in one side of the other.
When it comes to politics, the theory says, that some want to control the body and others want to control the mind. In other words some want to control abortion, drug use, (i.e. values, thoughts, the mind) etc., while others want to control the means of production (physical sustenance, the body).
One problem is that people are mixed. The bigger problem is that parties are not clearly on one side or the other. Party also morph over time. When we think left versus right we tend to think Democrat versus Republican. But we know that's not true either.
I don't know if there is some small dimensional way of getting a better conceptual handle on all of this. I hope you can figure it out. Good luck.
it's retvrn
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/retvrn
Thank you, how will I ever live down this embarrassment, I'm clearly not online enough :/
Hmmm: trad, constrained,mildly postmodern/metamodern? First dimension makes sense.
Second dimension reminds me of a classic religious tension in Genesis. You have man made in the image of God but the first story is disobeying and the second he kills his brother. Fallen man, original sin, depravity etc... different flavors of similar idea. From a game theoretic perspective there is no natural benevolence arising from unbridled rationality but constrained by institutions. Quite the opposite in fact, strong institutions are needed to enforce collaborative outcomes which are often utility maximizing. I betray my bias here, but this feels more like an order/chaos or institution/anarchy dimension. Are institutions enabling the person or unnecessarily constraining? If this is a continuum, I sort of like Texas: more order than Mexico but less contained than the Northeast or Germany. (Nevada has a really interesting progressive but chaotic vibe.)
Third dimension needs to be refined. I'm struggling with classifying astrology and fundamentalist religion. It is pseudo-rational universal vision. There is a universal truth which we access through reading stars or a religious text. Maybe this is a facts/universals vs relational differentiation? While there is some tension in emphasis, I see very few normal people operating at the extremes. Most people move between some sense of universal applicable intuition and cultural/relational intuition seamlessly. Maybe this is just a recasting of order/chaos the rational aligns with constrained thinking while postmodern is unconstrained (every person is good in their own story)?
Great comment as always! Yes, think the parallel to original sin is interesting as an expression of the constrained vision.
The constrained vs. unconstrained does to some degree map to order/chaos, but it depends on your view... for example libertarian economics is normally seen as an expression of the constrained vision, since individual knowledge is not sufficient to plan or decide what others should do with their time/resources and instead a system which assumes selfishness and yet can produce socially desirable results is the best we can do (makes me think of Hanania's "the humble capitalist"). But someone else might see that as the unconstrained vision - just let people do what they please and remove constraints and things will work out.
Third dimension I'm still thinking about too as it's tough to clearly apply and realism is relevant as well, in addition to rationalism as opposing postmodernism. I'm reading something relevant to this now though so maybe will have better formed thoughts next time I write.
I'd be curious to see if there's much in the literature that applies a factor analysis approach to political economy in a similar way it was applied to personality to create big 5. I don't suppose you've already looked for this?
I'm still in process - there's been some work, political compass theory is quite well known, and Haidt's moral foundations are certainly a related project... but as I'll lay out briefly in my next post, what exactly you want a worldview to measure and how you would collect data which covers the appropriate variance is very complex to think through... more on this soon!
I haven’t read A Conflict of Visions but the terms chosen for the unconstrained/constrained binary seem subtly judgmental to my ears, where “unconstrained” comes across as possibly fanciful and naive since nothing in reality is unconstrained while “constrained” sounds realistic, serious and grounded.
Other possible choices could’ve been ambitious/unambitious (wrt to broad-based human flourishing) or optimistic/pessimistic. Steven Pinker used utopian/tragic which I like because neither sound particularly attractive.
It reminds me of the use of “neuroticism” in the big 5 personality traits instead of say emotional sensitivity or valence.
He does explicitly describe it as a tragic vision in the book - I’m only about 25% through but it’s great so far. I think tragic utopian would work. It’s interesting though because I actually think for people who are unconstrained, the word constrained does sound negative. As in, I think it’s more neutral than you do and that to a constrained person unconstrained sounds fanciful but that it wouldn’t sound that way to an unconstrained person. Which do you identify with?
Huh, that is interesting. I see what you mean. Not sure if it can be constructed as a spectrum but I have historically leaned towards the unconstrained/utopian vision now tempered with acknowledgement of the complexities, trade-offs and higher order effects of various policies (but without wanting to prematurely limit ambition for broad-based flourishing or abandon the least fortunate).
feel like there should be a way to slip between Scylla and Charybdis along the lines of pragmatic progressivism, or progressive pragmatism, viz., it’s constrained but only till we figure out how to unconstrain it.
like … the unconstrained” mindset seems like it maybe reads to constrained-mindset people as “just pick up the whole system and kick it over a cliff!” and no. no i don’t want to do that. you want to do the situation analysis and develop an actual strategy with tactical planning and risk mitigation and a phased approach and build in pivot points where you’ll course-correct and —
but the overarching vision is absolutely to get the goddamn constraints off
to the degree feasible, with tradeoffs we deem acceptable; not in blithe disregard of tradeoffs even being a thing
so when i see constrained/uncobstrained come up in this way i have a strong ambivalent reaction, because on the one hand: cool model! intuitively useful! but on the other hand: welp, here’s yet another goddamn binary i’m gonna have to drag myself out of bed to queer
(cf. e.g. the whole decoupling/coupling thing)
I think it depends on the degree to which you think of it as a spectrum vs binary - sowell says it’s somewhat of a spectrum but also implies that it predicts many core values and stances which forces it more into a binary. The way I think about it is: is this more like the core branch on a decision tree which determines overall worldview, or more like a spectrum on one axis which can be combined with various other positions on other orthogonal axes? Will touch on this in my next post
Sowell: "There are not only degrees in each vision but also inconsistent and hybrid visions. Moreover, beliefs in visions are not static. Both individuals and whole societies can change their visions over time."
The problem with the Progressivism vs. Conservatism axis is that it doesn't take into account what society is "progressing" towards.
My position:
Where society is moving in a good direction, I am for Progress.
Where society is moving in a bad direction, I am for Retvrn.
Do you think it's maybe feasible to just run this study? I'm not quite sure how we would elicit a comprehensive list of worldview descriptors but it's a wild idea to toy around with.