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0 pointscrazygringo3y ago0 comments

> I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues. Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or worse...) have two clear centers of gravity,

We'll you'll be happy then! :)

Because this is commonly believed but actually totally untrue. There's an entire book about it, "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris P. Fiorina.

The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal. But whenever you give a sliding scale in surveys, it becomes abundantly clear that the population is centrist -- unimodal. Even for gun control and abortion, the most hot-button issues.

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godelski3y ago· 2 in thread

> The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal.

SHOCKING! (I laughed a little too much at this comment)

But this is also why surveyists tend to ask the "strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree" questions. Because it can measure the temperature better. This is effectively a type of cardinal voting too. After all, voting theory is also known as "social choice theory."

But I definitely agree that in practice we find more normal like distributions in preference. Which is why I find it odd when commenters argue that other voting systems "give advantage" to "moderates" or "centrists" as if this is not in reality "gives 'advantage' to candidates that have low variance to the mean opinion." (aka, the most representative). Isn't that the goal of voting systems? To be the most representative?

crazygringoOP3y ago

It's actually really interesting, when you look at political science literature and essayists.

You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists.

And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve, and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrary 10% wide so most people are divided (45% on either side), and the second group decides that the center is an arbitrary 80% wide, so only a small number of people are extremist (10% on either side).

It's the same damn bell curve.

godelski3y ago

I don't think I see as much of a problem out of academic literature (there are clear problem groups though, not denying that), but more that the problem is how the information is conveyed to the population. Both the media perception as well as how radicals present information. I'm always reminded of John Cleese's skit on extremism[0]. When he lists the enemies of liberals and conservatives "moderates" are included in both. I think we see this a lot as we often paint people that are moderates as "on the fence." We see this with the popularity of subreddits like r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM[1]. With one of the top posts suggesting that centrists see "compromise" and "a little genocide" as okay.[2] But is this not the playbook of authoritarians (right or left)? To remove all nuance from the conversation. Centrists aren't people who go to the middle of divisive opinions, they just don't cleanly fit into either camp but pull elements from both. I think nuance is the most important thing we can do to fight extremism in either direction.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/top/?t=all

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/cw2bbh...

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