Imagine we’re looking at an obscure group called the Axiom of Choice which has the following policy agenda and weights them with the following relative importances:
Anthropogenic global warming is real and dangerous: weight 20
Jesus is the reason for the season: weight 30
Farms should be collectively owned: weight 15
Monopoly should be played with no house rules: weight 12
The Beatles are overrated: weight 20
Yogic flying is real: weight 3
If I’m on board with everything but the yogic flying, then I’d refer to myself as being 97% in agreement with them.
Now, of course, exact numbers of this sort are practically impossible to come up with. But with sufficient interaction with a group, you can get a sense of what they’re about and what’s really important to them, and come up with a fairly decent approximation. (Then of course you halve the distance between that and 100%, to add rhetorical weight to your discussion of your differences with them)
Suppose it is 2015 and there is a movement X with a policy agenda:
Murder should be illegal
Slavery should be illegal
Duels to the death should be illegal
Personal income tax rate should be changed from x% to y%.
Suppose you do not belong to the movement X. I guess that when you read items 1-3, your reaction is likely to be “basically everyone agrees with these. I don’t need movement X for that”, and whether or not you will feel compelled to support the movement X will depend solely on the item 4, since items 1-3 do not distinguish the movement X from other movements. And you can’t say that items 1-3 are unimportant to the movement—of course they would be against legalizing random killings.
But, at the same time, only the items that distinguish a movement from other movements are useful in comparisons. Sometimes movements have incentives to claim that items 1-3 are more controversial than they really are, to increase the number of items which are used to calculate the percentage of agreements. Or they can use, for example, motte position (which nearly everyone supports) to attract supporters and the existence of people who do not support bailey position in order to be able to claim that the question is controversial and therefore you should add it when you calculate your percentage of agreement.
The point I tried to make was that if you allow all questions, then you would get everyone mostly agreeing with everyone else. But while we do observe that most people agree about certain uncontroversial things, we rarely observe people claiming to be mostly in agreement with their opponent movement.
In your example, if, during the course of history, playing Monopoly with house rules would became rarer and rarer until it all until they all but disappeared, then including it in a policy agenda would become pointless as it would fail to distinguish the movement from the alternatives. In other words, while dueling was a hot issue in 17th century France, nowadays political parties cannot run on anti-dueling-to-the-death platform, because most people’s reactions would be something like “are you trying to attract followers by supporting that? Almost everyone already supports that”. There must be at least some people who would support that. Therefore, sometimes movements might to exaggerate the power of opposition. If they succeed, more issues are made to look “contentious”, and that helps to increase the percentage of agreement. For example, if there is someone somewhere (real or imaginary) who is pro-murdering people, then the movements who are against murder gain additional support.
I am sorry that my writing skills seems to be so atrocious that I completely fail to get my point across (of course, maybe people simply did not find it interesting). Now I think if I should delete this discussion post and (maybe) try to rewrite it completely if I ever had time, an idea how to present it more clearly and enough enthusiasm. Whether this model adds any insight or merely rewrites a few old ones without adding anything, is a different question.
Fair point. I think I just mentally filed that under the weighting algorithm—nobody talks about banning murder, so it’d have a low weight for just about any group out there.
As a ballpark algorithm, weight = importance * controversialness?
The small percent that people say they don’t agree with is almost always the most controversial opinions. I suspect that such a weighting isn’t what people have in mind when they say they agree with a group 9X%.
Fair, but most controversial doesn’t always mean most important. Usually, the narrative is something like “All the hard slogging that this movement has done has been awesome—it’s changed society for the better. But now they’re overreaching”—I can see that aligning(seriously, not just for rhetorical weight) with a belief that the group is really about the sloggy stuff, and the goes-too-far stuff is just a novel addition that isn’t core to its beliefs. That seems to be what Aaronson meant, and also most others I’ve seen use similar phrasing.
You can measure this by looking at the spoken or written works of the group. When talking to an Axiomist of Choice, you would on average agree 97% of the time with what they are saying, since the other 3% they are talking about yogic flying.
Of course in real life people also make a lot of smalltalk, which is probably not ideological at all. This is less of an issue when looking at writing.
Imagine we’re looking at an obscure group called the Axiom of Choice which has the following policy agenda and weights them with the following relative importances:
Anthropogenic global warming is real and dangerous: weight 20
Jesus is the reason for the season: weight 30
Farms should be collectively owned: weight 15
Monopoly should be played with no house rules: weight 12
The Beatles are overrated: weight 20
Yogic flying is real: weight 3
If I’m on board with everything but the yogic flying, then I’d refer to myself as being 97% in agreement with them.
Now, of course, exact numbers of this sort are practically impossible to come up with. But with sufficient interaction with a group, you can get a sense of what they’re about and what’s really important to them, and come up with a fairly decent approximation. (Then of course you halve the distance between that and 100%, to add rhetorical weight to your discussion of your differences with them)
Suppose it is 2015 and there is a movement X with a policy agenda:
Murder should be illegal
Slavery should be illegal
Duels to the death should be illegal
Personal income tax rate should be changed from x% to y%.
Suppose you do not belong to the movement X. I guess that when you read items 1-3, your reaction is likely to be “basically everyone agrees with these. I don’t need movement X for that”, and whether or not you will feel compelled to support the movement X will depend solely on the item 4, since items 1-3 do not distinguish the movement X from other movements. And you can’t say that items 1-3 are unimportant to the movement—of course they would be against legalizing random killings. But, at the same time, only the items that distinguish a movement from other movements are useful in comparisons. Sometimes movements have incentives to claim that items 1-3 are more controversial than they really are, to increase the number of items which are used to calculate the percentage of agreements. Or they can use, for example, motte position (which nearly everyone supports) to attract supporters and the existence of people who do not support bailey position in order to be able to claim that the question is controversial and therefore you should add it when you calculate your percentage of agreement.
The point I tried to make was that if you allow all questions, then you would get everyone mostly agreeing with everyone else. But while we do observe that most people agree about certain uncontroversial things, we rarely observe people claiming to be mostly in agreement with their opponent movement.
In your example, if, during the course of history, playing Monopoly with house rules would became rarer and rarer until it all until they all but disappeared, then including it in a policy agenda would become pointless as it would fail to distinguish the movement from the alternatives. In other words, while dueling was a hot issue in 17th century France, nowadays political parties cannot run on anti-dueling-to-the-death platform, because most people’s reactions would be something like “are you trying to attract followers by supporting that? Almost everyone already supports that”. There must be at least some people who would support that. Therefore, sometimes movements might to exaggerate the power of opposition. If they succeed, more issues are made to look “contentious”, and that helps to increase the percentage of agreement. For example, if there is someone somewhere (real or imaginary) who is pro-murdering people, then the movements who are against murder gain additional support.
I am sorry that my writing skills seems to be so atrocious that I completely fail to get my point across (of course, maybe people simply did not find it interesting). Now I think if I should delete this discussion post and (maybe) try to rewrite it completely if I ever had time, an idea how to present it more clearly and enough enthusiasm. Whether this model adds any insight or merely rewrites a few old ones without adding anything, is a different question.
Fair point. I think I just mentally filed that under the weighting algorithm—nobody talks about banning murder, so it’d have a low weight for just about any group out there.
As a ballpark algorithm, weight = importance * controversialness?
The small percent that people say they don’t agree with is almost always the most controversial opinions. I suspect that such a weighting isn’t what people have in mind when they say they agree with a group 9X%.
Fair, but most controversial doesn’t always mean most important. Usually, the narrative is something like “All the hard slogging that this movement has done has been awesome—it’s changed society for the better. But now they’re overreaching”—I can see that aligning(seriously, not just for rhetorical weight) with a belief that the group is really about the sloggy stuff, and the goes-too-far stuff is just a novel addition that isn’t core to its beliefs. That seems to be what Aaronson meant, and also most others I’ve seen use similar phrasing.
You can measure this by looking at the spoken or written works of the group. When talking to an Axiomist of Choice, you would on average agree 97% of the time with what they are saying, since the other 3% they are talking about yogic flying.
Of course in real life people also make a lot of smalltalk, which is probably not ideological at all. This is less of an issue when looking at writing.