Speaking about the fraying of Liberal+Socialist coalition without defining what you mean by other of those terms seems political thinking that’s lower quality then what I think should have room on LessWrong.
This is exactly why I put the sources, including the “tilted political compass” model I’m referring to, right at the top. Technically the author uses the label “left” for what I’m calling “socialist”, but his description of the quadrant’s internal logic very clearly fits with what is usually called socialism, including by many of the people the label refers to. He even remarks:
“This has lead to a game of linguistic musical treadmills where liberals try to claim an identity apart from the left without joining the right, while leftists try to prevent them from doing so.”
I edited the post slightly, hopefully it will be less ambiguous.
Technically the author uses the label “left” for what I’m calling “socialist”,
Those two terms are quite different.
Socialism traditionally is about class. From the socialist perspective the goal is unity among the working class and it doesn’t matter whether someone is a poor Black or White. On the other hand critical theory produces new priorities where some people on the left consider identity more important then class.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, “left” is commonly understood to mean the whole Thrive coalition. I figured that using “left” would be more confusing/absurd-looking than using “socialist”.
For the purposes of the argument, I’m using a model where political behaviors are largely a result of personality traits (thrive/survive, cognitive decoupling, and cultural class membership) with most people using the theories as justification. I.e. theories have negligible influence, they are not causes but consequences of coalitions. This is a simplification, but not an unreasonable one (“all models are wrong, some are useful”).
The issue isn’t so much the word that you used but that you didn’t put in the effort to define what you mean with it.
For the purposes of the argument, I’m using a model where political behaviors are largely a result of personality traits
If that’s the argument you want to make, then how about being explicit about the assumptions of your model and why you believe that those assumptions hold?
LW isn’t a space to have political discussion with a bunch of vague terms and implicit models that the reader is supposed to guess for which no justification is given.
Again, this is exactly the reason I put the references there. They are not a signalling device saying “look at me, I read all these things” but a tool so that I don’t have to recreate their respective authors’ arguments as to their respective models’ degree of explanatory adequacy and why that makes sense in terms of what most of their readers already accept. This saves time for those readers of this post who have at some earlier point read some (or perhaps all) of these articles, as well as for me. The models are explicit.
The terms are, on the other hand, necessarily vague. This is a general principle of all models (to be computationally tractable for the human brain, models need to simplify and admit some level of uncertainty and errors) as well as a particular feature of political coalitions where individual people and even groups of people sometimes support/vote for some party “for idiosyncratic reasons”, which expression pretty much means “for reasons that I don’t bother to model because I expect that doing so wouldn’t be worth the effort”. I can’t give you the Moon, the exact list of how every person is going to vote in the 2024, 2028, etc. elections, but I can point my finger toward the Moon and say “you know, socialists”.
I don’t think expecting readers to read a bunch of long post before engaging with political posts on LessWrong is a reasonable demand. Furthermore you didn’t use the terms as defind in the posts you referenced.
I think it’s reasonable to say “I assume X to be true because argument from Y source” but that’s not how your post goes.
Speaking about the fraying of Liberal+Socialist coalition without defining what you mean by other of those terms seems political thinking that’s lower quality then what I think should have room on LessWrong.
This is exactly why I put the sources, including the “tilted political compass” model I’m referring to, right at the top. Technically the author uses the label “left” for what I’m calling “socialist”, but his description of the quadrant’s internal logic very clearly fits with what is usually called socialism, including by many of the people the label refers to. He even remarks:
I edited the post slightly, hopefully it will be less ambiguous.
Those two terms are quite different.
Socialism traditionally is about class. From the socialist perspective the goal is unity among the working class and it doesn’t matter whether someone is a poor Black or White. On the other hand critical theory produces new priorities where some people on the left consider identity more important then class.
Yes.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, “left” is commonly understood to mean the whole Thrive coalition. I figured that using “left” would be more confusing/absurd-looking than using “socialist”.
For the purposes of the argument, I’m using a model where political behaviors are largely a result of personality traits (thrive/survive, cognitive decoupling, and cultural class membership) with most people using the theories as justification. I.e. theories have negligible influence, they are not causes but consequences of coalitions. This is a simplification, but not an unreasonable one (“all models are wrong, some are useful”).
The issue isn’t so much the word that you used but that you didn’t put in the effort to define what you mean with it.
If that’s the argument you want to make, then how about being explicit about the assumptions of your model and why you believe that those assumptions hold?
LW isn’t a space to have political discussion with a bunch of vague terms and implicit models that the reader is supposed to guess for which no justification is given.
Again, this is exactly the reason I put the references there. They are not a signalling device saying “look at me, I read all these things” but a tool so that I don’t have to recreate their respective authors’ arguments as to their respective models’ degree of explanatory adequacy and why that makes sense in terms of what most of their readers already accept. This saves time for those readers of this post who have at some earlier point read some (or perhaps all) of these articles, as well as for me. The models are explicit.
The terms are, on the other hand, necessarily vague. This is a general principle of all models (to be computationally tractable for the human brain, models need to simplify and admit some level of uncertainty and errors) as well as a particular feature of political coalitions where individual people and even groups of people sometimes support/vote for some party “for idiosyncratic reasons”, which expression pretty much means “for reasons that I don’t bother to model because I expect that doing so wouldn’t be worth the effort”. I can’t give you the Moon, the exact list of how every person is going to vote in the 2024, 2028, etc. elections, but I can point my finger toward the Moon and say “you know, socialists”.
I don’t think expecting readers to read a bunch of long post before engaging with political posts on LessWrong is a reasonable demand. Furthermore you didn’t use the terms as defind in the posts you referenced.
I think it’s reasonable to say “I assume X to be true because argument from Y source” but that’s not how your post goes.