Astral Codex Ten

Conservatives

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Conservatives

Article

Conservatives is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 10, 2021 and February 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Conservatives become a fargroup who are less interesting”; “Conservatives will put slightly more people in prison”; “a strong correlation between the extent to which people feel these intuitions and the US partisan groupings of conservatives”. It most often appears alongside Bernie Sanders, Clinton, Google.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: February 20, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
"Socialism" provided the rallying flag that people used to carve out a new tribe from what was previously liberal territory. In order to maintain its independence, it generates and amplifies as many differences from liberals as possible, then treats liberals as an outgroup and flames them at every opportunity. Conservatives become a fargroup who are less interesting.
Inline links: the rallying flag that people used to carve out a new tribe, fargroup
Mantic Monday: Let Me Google That For You
December 20, 2021 · Original source
So the market predicts that Conservatives will put slightly more people in prison than Labor.
I don’t think this is interesting? Conservatives are right-wing and probably do the Tough On Crime thing. Labour is left-wing and probably does the End Mass Incarceration thing. You’re not really learning anything you wouldn’t have guessed otherwise. But it’s a proof of concept. You could do this for GDP growth, school test scores, and all the other things where we all agree what the good outcome is.
I don’t know, maybe you wouldn’t learn anything there either. If Conservatives had better GDP growth, maybe leftists would say “of course, they’re the more capitalist party, they trade off environmental damage and inequality for a slightly hotter economy”. If Labour had better test scores, maybe rightists would say “of course, they’re the more socialist party, they’ll tax you dry and throw some of the money at schools but it will still be inefficient.” But it would be an interesting experiment, and maybe put the size of the tradeoff into relief. I bet a lot of people would care a lot if the conservatives could produce 0.01% higher GDP growth vs. 5%.
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
The idea is that these are five fundamental intuitions humans have that come together to create our instinctive moral judgements, but that they are weighted differently in different people. Haidt then goes on to claim, based on his research, a strong correlation between the extent to which people feel these intuitions and the US partisan groupings of conservatives and liberals (Haidt is aware that the term “liberal” means all sorts of things around the world, but is working in a US context so uses it that way throughout, as I will), with liberals mostly responding to care and fairness, and conservatives to all five.
Haidt then proposes that conservatives have an inbuilt advantage in moral persuasion, because their wider collection of moral intuitions allows them to tell a greater variety of stories and justify themselves in a way that generates broader appeal, whereas liberals are mostly stuck justifying everything through care and fairness.
Haidt clearly struggles with the fairness foundation and its somewhat grab-bag nature. He eventually splits it in two, leaving the free-rider punishment part (which he calls proportionality) in the foundation called fairness, and spinning off a new foundation called liberty which is based around freedom from oppression. The revised political division is then that liberals mostly respond to care, fairness, and liberty, libertarians to liberty above all, and conservatives to all six.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
It will become more and more apparent that there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals. How exactly they sort themselves into two parties is going to be interesting. The easiest continuation-of-current-trends option is neoliberals+progressives vs. conservatives, with neoliberals+progressives winning easily. But progressives are starting to wonder if neoliberals’ support is worth the watering-down of their program, and neoliberals are starting to wonder if progressives’ support is worth constantly feeding more power to people they increasingly consider crazy. The Republicans used some weird demonic magic to hold together conservatives and neoliberals for a long time; I suspect the Democrats will be less good at this. A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations. For like ten years. Until there are enough minorities that the Democrats are just overwhelmingly powerful (no, minorities are not going to start identifying as white and voting Republican en masse). I have no idea what will happen then. Maybe the Democrats will go extra socialist, the neoliberals and market minorities will switch back to the Republicans, and we can finally have normal reasonable class warfare again instead of whatever weird ethno-cultural thing is happening now?