'I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it'
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Edit: the essay itself seems... not very perceptive. Notably, putting things on a continuum between far left and far right and imagining that everything is somehow a process of picking out options on this continuum seems amazingly reductive.
Further, the dig on "intentional moderates" also seems to miss the point that many intentional moderates might well be seeking to function politically - so picking out moderate positions in the range of public opinion might be a case of keeping your powder dry and being effective, not compulsively trying to be a moderate because it's nifty. This was very much the case with the way Obama analyzed his own politics (turning the huge ship, very slowly). Not saying I agree with that but the assessment of "intentional moderates" really feels like a cartoon.
I'm just saying, to the extent this post is political, it's political in a totally routine way that doesn't clear the "interestingness" bar for this site, other than that Paul Graham wrote it. It doesn't belong on the HN front page.
> I say this as a moderate, of the accidental variety, myself!
I had to laugh. As you are a reasonably prolific contributor here, I've seen dozens if not hundreds of your comments. It's gotten to the point I can reliably tell when it's a tptacek comment before I even read the byline. And it's not because you have stances on both sides of the political aisle.
This isn't a nuanced or deeply explored post on the topic of moderates. Same as the previous post that was on here this week or last. Name brand carries a lot.
Also, one reason this is getting shot down less hard than the atlantic is that it's a simple point being made in <60 seconds of reading. The atlantic would take >10 pages to do so.
This thought would be even more viable as a tweet.
Much more importantly though is what the content does to/with the community. Unless there's something truly remarkable about it, political content on HN generates terrible threads. Unlike embedded JIT compilers or linear algebra books, virtually everybody on HN can summon a strong opinion about routine political content, and a huge fraction of those opinions will piss someone else off. It's not a new phenomenon; it's why "politics and religion" is a cliche about what's out of bounds for civilized conversation.
Some political content is worth the thread drama. But this obviously doesn't clear that bar (and, again, I'm not suggesting Paul Graham thinks it does; he didn't submit it).
edit: sincere q, I have no idea how these things are handled
There are many posts that get on the front page which have even less merit from your POV. Posts about health or about management, many of the above with arguably unsubstantiated titles. If those make it here and get discussed I don’t see why this one deserves an exceptional consideration.
If the Atlantic is so damn smart, why don't I give a shit about their forum? And why don't you?
Maybe PG's essays wouldn't survive on the front page (all glory be to the masses who bestow their wisdom on us by voting!) if they were written by someone else. But they weren't written by someone else.
"Guys! You guys are voting all wrong!" feels lame. Sorry?
> openly being an accidental moderate requires the most courage of all
If he thinks that having middle-of-the-road opinions requires the most courage of them all, he has had an extraordinarily easily life in which he is used to be hailed as brilliant. It seems as though due to his comfortable position in life he has never faced any significant opposition to anything he's said, anything he's done, or anything he is.
I might be wrong, and I respect the opinions of "accidental moderates" who are acting in good faith, but I cannot imagine how you'd come to the conclusion that holding moderate viewpoints requires any real courage at all.
> Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates
"I am only impressed with people exactly like me."
Someone needs to write a similar pithy thinkpiece about how people who experience a lot of success should stick to what they know and not assume it gives them valid insight into other parts of life.
Has anyone cornered him and beaten him up for having moderate beliefs?
And having beliefs across the political spectrum hardly makes him novel. I'm probably a classic left leaning liberal. I'm in favor of universal healthcare. But I don't think gun control will solve all our problems, I'm okay with lower corporate taxes, but believe in greater wealth distribution. I think identity politics has gone too far. But I refuse to vote for Republicans because to an elect a Republican means to give more power to their voting bloc, and I don't like their policies.
Do I need to invent a special term for myself? No. I'm a complicated individual. Everyone else is one, too. It's easy to assume you're the only one thinking for yourself, but it's more likely that you just fail to understand others are as complicated as you are.
Also, I do believe he was implying that while his beliefs fall across the spectrum, they generally tend towards the center.
Expressing moderate opinions on the internet will cause a lot of people of accusing you of being a "fence-sitter" or siding with "the enemy", as well as accusations that you are a coward by people who are agitated that the opinions they hold in such high regard are not shared and are even challenged. It is inviting vitriol from people highly polarized on either side.
Often times people like that do think for themselves. They just think differently than you do.
Now, more than ever in our lifetimes, a lower percentage of congress is moderate. Center-right Republicans (the conservative party) have almost vanished. This isn't about a lack of choice either, because we've seen a bunch of long time incumbent congressmen lose to to people further from the center, like when Republican Bob Bennett finished 3rd in a Utah primary election to 2 far right tea party candidates.
If most people held moderate viewpoints, like you assume, then congress would be getting more moderate, no?
But accidental moderates aren't doing that and end up with positions across the whole spectrum. As such they're fully exposed to the slings and arrows from both tribes. It's easier and safer to be nestled inside a tribe than to be navigating outside of them. Which requires more courage than either selecting a tribe or trying to appease them.
I can't see how PG is incorrect about that, though I think using the term "moderate" makes it unclear and easy to misinterpret.
When you break this down into social groups, being moderate generally results in a person being able to pass in multiple groups if they are willing to be quiet and tolerate it, but not being able to join in any groups. And as for that passing, that holds true of most people in most groups. It is the lack of having a group to belong too that is harder than having such a group.
I guess the question then remains as to why such people don't form their own group, but I think that ends up being that they are as incompatible with someone else who is incompatible with established groups as they are incompatible with established groups.
Think of it this way. Imagine people's opinions super simplified into an array of 3 dozen boolean values, each representing one of the 3 dozen most charged political issues (even if it isn't charged for most people if it is really charged for some people it can average out as being charged enough to count). Arbitrarily pick 0 or 1 to represent one of the two party views within the US (places with multiple parties are harder to represent, but they may also have far less of this problem to begin with). Now calculate the distance people are based on how many are the same or different. Someone who is mostly a 0 with only 3 or so 1s is going to only be a distance of ~3 away from one of the main groups. But someone who is randomly assigned half and half is going to be a distance of ~18 from either group. But two people who are randomly assigned half and half are also going to be a distance of ~18 from each other, despite both of them being moderates.
Now in reality you will find some clustering beyond just the existing division (such a group that may tend towards socially conservative and socially liberal), but the overall all point of difficulty, and thus courage, can be understood as the calculation of a difference from other people in this simple model, and in such a case, being moderate has higher distance.
Edit: I would like to add that courage does feel like a bad choice of words to me. As someone who is often moderate (more undecided on issues because I see either stance resulting in extreme conclusions that I don't like), I don't do it because of any sense of bravery. I hold the views I do because they are the views I have. The extent I may espouse them might count a bravery, but in general I'm careful enough at reading the context and, when online, remaining anonymous I still wouldn't see it an act of courage (though what I am envision as courageous acting may be crossing that thin line into foolishness). I would much prefer calling it more difficult, but not an act of courage.
This is almost everything that PG writes.
Additionally, there are political world views that are often described as moderate, but are legitimately their own political world view. Namely, in the US political system, the democrats are a big tent party of liberals and social democrats with clear ideological differences between the new democratic caucus and the progressive caucus. Those liberals are not moderate, they're liberals which are much closer in line to conservatives ideologically as they both support free market capitalism.
Anyone who is an "accidental moderate" in a truer sense of the word has never spent any time thinking about politics in any sort of unified sort of way. Politicians should have a both a unified theory of change and a broader political framework for which they rationalize their decisions. While many people describe the Clinton's or Obama as being moderates, they are not moderates, they are liberals, which just happens to be it's own fully unified political theory to the right of socialism and social democrats and to the left of conservatism, nationalism, and fascism.
It doesn't surprise me that those kinds of people would be more impressive, since anyone who describes themselves as right or left, democrat or republican, liberal or conservative, inherits their opinions instead of choosing them one-by-one on the basis of merits. I mean accidental moderates are pretty much the only adults in the room, and everyone else are child-like in their beliefs. Why should it surprise anyone that the adults accomplish more impressive things?
EDIT I should add that I think everyone is really some level of accidental moderate, because there are not too many pure ideologues and not too many pure free-thinkers out there. But I think it is fair to say that the average person on the street is mostly not free-thinking about tribal things like politics or religion. And I'm sure I'm not fully-free thinking either.
As for a pithy thinkpiece about successful people writing outside their expertise, someone already did, nearly 15 years ago...
>The effect of a system based on plurality voting is that the larger parties, and parties with more geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties with more evenly distributed support are left with a disproportionately small share.
In the absence of first past the post voting (and its tendency to force people into parties to avoid losing to people who do [1], and for those parties to coalesce into two dominant, equally balance parties), there is still a polarity of, say, liberal and conservative. At least in the original meanings of the terms, which has to do with whether you go toward new things or prefer traditions.
But under FPTP, right vs left encompasses a lot more than that.
And more importantly, FPTP doesn't allow for middle ground. If you are in the middle, you can't get elected, because neither party would nominate you.
If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different. Yes there would be people on the extremes, but most people -- those elected, as well as regular citizens -- would tend be "accidental moderates."
Median voter theorem claims a mathematical proof of the opposite, that FPTP has both camps having a dominant strategy of appeal to the median voter. Both your assertion and median voter theorem fail in practice; the latter because it ignores issues of salience, distribution of views (unimodal vs. multimodal), turnout and mobilization effects, etc., and yours because, well, it ignores much of the same things, but assumes different generalities about them consistently hold.
> If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different.
Actually, the vast majority of US voters, even those that self-identity as independents, are highly partisan — the median voter is probably a reasonably strong partisan of whatever party has the current turnout advantage, which is essentially what FPTP elects.
California has FPTP voting and is completely dominated by Democrats who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
Tell me again how FPTP voting necessarily results in two equally balanced parties? I'm not seeing it.
I'm not sure that's true, at least in the UK, when one of the established two parties moves to the centre ground they tend to win. Moving away from the centre ground is how they lose.
Most European countries have proportional voting systems, yet can anyway fairly well be characterized by the left-right political axis.
Overall their adherence to the left-right dichotomy is less rigid than in the U.S.
Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those.
In fact, you can look at how each politician votes (without explicitly coding votes as left or right). This itself forms a space equal to the number of votes taken. But that vote space can be projected into a much lower dimensional space that captures most of the information about the vote space. If you go so far as to collapse it into a one dimensional space, that corresponds to the traditional left/right axis, and this holds through both history and internationally. The second issue is a bit more varied, but most of the time the left/right axis dominates whatever that second dimension is. Look up DW-NOMINATE for more info.
>Poole and Rosenthal note in Chapter 11 of Ideology and Congress that most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): "These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29
Static parliamentary majorities are not necessary in a presidential system.
The developed world as a whole seems to be approaching one of those "great leap" moments today as more and more issues have fallen into partisan extremism, motivating the search for a new consensus.
Diverse, yes. Meaningful, maybe. Look at Israel right now. 17 parties with seats in the Knesset, none with over 30%, and, after two elections, still no agreement on Prime Minister. Third election coming up.
Parlamentary systems without the option to call re-elections is an attractive alternative. The politicians just can't keep asking people's opinion until they get the answer they want.
Then there will have to be compromises, and even the smaller parties can get some of their important causes through.
Also I would argue Netanyahu failing to form a government two times is a good sign for Israel. That man is divisive and harmful.
We do have a middle of the road Liberal Democrat party, but to my mind they maintain their position in the middle ground by dodging the hard issues. They are intentional moderates in that respect and I just don’t trust them to tackle really tough issues effectively. So I’m a moderate conservative because the Conservative party is generally an effective party of government that often leans moderate for practical political reasons. Often enough that I’m ok with it, cripplingly badly thought out referendums aside.
Looking at the US political landscape there’s no question in the 80s I would have been a Reagan Republican, but gradually over the last few decades my respect for Republicanism has collapsed. It’s turned itself into a radical ideology that doesn’t even seem conservative, or concerned at all with things conservatives everywhere usually obsess over. The democrats have recently lurched left in response though, so while I found myself, to my own bemusement, generally cheering on Democratic candidates and presidents in the last few decades, now I’m worried they’re ‘doing a Corbyn’ and indulging in outlandish and fantastical economic policy positions that are always a temptation for the left. That leaves me in the wilderness in US political terms.
So I can’t support the Republicans because they are immoral jerks who are selling out democracy, undermining the rule of law and sold out on their international security position for partisan posturing long before Trump showed up. And I can’t support the Democrats any more because they are indulging in crazy leftist economic fantasies.
Bang-on 100% accurate. It's a bunch of immoral jerks versus a bunch of fantastical hooey.
Add to that a difference in rhetorical style: Republicans skirmish aggressively and keep their commentary "on message," while Democrats tend to virtue signal and use identity politics to galvanize their followers.
There is no space in the party for a Dominic Raab, Ken Clarke or Michael Heseltine, or One Nation policies -- once the bastion and bedrock of post-war conservatism, or even being in favour of a mild exit deal with the EU. Just dogmatic pursuit of blind, disproven policies for the benefit of a tiny minority such as the joke of austerity, closure and gutting of services many former Conservatives actually built and developed in former decades. For all her dogma on the Poll Tax, Thatcher could listen and understood the scientific advice, privatisation of many services that were eventually sold off were, to her, beyond the pale. She had her limits too, she did not and could not understand society, and people within it.
Thatcher's first set of ministers contained Whitelaw, Lord Carrington -- possibly the last high ranking UK politician of any party with an innate sense of ethics and standards, Heseltine, Pym, Prior and many others I forget, who wouldn't be welcome in today's party, let alone get a ministry. Plenty to bring some balance to cabinet, to moderate the extremism of the mad monk who invented Thatcherism -- Keith Joseph. Of course Joseph was the creator of one of those first extreme libertarian think tanks, the Institute of Policy Studies.
One Nation Conservatism, and moderate conservatism is dead. There's a radical party that uses the same name. They even adopted a bunch of US Republican voter suppression tactics in this election, page 48 of the manifesto. Promoting the suppression of democracy as policy aim! Gerrymandering constituency boundaries, picture ID to vote in a country that requires no ID -- knowing full well that hits the poor and minorities hardest (Who might well not be inclined to vote Tory), politicising the Judiciary. No, the Conservative party of yore no longer exists.
Before long we'll be back to buying votes.
Mistakes always happen in politics, if you’re not making mistakes you can’t be doing anything worthwhile. Austerity went too far, but fundamentally had to be done. Leaving the EU Is a mistake, but given the referendum the party had to commit itself to delivering what it promised. That’s my take anyway.
Their new leader performed particularly poorly in electioneering, and associated with this they nailed their election colours to "Bollocks to Brexit", and repealing article 50 legislation. i.e. Under us, Brexit is not happening, regardless of referendum, calls for second referendum or rerun with more honest campaign rules or what have you. Last, I think (I'm guessing) there was a good degree of everyone being beyond sick of this, and vote Tory so we're out and it's over and done with. Of course leaving is just the start of a 10x longer period of trying to negotiate with everyone, and make things like import/export work again, preserve NI peace etc... Brexit will continue to be the story of the coming decade -- all of it. Our famously resilient and politically neutral civil service is already deeply damaged by it.
Minor reasons are a lot of very amateur hour election leaflets with faked graphs, pretend newspapers that made them look like the Liberals in the 1970s once again -- intellectual, worthy, and utterly irrelevant. They also split the anti vote in more than one constituency.
Ironically, the closest thing we have to "true" conservatives here are self-fashioned centrists, who generally are interested in preserving the status quo, making small changes in one direction or another depending on how society is going, being generally vigilant against too much change.
It's a view that has almost completely ceased to exist among the conservative parties of the world.
And that's not inherently an insane approach. If we've been going in the wrong direction for the last 70 years, the most useful move is to go back to where we were.
Now, in practice, it's not that simple. You can't just go back. You don't even want to just go back; parts of 1950 we do not want to return to. And you don't have the people you had 70 years ago, or the expectations, or even the societal values.
But I think this explains why a conservative could want to radically shrink (or, rather, de-grow) government, and still legitimately remain a conservative.
Even if you think his solutions are horrible, you have to admit he's bringing new ideas to the table and focused on measuring the right metrics and solving problems.
UBI might seem like a pipe-dream but when you break it down it's way more realistic than "amazing government jobs for everyone" or "break up the big companies into little pieces."
The economy is shifting due to automation and the exploitation of workers through the on-demand gig economy. We need major changes and big ideas. I want someone who innovates and uses data to back up his political stances - so Yang has my vote.
There is a lot of stereotyping, and it doesn’t account for the interest axis, i.e. the fact that a lot of very smart people simply do not care for organised politics in any way, shape, or form.
More importantly, it lacks knowledge of consensus mechanics beyond Overton, which is why it struggles to get to grip with the right side of the spectrum - which is, historically speaking, the most consistently successful side, at least in the short or medium term when any new political issue arises. Dismissing that as “I don’t know” shows embarrassingly poor subject knowledge.
So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a much older and experienced person, somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person has done very little effort to actually study this particular field in depth.
Maybe it’s an attempt at showing that one can be not-smart about certain topics? If that were the case, I don’t think we really need it - Twitter and Facebook remind us every hour of every day that it is indeed the case.
So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a [billionaire founder of a private equity firm with a large platform], somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person [is engaged in an intentional effort to influence public opinion].
In 40 years, the USSR, whose economy was about the size of Brazil's in 1917, and who waged a civil war and repelled two waves of invasions (the first of which included an invasion by the USA after WWI) - this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth, to where it could repel an invasion by continental Europe, then launch the first satellite, man on space, moon probe and whatnot. For a country that Lenin considered to be in a holding action waiting for revolution in the west. I find that impressive.
The western anti-Marxists went through an array of nonsense in the 20th century - "The End of History", the idea that Keynesian or monetarist or whatever remedies would smooth out the business cycle.
Marx predicted worsening economic crises like in 2000 or 2008, with accompanying unemployment, overproduction and a falling of profits. Lenin predicted an unquenchable and self-destructive drive for imperialism.
I'm not familiar with this event?
> this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth
Ironically this is the same argument used by capitalists and colonialists when they claim that a huge body count or deliberate famine was "worth it".
BTW, they're even launching their own space satelites, men in space, moon probes and whatnot lately.
I think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift. The “accidental moderate”, in fact, shifts their opinion independent of the shifts of the window.
I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.”
Additionally, by even defining two types of moderate, there is a sense that the word “moderate” means something already. I don’t know, I feel like there could be a better word, maybe if you think of it as a graph there’s a graph-related term, but it’s not coming to mind!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Broder
http://pressthink.org/2010/06/clowns-to-the-left-of-me-joker...
The above has this quote, which sums it up nicely:
> Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.
what's left unsaid, but i find more thought-provoking, is the notion that, as with the fringe ideologues, you can safely ignore the "intentional moderate" since they don't add to the conversation (because they don't think deeply about politics).
intellectual independence seems integral to why his "most impressive people" are impressive in the first place--they delve deeper into questions/challenges to form their opinions rather than adopting them wholesale from others.
I can think of one possibly valid reason to do that: When you first begin to accept the foundational beliefs of some ideological group, you initially haven't had time to think through the logical implications of those beliefs. Tentatively adopting that group's set of secondary beliefs could make sense while until you have time to think things through yourself.
It's not true. An ideologue has committed to a single idea or system of ideas.
Acquiring in bulk and picking and choosing is the antithesis of an ideologue.
You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation.
> I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.”
"Moderate" means "restrained" or "mild" as opposed to "extreme" or "severe" and has nothing to do with splitting the difference between whatever you think the extremes are. As a side note, a lot of people seem to not really know where the extremes actually are, and falsely attribute ideas to people. Deliberately splitting the difference is a tactic, something done to avoid seriously offending any part of the audience in order to keep viewership and readership numbers high. It also does horrible things to the facts when one side is right and one side is wrong and the news feels the need to pretend everyone has an equal claim to being correct.
I think this is interesting because it's been exactly the opposite for me and many of the people I know. At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus to the point that we've unintentionally found ourselves being Republican now. I.e. the midwest Trump vote.
I don't think you can reduce political arguments to who is "right" and who is "wrong". Politics and moral questions are not mathematical problems. We fundamentally don't all agree on what the final outcome (of a society, of life) should be. Maybe 99% of us can agree with something like "happiness" or "peace", but those are way too vague and the devil's in the details.
2. There is strong agreement on lots of things:
95 percent disapprove of people using cell phones in movie theaters. (Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel Poll, 2014)
97 percent believe there should be laws against texting while driving. (The New York Times/CBS News Poll, 2009)
96 percent have a positive impression of small business. (Gallup Poll, 2016)
95 percent believe employers should not be able to access the DNA of their employees without permission. (Time/CNN/Yankelovich Partners Poll, 1998)
95 percent support laws against money laundering involving terrorism. (Washington Post Poll, 2001)
95 percent think doctors should be licensed. (Private Initiatives & Public Values, 1981)
95 percent would support going to war if the United States were invaded. (Harris Survey, 1971)
96 percent oppose legalizing crystal meth. (CNN/ORC International Poll, 2014)
95 percent are satisfied with their friends. (Associated Press/Media General Poll, 1984)
95 percent say that “if a pill were available that made you twice as good looking as you are now, but only half as smart,” they would not take it. (Men’s Health Work Survey, 2000)
98 percent believe adults should watch swimmers rather than reading or talking on the phone. (American Red Cross Water Safety Poll, 2013)
99 percent think it’s wrong for employees to steal expensive equipment from their workplace. (NBC News Poll, 1995)
95 percent think it’s wrong to pay someone to do a term paper for you. (NBC News Poll, 1995)
98 percent would like to see a decline in hunger in the world. (Harris Survey, 1983)
97 percent would like to see a decline in terrorism and violence. (Harris Survey, 1983)
98% would like to see an end to high unemployment. (Harris Survey, 1982)
95 percent would like to see an end to all wars. (Harris Survey, 1981)
95 percent would like to see a decline in prejudice. (Harris Survey, 1977)
95 percent don’t believe Magic 8 Balls can predict the future. (Shell Poll, 1998)
96 percent think the Olympics are a great sports competition. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution Poll, 1996)
(source How To Monroe 2019, by way of https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-win-an-election/)
If there were correct or incorrect policies, there wouldn't be any need to vote. If politics was a science or a math, we wouldn't need to vote. We be able to test or prove the correct answer. The reason we vote is precisely because there is no correct answer in politics.
There is a why science and math doesn't work by consensus or a vote.
Just because we cannot guarantee certainty or outcomes doesn't absolve us from the moral responsibility to try.
When PG says that the left and right are equally "wrong", he's suggesting that they are both trying to arrive at THE solution, but just taking different paths. I don't think this is fundamentally true and if you view political struggle from this perspective you're going to miss the full picture.
I think the point is that different people will try different things, often opposing each other.
For example, let me grant you that Nazi Germany and the Soviets were equally bad for the sake of this question, would that mean that we and our allies were moderate? Do the proxy wars that we fought/are fighting all over the world factor into an ideological spectrum?
The reason that I'm asking a question instead of just going all "what about-ism" is I really would like top understand why people think the way they do. Not trying to start an argument.
This is only the case if left and right are equally right and wrong, which is unlikely to be the case. The average place of an accidental moderate could be anywhere, even to the left of the left or the right of right right.
And I'd say it is very likely that they are. Almost by definition, in the sense that right and left are relative terms.
That being the case, I think PG is correct that accidental moderates should tend to average in the middle. In general.
* measuring distance to know how "far" they are is hard, so hard to say how far any given position is from the "median or average" viewpoint * hard also to measure not just the distance, but how common such a position is, which you'd need to do as well * harder still to do this over many different positions * harder still when you realise that, of course, the left/right thing is an incredibly simplified (although sometimes useful) way of looking at a complicated set of topics
For any individual "moderate" it seems very unlikely that they will end up "in the middle" even across a range of political topics.
For an aggregate of all "moderates", then it'll end up somewhere, but no reason to assume that it will be in the middle of things (even if you could determine where such a middle even was).
Of course, thinking for oneself might not correlate with being correct. I can think of numerous issues where those who challenge the status quo are more likely to be wrong (e.g. medicine).
> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity
The article is more about phycology than politics, IMO.
It goes to show that people in tech are acknowledging more that the industry is not apolitical and has a very real social and political effect on the world at large, and are so dropping the pretense of lacking political interest. That and like the rest of the world, the tech industry has become increasingly politically polarized over the last half decade.
If people were all "accidental moderates," there would be no need to keep politics off HN. The problem is that people pick one of two tribes, and discussions get ugly. If people weren't tribal like that, less of a problem, it's just a bunch of people with opinions all over the place.
Eking out a decision from the great power jumble requires self-awareness about the forces that gyre and gimble therein.
Not all politics is tribal.
PG explicitly establishes two different cohorts, each with its own way of thinking, from the outset. His argument reifies tribalism.
Well, no, not at all. People on the left and on the right tend to have a worldview and attitude that is the foundation of their stances on issues. It is not a coincidence that support for welfare spending, tolerance of theft, illegal immigration, fat acceptance, and decrying of objective standards in education all come from the same side.
The moderates are the people whose opinions are most formed from indoctrination.
> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
This is the problem with the "intentional" moderates: their position isn't a coherent one, it's instead pure unwillingness to engage. I understand people being conflict-averse, but it can lead to being backed into a corner by the people who are not afraid of conflict.
To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it. Are the people seeking justice willing to risk a nuclear war with China just to force changes? Would that help anything?
I worry about this, because I see that quote (along with an abuse of Popper's paradox of tolerance) thrown around a lot these days, by people who I don't at all trust to be of good will. The times we're living in are of great potential, but they're also incredibly fragile. Too much pressure, too much disruption, and the civilization may break down - which means not just rolling back a good thousand years of progress, but also leaving the next hundred or thousand generations stuck in these conditions on a thoroughly broken planet. You can't just reboot a technological civilization. Which makes me think that there is a solid argument to be made for minding the order, and not jumping to extreme action in pursuit of justice.
EDIT: I suppose this may be the "accidental moderate's" answer to the complaint about "intentional moderates". It's not about unwillingness to commit, or being extremely conflict-averse, or trying to appeal to all sides of the issue. It's about refusing to engage in actions - or call to actions - that lead to too much of collateral damage.
Well, that's fundamentally the tradeoff that China (and quite a lot of the other Asian states e.g. Singapore) have made; their ruling class picked stability over freedom, and hoped that the economic growth would keep everyone happy while at the same time preventing organisation outside the party.
I agree that needlessly destabilising situations is bad, but also that very large injustices can persist in the name of stability. It's not a simple problem.
To use another example more directly relevant to MLK, if African Americans had to wait until it was convenient and comfortable for the white establishment to tolerate and accept them as equals, and the civil rights movement only ever worked within the bounds of the law, they would still be picking cotton. Maintaining order for its own sake without regard for the justness of the society being defended is tantamount to fascism.
The same principle is why you can say "I expected more from you" to friend or family member and that simple comment spurs an improvement in behavior. They actually care, a little bit at least. We don't eloquently express our lofty expectations when it comes to our enemies. Only our friends, allies, and teammates.
Okay, the concepts are relative by nature (arguments about the two-dimensional nature of the left-right axis notwithstanding). In that case, place the concepts (or perhaps the individual ideologies that bundle the concepts) on a distribution and draw a line near the perceived median. That's the sort of thing you see in some poly-sci texts, and it makes sense.
My point was that it is a mistake to place people on a left-right distribution based on their positions and call the people in, for example, the first quartile the "far left."
> I think of it as relative to other americans, not to the rest of the world, and especially not relative to some absolute concept of right and left
The problem is, applied universally this approach of quantifying things would make it appear as though every place possesses the same diversity of political thought, whether you're talking about Europe, the United States, or North Korea. This is simply not the truth.
edit: another problem is that it can cause people whose views are much closer together than, for example, socialists vs fascists, to view each other as being on opposite ends of an ideological spectrum and combatants in a bitter ideological struggle, even though that's objectively ridiculous. Remind you of anyplace?
Calling the median between today's US Democrats and Republicans "moderate" or "centrist" is not really indicative of any political theory.
I really think the problem is Democrat and Republican are too closely thought of as "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservative", however, the parties are distinct from the political theory.
There are plenty of terrible political ideas and actions that die on the vine and they end up collated into messy echo chambers. Mentioning those terrible ideas seems too much for polite company so you have to go looking to find any.
Thinking out loud, I think this piece misses that aspect of team-seeking behavior. I know people who will recognise a good point against their side but will strive to ignore it because it works against their sense of loyalty to the team. I increasingly believe there are relatively few people who don't want/need that sense of identity.
[edit: the article doesn't really talk about sense of belonging, which I think is inherent in a lot of this discussion]
The small child at the top with the horn and red jacket is framed as Good, despite embarking on an illegal foxhunt at the end of which a fox will be killed with dogs. The "lawyer killing a fox with a baseball bat after it attacked his chickens" story immediately below is framed as Bad.
As the tweet says, you have to know the team loyalties for this framing to make any sense.
(The Telegraph is of course not any kind of moderate)
Left and right could be thought of as differing in whose behavior they think needs to change, to improve the world: the wealthy and connected, or the poor and disconnected. The more hardline you are, the more you think that that behavior doesn't just need to change, but is reprehensible and deserving of exclusion from consideration.
So you can be an 'ethical moderate' without necessarily holding centrist opinions. It may be that this means it should be named something else, but I think it's a useful way of thinking.
The point about extremists getting their opinions in bulk is a solid one. I'm not so sure intentional moderates is a well-defined category. It's what most "balanced" media strive for, but it's more like rubber banding in a video game race - the media have incentives to ensure an exciting, tight race, it improves their viewership, so they try to find the dead centre.
I think what PG calls intentional moderates are simply not that interested. Also, I think accidental moderates can end up fairly extreme in the end, because tribalism is ultimately a very strong draw and critical thinking is tiring.
I’m open to a lot of ideas, and I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with policies that are way outside the Overton window, but I think what feels dirty to me is holding political opinions so strongly that it makes our fellow humans the bad guys.
I am curious, what are some examples?
This is a typical complaint by the so called moderates who feel unappreciated by the left (whatever that is). But I yet to see an example of the far left who has any meaningful policy impact. All I see is a lot of whining about college campuses. Perhaps the far left in the US political landscape is Bernie who by most measures would be a moderate in other industrial nations. I don't know, but I have a hard time following what PG is trying to say here.
The corporatist center-left has given up on meaningful economic policy change and mostly just panders on abortion, gay marriage, and gender identity.
I think there's definitely something to the idea, but I wouldn't carve up the world into These People and Those People. If anything, we're more like calico cats and we all exhibit both behaviors simultaneously. Yes, I think the Overton windows "centers" some of our views, but I can't consciously tell you which ones without thinking about it first.
Well, I know tons of those. People in journalism, and other high profile public related posts, are often such. They don't want to offend any side, and reap the benefits of both. Some politicians are also like that. I know people in media personally who have more extreme positions in private talks, but their public opinions are carefully calculated to advance their career.
>Noticeable lack of specifics, not even historical figures. Honestly it comes off like "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why"
Why do people on HN think everything is a big science paper? The post is observations about society, from someone who has lived in one for 5+ decades and paid some attention. It's not some sociology paper or nation-wide poll results. It's like people can't think without polls and figures, or have relegated their opinions to the "experts" and their stats...
Graham's sale of Viaweb essentially exits him from the society most of us live in; he achieves a level of wealth that lets him ignore most aspects or truths he finds inconvenient (good or bad, small or large). As he's now writing in absentia for over 20 years, I don't think we should assume he knows anything about how the world works for most people today.
> and paid some attention
Extremely questionable based on his other essays.
One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience. This is true even if they have a sharp mind, decades of experience, and the best credentials.
The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.
I think this describes my own political opinion to a tee. I agree with some stuff on the left, some stuff on the right and the moderate/centrist opinion on some others, and it probably equals out as centrist.
Still, I'm not sure I'd say this is a rare thing by any means. Indeed, I suspect a large percentage (maybe even majority) of the population has beliefs from all sides/corners of the political spectrum.
It's just that the current voting system in places like the US and UK encourages everyone to band with 'one side or the other', and groups a bunch of people/groups that likely disagree in many cases together as one party.
Plus given most people's mixtures of said beliefs are different to others, your average politician/party ends up having to appeal to a certain 'tribe' in order to get elected, since the percentage of people who 100% agree with a certain mix of beliefs is too small to get anyone a majority.
People tend to believe whatever they hear.
WRT. the perceived amount of "accidental moderates" being small, I don't think it's just because of voting systems. I see two other factors.
1) When you speak up on some issue, people tend to immediately pigeonhole you into a drawer with a political affiliation label on it. I've been called an illuminati NWO supporter by some, a Marxist by others, roughly in the same time, just because I voiced my opinion on two different topics.
2) "Accidental moderates" are not a uniform group. I'll bet that you and I have plenty of differences of opinion - on one issue, I'll be leaning left and you'll be leaning right, on another issue, it'll be the reverse. So once someone wants to leverage group support for one of their positions, they essentially have to sign up with one of the extreme, well-defined groups, that support that particular position. And while internally, they're still an "accidental moderate", to the outside, they just look like another partisan.
The problem with polarizing issues is that it acts to reinforce the tribal mentality. The truth is that most people have relatively complex opinions when they get to genuinely think about them and they almost never fit in clean political tribes. Yet it's to the benefit of a given group to try and lump-sum everyone in or out of it.
We’ve been short of billionaires willing to share their opinions about why we should consider the incredible increase in concentrated wealth and the resurgence of monopoly business practices as “moderate” while the idea that maybe we should, you know, consider doing something to stop that, as “extreme” and “far left”.
There’s a couple tells in the article. But here’s a pretty clear one:
> Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates
You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
"Anyone that makes up they mind before they hear the issue is a fucking fool, OK? Everybody… No, everybody’s so busy wanting to be down with a gang – “I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal.” It’s bullshit. Be a fucking person. Listen. Let it swirl around yo head. Then form yo opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, OK? I got some shit I’m conservative about, I got some shit I’m liberal about. Crime, I’m conservative. Prostitution, I’m liberal. "
"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
It reminds me of how fatuous Nassim Taleb can be, certainly. That quote basically deletes any historical context and actual belief held by those groups. It reduces the actual differences that they have to a bumper sticker level of depth.
Not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't find it that helpful, and I'm also not particularly a fan of Taleb.
Also:
“The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. You don't get to pick and choose.”
PG has clearly never encountered two leftists in the same room together. We argue on critical issues more than a thanksgiving dinner table.
paul graham has a phd in computer science. he is a successful startup founder and vc. that is the extent of what i'm interested in his opinion on.
if a famous political theorist started opining on the organization of software or product/market fit or angel investing how many people here would take them seriously?
Smart people are much more likely to believe that they have intelligent and well-informed opinions on areas outside their expertise. PG himself is no exception.
I disagree with this in the strongest terms.
I realize that the people on this site lean right, and arguing politics isn't really cricket, so I won't go into to why.
The "center" is a political ideology that pretends that it's something else.
Also, being good at one thing doesn't make someone's opinion about everything else important.
> Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.
I disagree as well, but it could be revised to:
> and the [accidental moderate believes that] far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.
This would make the definition somewhat more sensible, though I'd still disagree with it.
I wasn't able to turn up demographics for the site, so I can't outright disagree with you on the political leanings of HN, but I'm curious to know what they are.
I'm usually uncomfortable talking politics because I have "radical" ideas from both sides. I believe in public healthcare and education for good reasons, mostly experience and observation. For most everything else I could be defined as libertarian. I'm also pretty skeptic of decentralized power: municipalities tend to create idiotic regulation and pork barrel politics, I'd rather have laws passed by national parliament.
So I can tell you exactly where a conversation with intentional moderates go astray, wheter they call it that to themselves or not.
Thank you for this. He has that post where he talks about "What you can't say" [1]. His basic premise is that it's naive to think that you'd believe the same things you do now by default if you lived in a different time period.
The posted article above seems pretty contradictory to me. Its notion of what is "moderate" is essentially anchored to the environment where a person lives. Would moderation be a virtue in an authoritarian country?
Graham's sleights of hand used to be better hidden.
The "far left" and "far right" are not fixed points in ideological space (even within a single country).
Ideas don't exist in continuous space.
http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/ https://www.quotes.net/mquote/770097
They don't. Perhaps that is why the voter turnout is so low everywhere.
For instance, myself, I cannot in good conscience support any of the political parties that exist in my country. I agree with each of them on few points, and strongly disagree on most.
Most people are pretty rational about most issues when you discuss them individually, but you end up with a few ''foundational''-- and unquestionable --ideas that people have to fall exactly on one side or the other. I won't name any specifically but I think everyone knows some of these immediately. So you have individually rational persons who have to congregate on either one side or the other, and these issues end up being the deciding factor of which group you must join, dividing many people who otherwise agree on a lot of stuff, perhaps without even realizing it..
It's pretty similar to religious fracturing to me now that I think about it. Groups who agree on everything except one or two ideas and that makes all the difference.
Very rare are the persons who fall heavily to one side of everything.
I don't think I can take seriously an essay that so flatly and flippantly claims this as fact.
A multi-dimensional (at least 2 axis) model [1] would probably be more enlightening in terms of why high profile personalities view things that seem "accidentally moderate".
Example: Sanders disagreed with Beto's gun buyback citing both the constitutionality and the fact that the only way to round up the guns would be invasive police searches which could lead to a despotic act, despite the potential for reduced gun violence. This viewpoint is both shared by hard left and hard right.
Anyone who thinks about politics seriously and argues politics with people needs to base their opinions on something besides personal preference. This means trying to develop moral and logical principles and goals on which to base positions. When people do this, opinions on many topics will be highly correlated.
This is not the case. The far-right police doctrinal purity very well, actually. They have built multiple pipelines for taking ideas that were once extreme and moving them to the moderates, who they then push to adopt these ideas lest the be called out as "Republican in name only (RINO)" or whatever the du jour insults are.
I don't know about the current state of things, but the far right used bank robberies to finance operations across multiple fronts back in the 90's. They used the proceeds to fund groups in different regions.
The far right is dangerous in a way that "the left" hasn't been since the 1960's.
I think its telling that PG's really concerned with ideologies that are a threat to his financial/class interests, thereby validating a point maid be leftist critiques of wealthy people like PG. So, way to prove their point, PG-man.
The history of the far right is really interesting and I would recommend it as a field of reading for anyone interested in American history.
Moderation is rarely a choice. There's an old expression, "The only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill." It's not saying that moderates are extinct or undesirable. Rather, left and right political views mostly come from a history of life experiences that drives people either towards empathy for strangers or towards fear of strangers. The combination of these worldviews and the human desire for having a community or clan drives people into parties in opposition to each other.
For most moderates, their experiences instead drive them to prefer either worldview depending upon which issue is being considered. Their experiences are not totally based on seeking safety or showing empathy. They are not middle of the road on most issues, but have a diverse set of opinions. Their opinions are diverse enough to not feel fully accepted into either party and to adjust their own views into alignment, unless their country has a middle party. This seems to be what Graham calls deliberate moderates.
There are also moderates who become moderate because nuance is important to smart policy. Fully left or right ideas both tend to overshoot evidence-based decision-making. I believe this is what Graham refers to as accidental moderates. However, the roadkill metaphor still applies because even accidental moderates still have life experiences that lead them to a worldview as well as the human desire to belong to a group. Even those who apply past policy-based evidence to develop a nuanced view will have a human desire to try to fit themselves somewhere into the partisan political landscape of their environment. It's not easy being the odd one who doesn't fit.
Ideologues assume that there is a single version / source of the truth whether it is a religious text, or a secular one (Marx, Hayek, etc). 'Intentional moderates' are not monist (as are idealogues), but to the contrary triangulate. If anything, intentional moderates reject the notion that there is an objective position.
Accidental moderates - idealised - are actually just being reasonable and weighing different considerations, thus arriving at a considered position.
Intentional moderates may not necessarily be cowards. To take an exampe: most people are ignorant of economics and so their position on, say, the interest rate is not an informed one.
Intentional moderates use a centrist heuristic in the belief that the reasonable answer is somewhere between the two extremes. There is nothing wrong with this; one cannot expect voters to be experts or even well informed on all the posible issues of government.
But I suppose they may be correct that such independent ideas may be considered as moderates by these measurements, and may also be correct that a lot of people hate them for it.
They say that on a scale from 0 to 100 your opinion might be any number, on average 50 but may be anything. I think that is not good enough because your ideas might not match the range like that so well, I think.
This is a flat assertion with no evidential backing whatsoever solely meant to make the sayer feel better about not challenging incorrect beliefs.
If history is a guide, the middle are very rarely on the correct side of a divisive issue when all the dust settles.
Somewhere in there maybe is a different idea about 'tolerance'. The first might have a 'Live and let live'-position. The other actually believes plurality of lifestyles is a good thing. Somewhere along those lines ;)
As is increasingly the case, the core of pg's argument is a variant of the Appeal to Authority: the "impressive people" that pg personally knows. And there is also an Ad Hominem; one doesn't want to be anything like the nasty people who are continually mean to him online.
It is certain that pg does know some very impressive people, and that he attracts a lot of attention from Twitter leftists looking to score cheap points.
However, this argument is vague and dependent on faulty assumptions. Not only can it be easily dismissed, it probably proves the opposite of what he intends.
I think we can assume those impressive people are likely all drawn from the small coterie of technology startup founders and investors. From this and other essays, it's become clear that pg believes that success at becoming a startup founder (just like pg) is almost identical with being an impressive person.
But it's well-known that this group already comes from a relatively narrow slice of humanity. Upper-middle-class or upper-class, likely white, likely gone to a university in America. It would not be surprising if their opinions were roughly in alignment.
Even so, the "impressive people" have not taken public stands that we can verify. We only have pg's assessment of their stances as being roughly centered around a mean, and we only have pg's assessment of where the mean is. (It's rare indeed for someone to self-identify as an extremist!)
This is an informal essay, so perhaps asking for even one example is too much rigor. And, as pg often reminds us, his friends have all kinds of interesting opinions they can't reveal in public any more, due to political correctness. Luckily we have pg who valiantly is willing to stand up in public and allude to a large number of people who agree with him, but are just off-camera.
Anyway, since we are left to merely imagine, let's also imagine that we asked pg's interlocutors about other topics. What would their opinions be on, say, technology startups and business? They'd probably say they were good for the world, and good as a career path. There might be a relatively univocal assessment of taxes as being too high, the barriers to founding businesses as too onerous, and that some ideas popular outside the tech industry (like mandated key escrow, or fact-checking social media posts) are all ludicrous and counterproductive. All defensible opinions, but my point is, we can imagine them all being in close agreement on issues relating to their industry.
So let's take pg at his word that if we have a cohort of people who have self-selected an industry and risen to success, their opinions about that industry are both informed and in close agreement, and their other opinions might be defensible, but randomly scattered around a mean. Is this really that surprising?
pg wants us to believe that the relative moderation of his impressive friends proves something. That not only is moderation a virtue, but the virtuous are moderate.
But accidentally, he may be revealing that technology startup success is more random than he thinks. That it selects for people with some narrow range of skills, but success is awarded with a high degree of randomness.
And since there is no reason for this cohort to be in alignment on any other matter, they are more or less randomly scattered around the median opinion of an upper-class American university technology student.
...
PS: pg started his career as an essayist with "Beating the Averages", and now he asserts that being average is actually good!?
Okay, maybe that's a cheap shot, but we're all looking to justify ourselves and be loved, I guess, and as we pass through different stages of life that doesn't change. pg used to write about the hidden virtues of high school nerds, minority programming languages, and young founders who weren't from California. I found it easier to be a fan. Today he mostly writes about the hidden virtues of the Silicon Valley elite. While that might actually have some merit, it's a bit of a harder sell.
IME the far right despises them as dupes of their favoured conspiracy theory.
Having polar opposites that are both "in the middle" seems to be a clear illustration of why the left vs right analogy is lacking.
I think most people in America aren't accidental moderates or "intentional moderates" or hardcore liberals/conservatives. I think most of them have limited opinions or investment in politics. Their experience is more akin to their patronage for a sports team than a system. They repeat things important figures for their side say and some of them can be bothered to vote depending on how much their side has stirred them up recently but they don't actually care much.
For those that do care. The people that Graham is liable to label intentional moderates are most apt to have as rich an opinion as accidental ones. Not expressing strong positions in public in America is how you avoid having to hear other people's strong opinions that you don't much care to hear.
In America it's not courageous to hold strong opinions from both sides of the aisle especially as a rich person. Most people will experience zero downsides. For those public figures that do they start off so much better off than most of us that their maximum downside is still much better off than most of us.
Chomsky put it well when describing this phenomenon:
--- The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. ---
> I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left
I think it is because left opinions, even in mainstream media and social discourse do not get the immediate push-back and derision, but are treated more of like confusion or maybe immaturity. Say, if we see someone waving the Soviet flag in the streets at a protest we just sort of shrug at it instead of have a visceral reaction to it.
Star Trek economy is all well and good and I think it is the eventual outcome, but in a specific time and place, with specific people and their baggage, the immediate best way forward may be something other than what I would prefer.
Didn't Marx say politics went through stages? Feudalism to capitalism to socialism or something? He might have had a really valid point on this. We can't jump from primitive barter economies to interstellar travel.
Besides, even though I like certain ideologies, I can't help but see the practical on the ground results of faulty, corruptible humans trying to implement them and it seldom turns out for the good from what I've observed. I have to imagine we will get there over time, perhaps with non human AI at the helm.
Republican/Democrat is more of "buying in bulk" these days as partisanship has aligned more with polarization.
On the other hand, consider Libertarian/Communist. Those both make policy arguments from first principles. They aren't so much buying policies in bulk as generating policies from a set of axioms. Many "intentional moderates" take it as axiomatic that the truth always lies in the middle, and thus are also generating policies.
I’m wondering if all the science heroes from that era were pro-Eugenics from a science or political position.
As usual, there is a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1170/
Again, I myself am mostly an accidental moderate. But I think he's underselling the case for intentional moderates.
There is no far left in America, the "leftist" candidate is campaigning on radical ideas like universal health care and free public education, things that every other first world country already provides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/policies/is-beginning-seco...
The notion that neoliberals are above the fray of ideology and independently minded, might be comforting to them, but it's a lie. Across the globe, PG and his ilk fit squarely in the various right and centre-right parties.
[2] For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left. Or perhaps that they are more confident, or more resigned, or simply more disorganized. I just don't know.
As a long-time student of the far right I can answer this easily: they do despise moderates, but being fascist, they plan to rule over them and figure (with some basis in fact) that the moderate middle will just go along with their program because it's expedient to do so.
As this treats of loaded topics I might as well clarify my own understanding by saying that I think the far left is characterized by its antipathy to property rights (and arguably individual rights in general depending on the particular dogma they adhere to) while the far right is characterized by its antipathy to human rights (and arguably the existence of distinct populations in general depending on the particular dogma they adhere to).
Otherwise you're just saying "I'm right and everyone else is totally clueless. If you don't pick any side you actually have the most ~ ~ enlightened ~ ~ opinion."
I expect nothing less from PG but it's hilarious to see him just blandly admit how intellectually out of depth he is. He's basically ignored the most rudimentary topics in political science and just flat out spread his academic ignorance for the world to see.
