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"Oh, I can know what he's referencing I can add some helpful links for this post. A little context, too." Oops. I guess I didn't not add helpful links or minor context. I have allowed myself to get lost in the textual sauce. An LLM, but worse.
This one is a trend that's been polled and surveyed for over a decade. It's bad. If we're pointing fingers I think this is one of many potential indicators of finger pointing direction.
The Heatmap is more interesting than the "ideological diversity" (ooo nodes) study. This one does not grab me like The Heatmap and instead I concluded, "Sure thing, social science. Run it back." For sake of brevity, this study asked 8 questions (n=400ish, 25%ish Republicans) and I'll share 3: (1) "Abortion should be illegal", (4) *"The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased", and (6) "The government should regulate business to protect the environment".
I don't think these are definitive type questions to accurately measure "diversity" -- a word the authors do not use -- of political temperament or ideology. The fun part is at the end where the authors remind us:
Ah
When academics invoke But, Trump, White, Christian in a context is important tone one must resist the temptation. Ah-ha! These inconvenient findings must be evidence for why the paper is correct. I, on the other hand, once again recall that science science is sham. Do it again, bozos, and do it better.
What other studies are you thinking of? This one got me good. What started as "helpful link":
This references the "heat map" study which you call flawed. For The Heatmap, or Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle, the study compares how liberals and conservatives express and/or extend "moral concern." The authors find liberals are prone to extend moral concern in a loose "universalist" fashion, whereas conservatives distributed moral concern a tighter "parochial" shape. They then mapped these response in concentric circles for our benefit. These circles start from the category of immediate family at the center, out to all of humanity, lifeforms in the universe, and finally everything that ever exists including space rocks.
People, like me, interpret "moral concern" as a synonym for units of caring. Which is not wholly accurate. This is a stated preference, but not a tested preference. A polite interpretation is that liberals are capable, or would like to be, of loving all of humanity and beyond to a greater extent than conservatives. From there, the "liberals love space rocks as much as their kids" dunks write themselves.
One of the exercises has the participants distribute their moral concern as a zero-sum resource. Liberals were more likely to apply concern to things far away from the center than conservatives, although they still applied concern to the center. That maps the same direction as the non-zero-sum, unlimited distribution which brings liberals and conservatives closer, but still distinct in pattern. Conservatives, even when told that moral concern is not finite, won't ascribe much moral value to space rocks. The gradient for conservatives shows they don't consider space rocks worthy of concern at all. In the study they stop giving moral concern points, regardless if they're finite, much sooner when extending outwards. They do so to the point where the outer circles are closer to non-existent.
If I can believe that these exercises can provide insight, then I would very much like to see the study repeated, then simplified, and finally standardized. I want to see this deployed across cultures and through time. What would populations in Somalia, South Africa, or Spain land if we replicated the study in those population? Does safety and prosperity change the disposition and by how much? Race/ethnicity? Climate?
A million questions. How does this interact with other parts we know to be (at least partly) hardwired like temperament and preferences? If the finding that liberals generally have a higher IQ is true, then might it be related? I know the findings are not so broad, but it's hard to not think there could be costs (and benefits) in processing the world in such a way. So long as we can consistently clamp down moral temperament as dimorphic across culture and time.
How exciting! Of course, because it's exciting, triggers my imagination, and was made into a meme then I assume it won't hold up. The limited/unlimited sample sizes for the exercises were 131 and 263 people respectively, however each only had about 35 conservatives. Maybe this should have been its own post, but I figure someone smarter and most handsome could do it better than I.
Dems are more conformist if we take the Do It Again, Bozo science at face value. This would suggest they're at least a little better about backing Their Guy. As a counter-point, the above quoted text sounds like an obviously bipartisan phenomena to me. It is normal for the average politically interested voter to vote for plainly partisan reasons.
What behavior should we expect from Dems when their election plans fall apart? "Yesterday I said it would be a mistake to let the Californian machine "brown and a woman" candidate takeover, but the party fucked it-- oh well we'll get you guys next time." Nobody wins elections by telling the opposition they are right on the tepid candidate. No way, that billion dollar campaign is gonna happen. It may as well be spent on a fun, joyful Brat! campaign.
This is exactly the kind of example where we -- you, me, everyone else -- are programmed to notice the enemy's transgressions, but forget our own. Your average MAGA voter was railing against TikTok a year ago. Now? All quiet on the big bad Chinuh! front. Difference in degree, not kind? Maybe. Team Trump can turn on a dime. I consider this as an uncontroversial statement without comparison to anything else. The D machine's effort in 2024 was absurd and, yes, it worked to an extent. It had to work. It was always going to work. You can't just give up at the end of democracy. [Which should put in perspective the monumental and historical fuck-up of Democrats in 2024.]
All the consensus backs the Republican candidate no matter what some writer at National Review said ten minutes ago. Trump has some in-house resistance, but how'd that work out? How many Republicans backed Trump after calling him some name or even disavowed him? Many, including Vance. Democrats have seen this and they've called it out! "People can change their minds, you know?" Yeah, yeah, some more than others.
The mainstream Dem machine is impressive and has some unique advantages. Concepts of optics, messaging, and narrative are more prominent in the minds of Blue voters and, to some extent, this has trained them. Maybe the Republicans don't get as close as Kamala did if the parties swapped position and infrastructure. Falling in line behind Kamala for the party -- or whoever it is -- can be your expectation next time. No surprise or condemnation or special accusation necessary.
Political disputes at the moment, but more righties than lefties tend to support violence as a means in other general settings. Is this the same? No, it's frequently not the same. There are many qualities of American leftism that are in not mirrored or symmetric to the right. That is another fundamental problem with the left-right paradigm not solved by another axis. There are qualities of leftism that I also find frustrating, abhorrent, or special. Nature nurture blank slateism is a huge fundamental contradiction in liberal and leftist ideology.I share many of the same grey tribe suspicion of lefty thinking, culture, and politics. I still* think you lean too far in your condemnation of people.
In terms of ideological conformity, you can also take a look at organizations and institution that have become more left wing over time (almost all of them) and those that have become more right wing (good luck finding ANY).
What happens with Righties when they notice they've been pushed out of a space they like is... they go build a new one, start a new foundation on which to build a new institution. Note this is how Charlie Kirk got his start.
Look at how the Ratio of Conservatives to Liberals as College Faculty has dropped off a cliff since the 60's.
Note, this was precisely the sort of thing Charlie Kirk was trying to combat.
Of course, the left will simply say "Conservatives aren't as smart/don't believe in science/are anti-intellectual" as an excuse for this, as part of that whole "intellectual superiority and scientific backing" shtick. But amazingly the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.
It was NOT because the share of conservatives in the population dropped off sharply that they took over colleges. It was attributable to the intentional attrition of activists over a long period of time actively favoring their ideological peers for hiring, and actively making life unpleasant for righties, to ultimately cement control over the valuable institutions. They are very open about the strategy and tactics they were employing. Conservatives/righties generally don't use these strategies to co-opt functional institutions.
And believe me, I can get almost as critical of red tribe politics and belief if I choose. But the central point, borne out by decades of living around both sides... is that Red Tribe will actually leave you alone/accept you as you are much, much more readily than blue tribe, provided you don't start conflicts. Grey tribe is easily the most accepting of all, but tends to lose out to blue tribe operatives due to having no/poor antibodies to their entryist tactics.
Well, the place where the Republican-vs-Democrat ratio is highest is in Economics, but that's not so much because there's especially extensive high-stakes testing that Applied Economics gets. It's probably because our best theories, starting in literally the first Microecon 101 classes, have good, simple explanations for why many populist (and historically leftist-aligned) economic ideas end up worsening the very problems they were trying to solve. You can still say those explanations are too simple, and make an economics research career out of trying to justify that, but having to add and defend precisely the necessary epicycles can't be entirely comfortable.
I'd also point out that it's common for a math professor to take pride in how disconnected their research is from real-world applications. Maybe in the back of their mind they expect some applied math guys to snatch up their work and use it eventually, but the more decades that takes, the more ahead-of-its-time their work must have been! There may also be some counter-signalling, where the shakier your reputation is, the more your grant applications have to look like "this could advance cancer research, somehow, because graph theory I guess" rather than "this builds on my work that finally proved the long-open Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture"? The trick with trying to subvert math is that even if it's not empirical, it's still objective. Other mathematicians may disagree over how important the Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture is, but even if some of them dislike you that doesn't make it any easier for them to find flaws in your proof.
I don't think it's about real-world applications so much as in the sense of “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
It doesn't matter if you pass a law saying that pi should be 3, or write a very well-written and persuasive paper, or murder your co-worker and throw them off a boat.
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