Asked in this form, this is a request for collecting information about distribution of opinions in the form of a few self-filtered anecdotes. The data thus collected is completely useless,
Suppose then that we do collect such data. In what way would it be useful for the purpose of a theoretical discussion?
No, the data is not completely useless. Limited sampling of a distribution can give you information about the different clusters in the distribution, if not the relative frequency of samples in those clusters.
There are only so many basic arguments for a position. I wanted to see if the clever folks here had one I hadn’t heard before.
I was making a distinction between arguments for a position and statements of a position. The words “asked in this form” in my comment referred to the way you phrased the question, which was as stated about positions and not arguments. Thankfully, the responses were mostly about arguments, although a couple of them opened with statements of positions, which was the unhelpful bit, whose flaws were the topic of my comment.
(Nice point about limited biased samples being adequate for discovering clusters. It seems that this way you may form non-hopeless hypotheses with much less effort than is necessary to quantitatively judge them.)
I see now what you were getting at. Yes, the question as posed to libertarians lacked the request for “why” that my question to liberals did.
As was likely apparent, the libertarian question was an add on to the question to liberals. I’m much more familiar with the basic premises of people who call themselves libertarian, and consider it unlikely that too many libertarians would prefer the hyper regulatory state, though I could make a libertarian argument for it versus the pure redistributionist welfare state.
I was mainly interested in what those crazy liberals are thinking, because what they advocate doesn’t actually effectively fulfill what they say they want. IMO.
No, the data is not completely useless. Limited sampling of a distribution can give you information about the different clusters in the distribution, if not the relative frequency of samples in those clusters.
There are only so many basic arguments for a position. I wanted to see if the clever folks here had one I hadn’t heard before.
I was making a distinction between arguments for a position and statements of a position. The words “asked in this form” in my comment referred to the way you phrased the question, which was as stated about positions and not arguments. Thankfully, the responses were mostly about arguments, although a couple of them opened with statements of positions, which was the unhelpful bit, whose flaws were the topic of my comment.
(Nice point about limited biased samples being adequate for discovering clusters. It seems that this way you may form non-hopeless hypotheses with much less effort than is necessary to quantitatively judge them.)
I see now what you were getting at. Yes, the question as posed to libertarians lacked the request for “why” that my question to liberals did.
As was likely apparent, the libertarian question was an add on to the question to liberals. I’m much more familiar with the basic premises of people who call themselves libertarian, and consider it unlikely that too many libertarians would prefer the hyper regulatory state, though I could make a libertarian argument for it versus the pure redistributionist welfare state.
I was mainly interested in what those crazy liberals are thinking, because what they advocate doesn’t actually effectively fulfill what they say they want. IMO.