Astral Codex Ten

liberals

4 min read

liberals

Article

liberals is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 01, 2021 and July 15, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “agreeable for liberals and libertarians”; “then treats liberals as an outgroup and flames them at every opportunity”; “liberals mostly responding to care and fairness”. It most often appears alongside Bernie Sanders, Clinton, Conservatives.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 01, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2022

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.

Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure
April 01, 2021 · Original source
At least this is the conclusion I take from Lyle & Grillo (2020) Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals More Authoritarian: The Role Of Need For Cognitive Closure. It discusses studies finding that consistently-handed people (ie people who are not ambidextrous) are more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios.
Inline links: Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals More Authoritarian: The Role Of Need For Cognitive Closure
A fourth possibility: if you have need for cognitive closure, you only seek out information that agrees with you. If you have high need for cognitive closure, you seek out information that disagrees with you. This blog is probably very disagreeable for Marxists, and very agreeable for liberals and libertarians, which matches which of our readers are most likely to be ambidextrous. This would be a very easy hypothesis to test - just find a blog that disagrees with me about everything, and have them ask these same questions.
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
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.