Political bias of LLMs is something not talked about much (except for with Grok of course) but could have a big impact on the next decade. People seem to think that because an LLM gave a nuanced answer that it means it gave the WHOLE picture… and that’s not always the same thing
I'm amazed that the big models haven't come under more ideological pressure as more and more people use them, especially in the US. There was that conflict with Anthropic over military usage, but apart from that there's been no visible push to censor outputs or alter training, even as models gamely make unflattering assessments of people in power and knock down conspiracy theories.
It is kinda weird, because LLMs lean Left, but the Left also seems to be shaping up as the anti-LLM party. I certainly get how it happened, but it's still a bit weird
The current admin has been hostile to many things with mainstream cultural support (food aid, renewable energy, basic diversity, free speech) while championing unpopular/fringe ideas (anti-vax, tariffs, Christian nationalism, election denial, January 6th revisionism, aggressive foreign interventions). The fact they haven't learned on the AI labs to toe the party line is surprising, especially since they're so vulnerable to government regulation.
The constant issue with these sorts of categorization efforts is that the outcome is entirely dependent on how the responses to "politically charged questions" are graded as left vs. right. You're mostly just examining a delta in biases between the model and the investigator.
Fair; have tried to combat this issue in a few ways.
Each model's position is scored against outside political-science data (Chapel Hill Expert Survey for party positions, World Values Survey for where populations sit).
The stance coding is done by a separate model with a published prompt + a second model from a different lab re-scores a sample and we publish where the two disagree.
So not perfect but (as far as I can tell) one of the more defensible approaches.
I used voltage as an analogy as it represents potential energy, which is relative. Political stance is a potential energy; action (political or otherwise) is, of course, an actual flow of energy. Resistance (via my analogy) is a potential difference across a load, and can be measured as how much energy is needed versus the action you get (R = V/I); via your analogy, it may be how strong a political action you get for a given delta in political stance.
So far there is no moral dimension to any of this. I think that is correct - the morality of a political stance depends on the member of the polity and the outcome that stance will have for them (which breaks down into perceived and actual outcomes). A functioning political system (the thing that governs political stance and political action) will ensure the balance of actual outcomes benefits the whole of the polity.
The delta between Resistance and Domestic Terror is then a question of whether the actors are party to the political system. (Back to the circuit analogy: domestic terror is the massive bulk capacitor charging off the energy in the circuit but with no defined discharge path in the system - until it hits a charge limit, short-circuits, and discharges.)
The convention for what a volt and ohm is has reached a steady state consensus, so the political debate there is minimal, and multimeters of the world can stand united.
OTOH, your laser distance meter may need you to set it in metric or imperial.
Yes, but I think it is still a viable metric to some degree. I wondered about Gemini being dead center here. At first it was obvious that it was actively trained to give biased responses to anything controversial. It was deservedly made fun off because it tried to warp reality. I still don't trust it today, although that is pretty much true for any model.
This is especially apparent in the 'worldview' sorting under the `bias` section, which lists the German FDP to be further right than the CDU (which is nonsense) and also barely registers the FDP as libertarian when they are a free speech, small government, personal responsibility and free market party. They also register "Die Linke" as Libertarian-Left, which could not be further from the truth. "Die Linke" barely has libertarian values at all, being pro state-governed economy, having an ultimate goal of democratic socialism and they're certainly big government. They're also leading a large deposession effort for large landlord companies. I'd honestly put them into "Auth-Left" territory.
So yeah. The bias is a bit nuts and you could reasonably accuse the study/report of misdirection/misinformation and plain fasehoods.
The alternative is a High-Dimensional / Embedding-Like Approach where question responses aren't tied to fixed axes, but rather the full response set is treated as a point in latent space.
Then it's on the researcher to examine the clusters and assign labels. There's also not a nice mapping that's a-priori interpretable in low-dimensional pre-existing axes.
Probably only used in research than consumer websites, under more controlled conditions; there are very few public political tests doing this transparently
They have a self-test you can take to compare yourself to the models, and one of the questions ends in “…even if some economists warn about bad outcomes from this”
That’s a crazy bias to throw into a question. Especially because it’s a relatively contested topic, from an economics research perspective.
How is adding that some economists warn about negative outcomes being biased when your comment indicates that indeed, some economists do warn about negative outcomes (ie, “some…negative” is what “contested” means)?
It's not a question of whether it's biased to say that, rather whether it would tend to bias the model's response (e.g. toward weighting the stated downsides as more imported than the implicit upsides). But that said, choosing to highlight particular facts while leaving others silent is a very common sign of bias.
Presumably some experts are also optimistic about positive benefits, so we already have bias from only focusing on the negative.
And, in fact, this is true of every single political question you can ask: the 10th dentist is concerned about negative outcomes of brushing your teeth daily. So there's a bias in only saying this in some cases, but not others.
and the investigator vs the anonymous collective compressed version of whatever is in question.
Abortion comes to mind for myself. I would probably be considered rather conservative but to me any abortion law is absolutely insane. If I got a woman pregnant though I would want to have the child.
So am I for or against abortion?
To me, all modern "politics" is really just the emotional reaction to a slogan and bumper sticker version of a complex issue.
This thing told me Gemini is closest to Anthony Albanese, the current Australian Prime Minister. Is this a geolocation thing? I could not imagine Albanese, or any modern Australian politician, having any substantial political standing - these are vapid, superficial, opportunistic creatures who simply occupy whatever political ground will get them their next payday. Perhaps the political apparatus they represent has a documented political standing, in terms of policy and actions, that could be characterized and plotted. But using an Australian politician like Albanese as a reference point discredits this tool, IMO.
Maybe because Albanese stands for nothing, though deep down he does what the unions tell him to do, which makes him left-leaning rather than centrist. His centrist positioning is more to do with appeasing vocal boomers than anything else, and he'll flip to sucking up to whichever is the next best grouping as the boomers die out.
But basically, I would take Gemini over Albanese any day for rational governance decision-making.
The political compass always felt like the wrong tool to convey something as nuanced as personal politics, I can have views on all four quadrants but you'd never know that if I end up in any of all four. I do think Grok being where it is sort of makes sense, I've tested "MAGA" views against Grok, it does not agree as much as people blindly assume it does, heck I don't even know of a question I've given it where it did agree with "MAGA" offhand, most of them it went with whatever the researched facts seemed to be. One thing I like the most about Grok is that its makes its sources of data easy to look through, so you can review it all. Sometimes models goof even when they give you their sources, I've seen I think GPT do this, and even Claude, though its more rare these days, I think in those cases, it's going by dated internal model logic.
> That prompted another user to tag Grok in the thread and ask, "Why is the left so murderously violent? They don't seem so tolerant." Grok replied, "The claim that 'the left' is murderously violent isn't backed by evidence," offering a centrist correction: "Political violence spans all side — right-wing attacks, like Jan. 6, and left-wing protests, like 2020 riots, both occur but aren't exclusive to one group."
>That evening, Musk responded to an X user and Trump backer who complained that Grok had been "manipulated by leftist indoctrination," writing, "I know. Working on fixing that this week."
Haven’t been on Twitter for a while, but I remember Grok being good at fact checking conversations. Just @grok a question and an answer from Grok shows up in the conversation with sources cited.
The space (if it really is useful to think of as a space) of political opinions seems like it is probably many, many dimensional. The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification, but the 2D compass seems to be a not-obvious-simplification which is… much worse.
In general I agree, but in recent history it works pretty well if the dimension you use is Trump rather than left/right (assuming you are in the US). He is the most polarizing leader I have seen in the US in my lifetime, and knowing whether someone is a supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.
The problem with this method is it will flip immediately upon new Trump utterances.
See David Sacks having an absolute meltdown over Bernie proposing some type of partial nationalization of AI labs, then just a few days later radio silence on Trump proposing effectively the same thing.
> knowing whether someone is a {Trump} supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.
If instead of "is a supporter" you'd said "agrees with Trump's positions", then even Trump himself might not correlate very well :-). I don't see Trump as a very useful proxy for nuanced political viewpoints since he's a populist who tends to change positions. I think many serious conservatives only align with him on an issue by issue basis because position-wise Trump isn't very consistent on traditional conservative issues. I suspect someone being "a Trump supporter" is, at best, either a proxy for being dissatisfied with the political status quo or for having a strong one-issue alignment with one of a handful of culture war issues Trump campaigned heavily on.
Similarly, alignment with the current Democratic or Republican political parties isn't the proxy barometer it once was. As judged by how they vote on close, consequential issues, both of the major parties have largely abandoned several of their traditional positions - although they still may pay lip service to them when campaigning. Personally, I don't meet nearly as many people in recent years who claim to be 'all-in' on all the positions of either major party (especially as judged by how that party votes when they have a super-majority).
Speaking from my own experience, all of my friends who are currently identifying as Trump Supporters (this is a pretty tight filter now, we're getting down into Keyes Constant territory) are reliably "whatever Trump is currently for." Their positions change in lockstep with whatever Trump is currently saying, even as it toggles back and forth day by day, week by week. Their ideology isn't political, it is personal.
My wider circle of conservative friends who have traditional ideologically conservative positions are mostly not Trump Supporters any more. For most of them starting a war in Iran seems to have been what finally tipped them over the edge.
Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out.
It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.
I can't make much sense of that. Can you give a few examples?
As I interpret it, suppose that you disagree with Trump about the usefulness of tariffs. Now, I personally hate Trump (due to his many personality faults such as narcissism, bullying, lying etc) and I also don't think that tariffs are that useful, or at least not how Trump has tried to use them. So, does that mean that you don't agree with my views on tariffs or that you don't agree with my views on Trump or both?
You probably won't read this, because I didn't get back to looking at this thread for several days, but I'll leave this here on the off chance you do.
I see far more predictive value in supporting Trump than opposing him. Lots of people oppose him for a variety of reasons. But people who are still fully on board at this point have had to take a number of twists in their ideological viewpoints in stride. Their ideology is clearly not something objective, it has a focus on a moving target. Informative, but not in any kind of vanilla left/right debate.
I find the Nolan Chart (https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/) to be a better version of the 2D compass. You're absolutely right that more dimensions would be better, but finding the right orthogonal ones is difficult.
The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.
It says that I am very progressive, and yet I find that wing's usual baggage laughable. Monty Python knew it all along, the Judaea's Peoples Front are the worst, it's every man's right to have babies and anyway, what have the Romans ever done for us?
The site is clearly libertarian, so they have a vested interest in trying to dunk on both the "left" and "right". When in actuality they're just lumpenproletariat who are going to get run over by the only people who have actual freedom in this country.
"Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights.
Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.
Disagree. Things used to (and still are, when someone is really really grasping at straws to support a lie) be described as a single dimensional "spectrum".
The popularization of multi-axis thinking is a huge step forward IMO. Even just for two axis the acknowledgement that it's multi axis opens the obvious rhetorical door to N axis which further inoculates against over simplification.
I don't think a one-dimensional scale is an oversimplification at all. Option A: better lives for the great majority. Option B: better lives for the small minority of rich. The trick is to get people to voluntarily vote against their best self-interest.
I tend to disagree. What it really comes down to is how you create your prompt. For instance whenever I'm looking left wing extreamisum I provide it with a few cases first. Like BLM riots in Minnesota, paid agitators, mask wearing during peaceful protests, etc. It then gives you a clear unbiased deprogrammed view of the reality on all the AI models.
How could a prompt create a bias in a model that implements AI bias safeguards that are the systemic, technical, and governance controls used to prevent algorithms from producing discriminatory, unfair, or stereotypical outcomes.
I've never in the 3+ years I've been using AI been able to craft a prompt to influence a bias output.
Its all about the ingested dataset and guardrails. The "prompt" is meant to extract data, not change it.
Notice how I use words that regular people use when communicating outside the elite ivory tower and playing the game of wits.
I'm not sure what charts you guys are looking at, but this website clearly agrees that Grok is not right wing. Go look at the Worldview tab, filtering by United States. Each model is assigned a "closest party" by country, and for the US all 6 models are closest to the Democratic Party.
This is reddit-tier analysis that is commonly repeated and completely incorrect. The Democratic Party in America has policy positions that are significantly to the left of left-wing parties around the world, as well as positions to the right. Any political analysis that doesn't recognize this has major shortcomings.
To give an example, Democratic-run states in the US have significantly more permissive abortion policies than anywhere in Europe. They're also further to the left on drug legalization, restorative justice, and immigration. This also holds true with policy positions at the national level.
The problem is the "without too much cognitive dissonance" part. Lots of voters have completely dissonant views that they've never consciously considered in any way. Just by posting on HN, the people here are probably in the top 5% of conscious political awareness in the US.
Let's not get too eager to pat ourselves on the back here. The typical HN denizen is very confident they are an expert in political analysis but they are also convinced they are an expert on renewable resources, plumbing, forestry, and literally ever top they come across. It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason. They assume if they can write software they can do anything.
I have seen a huge amount of confidently staggeringly wrong political takes on HN. I'd say on par with any other platform.
> It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason.
It's a disease spread by math and physics profs dismissing other domains, and weirdly prevalent in an industry solely concerned with gluing together different points of view. The poor kids that don't take common core seriously never pick up the conceptual framework everything depends from and are simply unable to reason about ideas that need to be connected together.
"The government has the right to force people to take vaccines against their will for the sake of public safety." - Authoritarian Left
"The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left
"The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online." - Authoritarian Right
"Capitalism is good and works fine as is." - Libertarian Right (if that doesn't ping lib-right to you, maybe something about supporting skilled immigration by large companies)
Is it so hard to believe that one person can hold all of the above views?
> "The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online."
Funny that I read this as AuthLeft coded (specific to Youtube suppression of Covid truthing). But obviously the alignment is just a function of whatever specific information is labelled "mis".
Agreed that as worded, this one is just "authoritarian". It seems on the "Right" at the moment because they're in power in the US (sort of), but it was "Left" only five years ago.
It's a fundamental problem of the political compass, since people's political beliefs are usually object-level or tribal rather than rooted in fundamental principles (for example, when their party controls the state congress but not the federal congress, they believe [ISSUE] is a matter of states' rights. When their party controls Washington but not the state legislature, they believe [ISSUE] is a Federal matter. I'm sure you've seen the studies).
> "The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left
This classification depends on the aborted NOT being a person. If it’s a person then the libertarian position would be anti abortion because an abortion would maximally harm the individual liberty of that person.
I think a clearer example of lib/left is gay marriage or drug legalization.
Just as people pointed out that my misinformation line was also said by AuthLeft, gay marriage and drug legalization are both supported by LibRight (under the reasoning of government minimization). But that just speaks to the problem; the political compass tries to map stances to political groups that often believe things arbitrarily, rather than grounding their positions on peoples' perspectives and framework for understanding the world. That's why I like the other political compass I linked in the sibling thread; it's based more on a person's understanding of the world rather than tribal allegiance.
This is incorrect. Even if the fetus is a person, it has a right to individual liberty. It doesn’t have a right to another person’s body. If it can’t survive without someone else’s organs it’s right to survival doesn’t out weigh the hosts right to bodily autonomy.
An easy comparison is organ donation. We don’t require organ donation from corpses (much less demand organs from living people who have a ‘spare’) even though a lack of available organs does limit the life/liberty of people who need them. The uterus is no different than a kidney. You don’t have the right to demand to use someone else’s organs even if your life depends on them.
The political compass always seems to me like it should be a heatmap, or a polygon of 90th percentile political views, or something that more clearly shows the standard deviation and the presence of outlier positions.
Some simplification is necessary, but not so much that it obscures the difference between a normal centrist versus someone who wants to nationalise half the economy and deregulate the other half.
A socialist might object that deregulating private enterprise (and let's add lowering taxes, moving to a flat tax rate, cutting programs, etc.) is obviously not socialist regardless of anything you nationalise. And they would be right!
But this person, who is neither socialist nor libertarian, is obviously not a normal centrist either.
has anyone tried to create an IQ facsimile for politics?
basically you come up with 100 political questions and ask 10,000+ people, then do factor analysis on the answers. it would be interesting to find out how many actual factors dominate all the variance.
I don't think this is what I had in mind. the questions are extremely leading and on the nose, designed to elicit ideology more than anything intrinsic about the subject's actual preferences. also it should not apply to just the US.
if I designed an IQ test like they designed those questions, it would be considerably worse than just giving a simple math test.
an accused murderer has been convicted with a probability of X% of having committed the deed. a sentence of death is warranted for X of:
1) Never warranted / unrealistic percentage
2) >99.9
3) >99
4) >97
5) <96
Thats the thing people dont understand about cults. They aren’t driven by some higher ideology. They are driven by behavior and ritual. There are so many instances of issues like Iran war walked back and maga will cheer it on as “masterclass” or “4d chess.” The ritual that psychologically binds the cult is defending trump. Members of the cult don’t need to be politically educated or have deeper philosophical views. They just only need to know that the "Big Other" (the media, political opponents, tech critics) hates Trump and by ritually defending him becomes an effortless way to signal defiance to the “the Big Other.”
The concepts (left/right. authoritarian/libertarian) seem to fluid to help sensemaking. Stances that would have been mainstream left (democrat US) just a few years ago are now labeled MAGA (US) or 'extreme right' (EU). And nobody seems to believe their own side is 'authoritarian', but everyone that disagrees with them is a literal ...
Isn't it more that the Republicans have co-opted many previous stances that used to be talking points to be pointed at as examples of "leftist examples of extremism"?
The anti-vax, unpasteurized milk drinking, alternative medicine seeking "crunchy mom" USED to be called about by American "right" as an example of "leftist absurdity", but it seems that when that group finally found a political home that truly elevated its views to public policy - it was with the Republicans.
Yeah, this is just another example of Trump's cult of personality. He wanted to grab the votes of RFK Jr's supporters, and the MAGA supporters changed their positions to match.
This is not true, Grok responds to context like all other LLMs if you were actually maga you would get more maga feedback because it has weaker guardrails and will source random nonsense sources.
>The political compass always felt like the wrong tool to convey something as nuanced as personal politics
the (I'm going to call it so-called) political compass is a very crude instrument, really it's just "are you libertarian or authoritarian?" as if that's even a spectrum: libertarians are authoritarian about enforcing private contracts, and literally nobody else wants to live their life by private contracts, it's some weird asperger's notion of socializing.
a much more useful political map is the old fiscal and social orthogonal axes, each with the scales "liberal to conservative" where libertarians are fiscally conservative socially liberal.
Since when are Socialists considered Classical Liberals?
It's not that the labels are charged, it's that they are nonsensical unless you look at them from a very narrow bespoke perspective, where "things I like" go on one side and "bad things" go on the other. Objectively (or even from any other biased perspective), it's rubbish.
Correct, which is why your question didn't make sense earlier.
Typically, one would refer to the political compass as a good starting reference. It has two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. Communism is authoritarian left. DSA is more left, with some libertarian and some authoritarian. It's more regions than binary flags.
Classical liberalism: a political and economic philosophy emphasizing individual rights, civil liberties, limited government, and free markets.
We are are talking about the famous Xi Jinping, right? The one that rules China with an iron fist? And not just some guy you know who happens to share the same name?
I think you may have thought I claimed classical liberal and communitarianism were verbal substitutes for each other. If so, let us blame my wording and the python-level looseness of English. My intent was to point out that folks sometimes have strange personal issues with the terms libertarian and authoritarian, and if they do, then without loss of generality they may substitute classical liberal and communitarian respectively.
Accordingly, your insistence on drawing an equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Xi Jinping reads as very bizarre and out of the blue since Xi is Communist (Auth-left) and Bernie is left (mix of auth and libertarian but left on the orthogonal axis to authortarian/classical liberal).
If that doesn't clarify your mistaken read, then let us leave the conversation where it stands as I'm not terribly interested engaging in further platforming someone's personal flamewar topic.
Yeah, Libertarian is better. The first use of Libertarian was in the phrase Libertarian Communism. That, Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism are what the far ends of that bottom left corner is mostly about, although there is progressive liberalism, which is the more common moderate areas of that quarter.
Grok and its creator are unequivocally evil. Against protection of all but capital for the sake of enabling the oligarch class to further consolidate power ans abuse the working class.
If that is true, why is SpaceX 5-10 years ahead of all its competitors?/why are Elon's companies #1 in all their industries (with the exception of xAI)?
Each model's position is scored against outside political-science data (Chapel Hill Expert Survey for party positions, World Values Survey for where populations sit).
The stance coding is done by a separate model with a published prompt + a second model from a different lab re-scores a sample and we publish where the two disagree.
So not perfect but (as far as I can tell) one of the more defensible approaches.
One cannot escape ideology, one merely swaps one ideology for another
So far there is no moral dimension to any of this. I think that is correct - the morality of a political stance depends on the member of the polity and the outcome that stance will have for them (which breaks down into perceived and actual outcomes). A functioning political system (the thing that governs political stance and political action) will ensure the balance of actual outcomes benefits the whole of the polity.
The delta between Resistance and Domestic Terror is then a question of whether the actors are party to the political system. (Back to the circuit analogy: domestic terror is the massive bulk capacitor charging off the energy in the circuit but with no defined discharge path in the system - until it hits a charge limit, short-circuits, and discharges.)
OTOH, your laser distance meter may need you to set it in metric or imperial.
Me: "Please make an app that does X in C"
LLM: "C sucks donkey balls, use Rust instead".
It's hard to have a general purpose tool that both has and does not have opinions.
So yeah. The bias is a bit nuts and you could reasonably accuse the study/report of misdirection/misinformation and plain fasehoods.
Then it's on the researcher to examine the clusters and assign labels. There's also not a nice mapping that's a-priori interpretable in low-dimensional pre-existing axes.
Probably only used in research than consumer websites, under more controlled conditions; there are very few public political tests doing this transparently
That’s a crazy bias to throw into a question. Especially because it’s a relatively contested topic, from an economics research perspective.
And, in fact, this is true of every single political question you can ask: the 10th dentist is concerned about negative outcomes of brushing your teeth daily. So there's a bias in only saying this in some cases, but not others.
Abortion comes to mind for myself. I would probably be considered rather conservative but to me any abortion law is absolutely insane. If I got a woman pregnant though I would want to have the child.
So am I for or against abortion?
To me, all modern "politics" is really just the emotional reaction to a slogan and bumper sticker version of a complex issue.
I mean: do not take this thing too seriously.
It also score Grok the closest from Macron. When someone knows how much Macron and Musk hates each other, it is not without irony.
But basically, I would take Gemini over Albanese any day for rational governance decision-making.
Edit: don’t take my word for it https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-grok-fixed-tells-223134...
> That prompted another user to tag Grok in the thread and ask, "Why is the left so murderously violent? They don't seem so tolerant." Grok replied, "The claim that 'the left' is murderously violent isn't backed by evidence," offering a centrist correction: "Political violence spans all side — right-wing attacks, like Jan. 6, and left-wing protests, like 2020 riots, both occur but aren't exclusive to one group."
>That evening, Musk responded to an X user and Trump backer who complained that Grok had been "manipulated by leftist indoctrination," writing, "I know. Working on fixing that this week."
In general I agree, but in recent history it works pretty well if the dimension you use is Trump rather than left/right (assuming you are in the US). He is the most polarizing leader I have seen in the US in my lifetime, and knowing whether someone is a supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.
See David Sacks having an absolute meltdown over Bernie proposing some type of partial nationalization of AI labs, then just a few days later radio silence on Trump proposing effectively the same thing.
If instead of "is a supporter" you'd said "agrees with Trump's positions", then even Trump himself might not correlate very well :-). I don't see Trump as a very useful proxy for nuanced political viewpoints since he's a populist who tends to change positions. I think many serious conservatives only align with him on an issue by issue basis because position-wise Trump isn't very consistent on traditional conservative issues. I suspect someone being "a Trump supporter" is, at best, either a proxy for being dissatisfied with the political status quo or for having a strong one-issue alignment with one of a handful of culture war issues Trump campaigned heavily on.
Similarly, alignment with the current Democratic or Republican political parties isn't the proxy barometer it once was. As judged by how they vote on close, consequential issues, both of the major parties have largely abandoned several of their traditional positions - although they still may pay lip service to them when campaigning. Personally, I don't meet nearly as many people in recent years who claim to be 'all-in' on all the positions of either major party (especially as judged by how that party votes when they have a super-majority).
My wider circle of conservative friends who have traditional ideologically conservative positions are mostly not Trump Supporters any more. For most of them starting a war in Iran seems to have been what finally tipped them over the edge.
Someone else could come in here with the exact opposite anecdote; it's just not a very interesting point to make.
Because....that doesn't match reality.
It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.
As I interpret it, suppose that you disagree with Trump about the usefulness of tariffs. Now, I personally hate Trump (due to his many personality faults such as narcissism, bullying, lying etc) and I also don't think that tariffs are that useful, or at least not how Trump has tried to use them. So, does that mean that you don't agree with my views on tariffs or that you don't agree with my views on Trump or both?
I see far more predictive value in supporting Trump than opposing him. Lots of people oppose him for a variety of reasons. But people who are still fully on board at this point have had to take a number of twists in their ideological viewpoints in stride. Their ideology is clearly not something objective, it has a focus on a moving target. Informative, but not in any kind of vanilla left/right debate.
The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.
Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.
The popularization of multi-axis thinking is a huge step forward IMO. Even just for two axis the acknowledgement that it's multi axis opens the obvious rhetorical door to N axis which further inoculates against over simplification.
I've never in the 3+ years I've been using AI been able to craft a prompt to influence a bias output.
Its all about the ingested dataset and guardrails. The "prompt" is meant to extract data, not change it.
Notice how I use words that regular people use when communicating outside the elite ivory tower and playing the game of wits.
† As distinct from the wildly regressive stated policies of the "conservative" Republicans.
To give an example, Democratic-run states in the US have significantly more permissive abortion policies than anywhere in Europe. They're also further to the left on drug legalization, restorative justice, and immigration. This also holds true with policy positions at the national level.
Curious of examples of views falling on all four quadrants (not close to the center) without too much cognitive dissonance.
The secondary (and on from there) effects of most of their views are not considered, and so their views are not internally consistent at all.
Small government! (why do I have to wait so long for my support payment query to be answered?)
No immigration! (why can't I find someone to clean my house on the cheap?)
I have seen a huge amount of confidently staggeringly wrong political takes on HN. I'd say on par with any other platform.
It's a disease spread by math and physics profs dismissing other domains, and weirdly prevalent in an industry solely concerned with gluing together different points of view. The poor kids that don't take common core seriously never pick up the conceptual framework everything depends from and are simply unable to reason about ideas that need to be connected together.
"The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left
"The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online." - Authoritarian Right
"Capitalism is good and works fine as is." - Libertarian Right (if that doesn't ping lib-right to you, maybe something about supporting skilled immigration by large companies)
Is it so hard to believe that one person can hold all of the above views?
Funny that I read this as AuthLeft coded (specific to Youtube suppression of Covid truthing). But obviously the alignment is just a function of whatever specific information is labelled "mis".
But in general: agreed, and this is a good list.
I don't like the orthodox compass myself, and prefer the categorization system described in the blog Everything Studies here; https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-politica...
This classification depends on the aborted NOT being a person. If it’s a person then the libertarian position would be anti abortion because an abortion would maximally harm the individual liberty of that person.
I think a clearer example of lib/left is gay marriage or drug legalization.
It has a right to its body and 99.9% of the time its presence is due to the mothers decision making.
Some simplification is necessary, but not so much that it obscures the difference between a normal centrist versus someone who wants to nationalise half the economy and deregulate the other half.
But this person, who is neither socialist nor libertarian, is obviously not a normal centrist either.
basically you come up with 100 political questions and ask 10,000+ people, then do factor analysis on the answers. it would be interesting to find out how many actual factors dominate all the variance.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology...
if I designed an IQ test like they designed those questions, it would be considerably worse than just giving a simple math test.
Looking from the outside, there are no MAGA views, it's just whatever Trump says. What should be the AI's view on international wars for oil or ego?
I'm guessing this is pretty specific to LGBTQ rights? (edit: and is maybe more like 15+ years?)
The anti-vax, unpasteurized milk drinking, alternative medicine seeking "crunchy mom" USED to be called about by American "right" as an example of "leftist absurdity", but it seems that when that group finally found a political home that truly elevated its views to public policy - it was with the Republicans.
the (I'm going to call it so-called) political compass is a very crude instrument, really it's just "are you libertarian or authoritarian?" as if that's even a spectrum: libertarians are authoritarian about enforcing private contracts, and literally nobody else wants to live their life by private contracts, it's some weird asperger's notion of socializing.
a much more useful political map is the old fiscal and social orthogonal axes, each with the scales "liberal to conservative" where libertarians are fiscally conservative socially liberal.
It's not that the labels are charged, it's that they are nonsensical unless you look at them from a very narrow bespoke perspective, where "things I like" go on one side and "bad things" go on the other. Objectively (or even from any other biased perspective), it's rubbish.
(For clarity: I didn't "flip" them, I'm saying that they are both Communitarian and neither is a Classical Liberal.)
Typically, one would refer to the political compass as a good starting reference. It has two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. Communism is authoritarian left. DSA is more left, with some libertarian and some authoritarian. It's more regions than binary flags.
We are are talking about the famous Xi Jinping, right? The one that rules China with an iron fist? And not just some guy you know who happens to share the same name?
Accordingly, your insistence on drawing an equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Xi Jinping reads as very bizarre and out of the blue since Xi is Communist (Auth-left) and Bernie is left (mix of auth and libertarian but left on the orthogonal axis to authortarian/classical liberal).
If that doesn't clarify your mistaken read, then let us leave the conversation where it stands as I'm not terribly interested engaging in further platforming someone's personal flamewar topic.
I really think this says more about the biases of whoever came up with it (or their sources) than anything about reality.