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This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

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Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#51

Post by zhemao »

gknoy wrote: post #21
vilhelm_s wrote: post #18

The Last Psychiatrist wrote some interesting commentary about the Science paper that this article mentions. "[T]he actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos. But it's actually a little worse than that." ( http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/either_conservatives_... )

Note for the squeamish: There's a photo of one of the fear-inducing (kinda) pictures near the bottom of the blog post. I would like to have some brain bleach for the memory of that picture. Logically, it shouldn't be scary. I'm pretty sure it's photoshopped... and yet part of me wants to squirm away from even looking at it in the peripheral vision. Ew ew ew.

Maybe I'm just a psychopath, but after reading your comment, reading through the article, and getting to the picture at the end, I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it. It just looks incredibly fake, like something you'd see in a terrible 50s monster movie.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#52

Post by rayiner »

patrickmay wrote: post #43
rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is internally inconsistent. Authoritarianism is one dimension along which people can differ, but empirically, most people are more or less authoritarian. It's a point which you essentially concede by noting that both parties in the U.S. are authoritarian (and so are most political parties throughout the developed world). So how can you justify calling authoritarianism versus anti-authoritarianism the "real…

Please see my comment above. My perception is that the two major parties are controlled by authoritarians, leaving anti-authoritarians no good alternative. They can either vote with the religious fundies or vote with the Nanny statists. By the nature of the system, anti-authoritarians are disenfranchised.

Anti-authoritarians aren't disenfranchised. If there were really that many anti-authoritarians, they would vote for the anti-authoritarian parties that do exist, and those wouldn't be minority parties any more. The nearly half of Americans who don't vote aren't disenfranchised secret anti-authoritarians. They're just politically apathetic.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#53

Post by MaysonL »

patrickmay wrote: post #39
aptwebapps wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between left and right may seem less to you than that between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians but what about the numbers? If the former has a roughly 50/50 split in the general population and the latter is 90/10 (I have no idea), then it's not surprising that the former is considered more important.

True, real numbers would be helpful. My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold thei…

"fiscal conservatives" I'm curious: could you name a few?

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#54

Post by satellitecat »

thesimpsons1022 wrote: post #50
satellitecat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a 50/50 split. It's just that with a 2-party system like in the US, it's natural that they will roughly split the vote.

I think most people are too ignorant to even be either party but instead vote narrowly on issues that benefit them or stupid stuff. that's why we end up with divided government with the president as one party and congress as others.

Agreed, yep. They'll vote for their niche issue even though the rest of the platform may hurt them or their ideals more in the big picture.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#56

Post by gnaritas »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #27
jerf wrote: post #13

More generally, it seems the more we look into the seemingly-simple emotion of disgust, the more complicated it gets. While I hate to just drop a Wikipedia page in a comment link, it seems to be a pretty good starting point on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust It's fascinating stuff. The other nice thing about this article is that it seems to refrain from judgments, which is a problem this general field…

Disgust is only one of the relevant psychometric dimensions in Jonathan Haidt's model, which is where this bit comes from. In a nutshell, Haidt found that liberals reason about moral problems almost exclusively through the lens of fairness, while Consevatives use a larger "moral toolbox." http://www.moralfoundations.org/ One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably a…

> Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.

I would hope so, since divine anything is simply ignorant and doesn't belong in any moral toolbox.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#57

Post by gnaritas »

wreegab wrote: post #11

I questioned that a population can be categorized in only two sets. It's unfortunate that a lot of people buy into this, and end up trying to be as faithful to one of the label as they can, just like a fan will dedicate himself/herself to a specific sport team for no good reason really than just picking a side and sticking to it.

> I questioned that a population can be categorized in only two sets.

Bald, Not Bald. Q.E.D.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#58

Post by jksmith »

jksmith wrote: post #5
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #3

Some other features that can help classify a liberal: Weaker upper and lower body strength. Weaker immune system, lower T-cell counts. Weaker ability to detect odors and tastes like burning smoke and acrid compounds.

Not to mention excellent fashion sense. Conservatives are so Carharrt.

Finally, I've been taken seriously on this board.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#59

Post by ScottBurson »

gknoy wrote: post #21
vilhelm_s wrote: post #18

The Last Psychiatrist wrote some interesting commentary about the Science paper that this article mentions. "[T]he actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos. But it's actually a little worse than that." ( http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/either_conservatives_... )

Note for the squeamish: There's a photo of one of the fear-inducing (kinda) pictures near the bottom of the blog post. I would like to have some brain bleach for the memory of that picture. Logically, it shouldn't be scary. I'm pretty sure it's photoshopped... and yet part of me wants to squirm away from even looking at it in the peripheral vision. Ew ew ew.

Brain bleach, really? I think the spider is quite beautiful.

I must be a psychopath :-)

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#60

Post by ScottBurson »

satellitecat wrote: post #28
vilhelm_s wrote: post #18

The Last Psychiatrist wrote some interesting commentary about the Science paper that this article mentions. "[T]he actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos. But it's actually a little worse than that." ( http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/either_conservatives_... )

On it being "worse" and liberals being unafraid in the way psychopaths are -- it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them, like the "scary" staged photo in the article. Maybe if they used realistic pictures, they'd get an actual response. And of course a picture of something scary and something actually scary is quite different. Makes me remember when I found a video online of a guy getting atta…

This is a very interesting comment. I'd love to see a followup study addressing the hypothesis that "liberals" place more emphasis on, and are better at, discriminating true threats from the appearance of threat than "conservatives".

Such improved discrimination wouldn't necessarily have been evolutionarily adaptive, it seems to me. First, there's the risk of false negatives: you might incorrectly dismiss a real threat. Second, such discrimination takes time that might be better spent fleeing (or whatever).

I can see that the optimal strategy might be to maintain a dynamic balance in the population between "discriminators" and "reactors". "Reactors" might get killed less often, but without a certain number of "discriminators" in the population, the tribe (or whatever) would fail to maximize its utilization of the environment and thus not compete well against neighboring tribes.

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