Perhaps the politics question would be better phrased negatively:
On a scale of zero to ten, how much do you despise each of the following political ideologies? If you endorse an ideology, put zero. If you very mildly despise it, put one. If your life’s focus is to expunge it from the world, put 10. You must give each ideology a unique ranking.
All you have to care about is the lowest number, and anyone who wants to do more with the numbers is able to. People would be less inclined to complain about cultural focus or balance issues.
I second that idea, but even then the cultural focus/balance issues will remain when a word and a “definition” are given in a way that appears to be a strawman or a very US-centric view of things. Maybe remove the words (“libertarian”, “socialist”, …) and just give the one-sentence definition ?
What people primarily seem to want is a more diverse list. Increasing the word count per entry makes that less feasible. As one source of complaint is, as you imply, the linking of a term with a description, what if descriptions were eliminated all together?
I could begin a political survey discussion post asking people to PM me a one to three word description of a view they endorse or almost endorse, as well as another view they think important. I would update the main page to reflect submissions so more of the same wouldn’t be submitted. Then the political ideology list could be trimmed down a bit somehow, and people could do a despise-style survey in which they express their disapproval of each.
As the previous LW survey had about 150 takers, I would expect about that many people going through the trouble of sending me submissions, and many would be redundant, and perhaps by consensus or fiat a representative list of 35 or so could be set for the survey. Would that be a reasonable number of one or three word phrases to scan? It would be an order of magnitude more effort to read that many political sentences.
The despise survey might reveal interesting things that the approval one did not—for example, we might find we have many transhumanists that dislike libertarianism and monarchism, and hate everything else. Or meta-contrarian people who approve of currently popular movements and no fringe ones. I don’t know.
I fear eliminating the descriptions would lead to even more problems, since words like “libertarian”, “socialist” or “communist” don’t mean the same depending of your cultural background. I would have answered the question differently if the descriptions were not given, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Or maybe, could we just ask for Political Compass score ? Would be a straight-forward question and easy to exploit later on, even if a bit caricatural. And if people don’t want to take the full Political Compass test, they can still say roughly where they stand on the two axis.
Perhaps the politics question would be better phrased negatively:
All you have to care about is the lowest number, and anyone who wants to do more with the numbers is able to. People would be less inclined to complain about cultural focus or balance issues.
I second that idea, but even then the cultural focus/balance issues will remain when a word and a “definition” are given in a way that appears to be a strawman or a very US-centric view of things. Maybe remove the words (“libertarian”, “socialist”, …) and just give the one-sentence definition ?
What people primarily seem to want is a more diverse list. Increasing the word count per entry makes that less feasible. As one source of complaint is, as you imply, the linking of a term with a description, what if descriptions were eliminated all together?
I could begin a political survey discussion post asking people to PM me a one to three word description of a view they endorse or almost endorse, as well as another view they think important. I would update the main page to reflect submissions so more of the same wouldn’t be submitted. Then the political ideology list could be trimmed down a bit somehow, and people could do a despise-style survey in which they express their disapproval of each.
As the previous LW survey had about 150 takers, I would expect about that many people going through the trouble of sending me submissions, and many would be redundant, and perhaps by consensus or fiat a representative list of 35 or so could be set for the survey. Would that be a reasonable number of one or three word phrases to scan? It would be an order of magnitude more effort to read that many political sentences.
The despise survey might reveal interesting things that the approval one did not—for example, we might find we have many transhumanists that dislike libertarianism and monarchism, and hate everything else. Or meta-contrarian people who approve of currently popular movements and no fringe ones. I don’t know.
I fear eliminating the descriptions would lead to even more problems, since words like “libertarian”, “socialist” or “communist” don’t mean the same depending of your cultural background. I would have answered the question differently if the descriptions were not given, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Or maybe, could we just ask for Political Compass score ? Would be a straight-forward question and easy to exploit later on, even if a bit caricatural. And if people don’t want to take the full Political Compass test, they can still say roughly where they stand on the two axis.
LCPW, so one should describe something like how much one despises the best relatively sizable minority position of each.