My model takes the prevalence of the opinion into account; it’s the reason that sometimes you have to e.g. agree strongly and other times you merely have to not-disagree. There’s unpopular opinions that the factor model does place correctly, e.g. I can’t remember whether I have a question about abolishing the police, but supporting human extinction clearly went under the leftism factor even though leftists also disagreed (because leftists were less likely to disagree and disagreed less strongly in a quantitative sense).
I think the broader/fuzzier class point applies more directly though; from a causal perspective you’d expect rationalists to have some ideology that exists in the general population (e.g. techbros) plus our own idiosyncratically developed ideology. But a factor model only captures low-rank information, so it’s not going to accurately model idiosyncratic factors that only exist for a small portion of population.
My model takes the prevalence of the opinion into account; it’s the reason that sometimes you have to e.g. agree strongly and other times you merely have to not-disagree. There’s unpopular opinions that the factor model does place correctly, e.g. I can’t remember whether I have a question about abolishing the police, but supporting human extinction clearly went under the leftism factor even though leftists also disagreed (because leftists were less likely to disagree and disagreed less strongly in a quantitative sense).
I think the broader/fuzzier class point applies more directly though; from a causal perspective you’d expect rationalists to have some ideology that exists in the general population (e.g. techbros) plus our own idiosyncratically developed ideology. But a factor model only captures low-rank information, so it’s not going to accurately model idiosyncratic factors that only exist for a small portion of population.