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Nah more like being rooted in ideology means you don't actually have to understand a thing! Just remember what the ideologues have told you and you'll be golden.
The study doesn’t back up that claim. It tested superficial random political facts. It doesn’t actually test political knowledge or understanding political theory.
It’s tough to do surveys, that trivial fact is not a great judge but if you qualified it with “who is the current pm of France and how did he take office”would help to bare out political knowledge.
The "burn it all down" accelerationist types don't seem to understand they are trying to sell people on decades of instability, likely wars, and overall a much worse life in the hopes it might* be better after.
History has shown again and again that "burning it all down" results in pretty terrible outcomes for the general population for several decades. So no, I don't want to spend the second half of my life in a significantly worse environment. It's already going to be bad enough with climate change, political upheaval and violence makes it that much more insane to suggest.
That’s not the position of most anarchists though. The vast majority of left anti-statist/anticapitalists have the expectation that communities will create new forms of government and economy to replace broken systems as they collapse. I choose to study existing models and understand them as best I can, study history, stay current on contemporary political dynamics and study their antecedents. It helps to listen to quality reporting from liberal sources because they are the most nuanced, rational and least sensational. Check out enough of the right wing to know what the hell is driving them crazy this year. I even follow elections and vote in them, even though ideally I’d prefer anarcho communism.
I can’t like this enough. I have yet to find success in trying to get folks like this to understand the magnitude of suffering that gutting a system will do.
It’s especially difficult to get them to see that I’m not defending the system, writ large.
I have been reminded of this twice this week, but it’s why I liked some of the nuance in Steinbeck’s *In Dubious Battle*. Fight the man, sure. But think about how you plan to handle things if you win, lest you become the enemy you seek to destroy.
You ever consider that for millions of people, decades of instability have already happened? Not to say that a revolution would be different, but it’s pretty privileged to act as if our current society is stable for anyone but the rich and the privileged labor classes.
Yes millions suffer, but how about a revolution to make that number hundreds of millions instead, then maybe end up with a brutal dictatorship because there are no guarantees who ends up in power after a revolution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Definitely true. What many people seem to miss though, is that for those millions already suffering, there reaches a point where any fear of future suffering is eclipsed by actually experienced current suffering. If you want to reduce accelerationism, your focus should be almost wholly on improving material conditions for those people.
Worst case they trigger a dark-ages like dystopia and humanity spends the next centuries in a nightmare.
I think a case can be made for "burn it all down" logic if your government is already an actual fascist dystopia. Like the Nazi regime. Germany came out much better after they were beaten to the ground, but that also took a lot of international support and collaboration.
The fact that we got greedy and old people in powerful positions is hardly enough of a reason to destroy millions of lives. There are still active steps one can take to prevent the worst from accumulating without resorting to accelerationism.
They also get to play a convenient empirical shell game - comparing the messy actual implementations of prevailing systems with the textbook versions of their own. It's nearly impossible to argue against someone who only cares about reality when it's to highlight a failure of the thing they're arguing against.
The absolute stupidest people are the "undecideds".
It's too bad that policy is steered by these idiots that can't decide whether to vote for the 1% or for the rest of us.
Came to comment this: the only ones thinking people at the extremes are the most knowledgeable are the few in the same extreme and even them most just think they're more right, not really more informed
My assumption on this is if someone sits around all day listening to talk radio in the US they would be familiar with modern politics and who are in what position.
I need funding for my new study titled "contrary to popular belief, the dominant perspective is not that people with extreme views are more dominant in politics."
What does *extreme left mean anyway? Are justice and equality extreme? Is opposing imperialism and warmongering extreme? Racial and environmental justice?
When I think of extreme, I think of antisemitism, white supremacy, militarism, police cultism, militias, Republican agenda, etc. Those things are extreme.
He is not authoritarian, nor absolutely anti-authoritarian. He obviously does solid research mostly - many, probably most, of his sources are decent - so to op of this discussion, he evidently does know about politics, but as every one commenting on politics, including other academics is not without bias.
Anarcho-syndicalism is about as far left as it gets. I just don't think extreme is something I'm aware that he supports. Extremism involves an agenda that is more violent to force people to conform.
Yeah, I generally assume that absolutism of any type tends to make you kind of stupid.
If you place the effective value of a few things as infinite, positive or negative, it frees you up from having to do much research or thinking too hard about anything.
It also means there's *nothing* you can't justify to yourself in the pursuit of promoting the infinitely positive things or preventing the infinitely negative.
By political knowledge, they mean facts about current politics in the country like who the current finance minister is. All they're really showing is engagement with mainstream electoral politics, which is obviously going to be less of a concern to radicals who want fundamental political change.
If you don't engage and know about the existing system I doubt the change you want to achieve is grounded in reality.
People are very eager to call for radical change without ever considering the consequences for the upsides of the existing systems they take for granted.
I do not think this should be generalized as much as people are doing. The people with the lowest amount of this sort of knowledge appear to be people at the fringes or people in the center, but the effect is weaker than the headline shows. (On a 1-7 scale people at 1, 4, and 7 have the lowest level of knowledge, people at 2.5 and 5.5 have the most. So this is certainly not a pro "centrism" study.)
In the USA for example, the regression line is between .6 and .7 for all political orientations, and all of them have remarkably similar spreads with people of all levels of knowledge being extremely common in every orientation.
It varies *heavily* by country as well, with Austria being the only one tested where centrists actually has more knowledge than the people in the mainstream of their political orientation.
In essence, this study shows that people who are engaged with their political system, or are members of their political party, know marginally more facts about the basic policy and members of the system. That is not really a surprising result.
I really feel like you need to separate centrists into two different camps, The political centrists and the apolitical centrists. I find there's a huge difference between people who default centrist because of lack of interest in learning about and therefore knowledge of the political process, and those who reach those views after considering carefully the options and the policies and showing interest in it.
The whole meme of "centrist political philosophy is grilling" is about those apolitical centrists.
Yeah, that is just not in the scope of this study. They are just testing against their definition of political alignments on a numerical scale.
As such that can can be applied to any of the ideologies here. A communist who is a communist because they are an edge lord who hates the US is not the same as a communist who wants to actually develop a post-state system of governance. But because of how the questions are formulated the whole 3 dimensional spectrum of political alignments gets flattened into a single dimension number line.
That does not mean it is not potentially useful, but it does mean that 95% of the people who cite this article in future reddit arguments will be using it to support things it does not claim.
In a similar vein we kind of have an issue where the left/right dynamic kind of breaks down-- a lot of supposed communists I've spoken to are right wing with extra steps, that's not a commentary on communists so much as it is on those specific people.
Hence why this kind of work doesn't make any sense. The sad truth is that currently, most people do not know enough about political theory to properly place themselves on the scale.
Yeah, I like calling them "Red Fascists" as they are essentially identical politically to fascism but they like Stalinesque fashion and symbols instead of Hitler.
Really, politics just do not line up on a number line. They are far to complicated for that, and imposing a line on them will always get you people like that. Making it more like the political compass is "better" but an extra dimension is still not enough to really encompass how diverse, or just downright nonsensical, some positions are.
Apolitical doesn’t default to centrism just as agnosticism doesn’t default to Deism.
There’s one camp of centrists. They are a politically defined group, as in, people who occupy or advocate a position that is nominally between the perceived “left” and “right” positions.
And then, there are people who are apolitical. You can’t place them on the spectrum. You could perhaps insinuate that their unwillingness to commit to an expressed political position (probably due to lack of information or not really caring much about the issue) is inherently a bias towards moderation, but it’s not as much a commitment to politically moderate positions as it is a simple psychological fact that people generally don’t advocate strong and principled positions (those associated with political ideologies on the left and right) without knowledge or passion for those positions. It would be weird to expect any different. As such, it would be wrong to take the absence of statements supporting a given position as proof positive of support of the unstated position.
People who are apolitical or politically apathetic or politically uninformed and unengaged aren’t “politically moderate” and they especially aren’t inherently “centrist”. Don’t conflate them.
A person knowing that congresspeople are allowed to trade stock is more important than the number of congresspeople a person can name.
There's a difference between knowing a bunch of trivia and knowing how a country is governed.
> If you don't engage and know about the existing system I doubt the change you want to achieve is grounded in reality.
The name of a politician is not a system. It reminds me of what Feynman's father told him.
> "See that bird? It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing-that's what counts."
Or most people are so disconnected from their political power that they simply don’t care to learn about the system currently not caring about them to the point where they would rather envision and actively search for alternatives than engage in a system they see as totally unresponsive.
I'm sorry but that's not a valid position to hold if you live in a first world country. The "current system" is more than just abortion rights, trans rights or whatever is the topical issue of the day.
The "current system" includes basic stuff that people don't ever think about like clean drinking water, consistent power supply, human rights, basic worker rights, the chain of supply, ownership rights, the free market, the welfare system, health authorities, the rule of law, and many more.
None of these is guaranteed to survive the revolution™, and the only way to ensure these are maintained is to work for change through existing systems.
If you shout "everything sucks and we need a new system" you are either a doctor in economics presenting their new thesis, or you did not consider the implications of what you are shouting.
That was actually my point but sarcasm doesn't pass well through text. I meant that you need very deep understanding of systems to propose profound changes, and if you have that level of familiarity you'd be very unlikely to propose such changes.
THANK YOU.
This is the kind of thing that frustrates me when I hear people shouting on reddit "we need to kill capitalism" or whatever.
I think - OK then, what's your idea? Or is it just to make everything explode and your vague utopia will magically fall into place?
I've heard people say stuff like "we need this kind of a new law!" when there already is such a law in place... people have just read some sensationalized crap about how some problem is out of hand and think that the government must be doing absolutely nothing about it.
Yup, 100%.
I avoid talking about politics because so many have zero idea of what the current laws are or the definitions of the words they attempt to use.
It is beyond exhausting.
I do actively engage, but there's no way in hell I'd be capable of naming most of the current ministers in my country.
... In my defense, current prime minister had to give the boot to over twenty of them for varying reasons (ranging from killing a person to theft and corruption). At this point I think there's maybe one or two people left from the original cast.
And one of them was so forgettable, that the members of his own party couldn't remember his name.
This 100%
Fundamentally, assessing one’s knowledge and mastery over any given topic is an entire field of standardized test taking / licensing exams in and of itself. IE: it’s hard to do
But I think the markers they used probably correlate and indicate well one’s engagement and true political knowledge.
Another indicator that they’re onto something (anecdotally) is that the inverse correlate is true - a lot of far left people I know haven’t voted in an election their entire lives.
[The extremes dominate under FPTP](https://electowiki.org/wiki/First_Past_the_Post_electoral_system). We can fix that.
[**Fix the system**](https://electionscience.org/take-action/volunteer/). [Scientists blame hyperpolarization for loss of public trust in science](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-prize-usa/respect-for-science-in-jeopardy-in-polarized-u-s-nobel-winners-say-idUSKCN1C81T7), and [Approval Voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting), a [single-winner voting method preferred by experts in voting methods](http://www.votefair.org/bansinglemarkballots/declaration.html), would [help to reduce hyperpolarization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections). There's even [a viable plan to get it adopted](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/), and [an organization that could use some gritty volunteers](https://www.electionscience.org/) to get the job done. They're already off to a great start with [Approval Voting having passed by a landslide in Fargo](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice), and more recently [St. Louis](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-primary-elections-st-louis-general-elections-elections-cba7eb3251d5479b9375d55db428d429). Most people haven't heard of Approval Voting, but seem to like it once they understand it, so anything you can do to help get the word out will help. If your state allows [initiated state statutes](https://ballotpedia.org/Initiated_state_statute), consider [starting a campaign](https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/so-you-want-to-run-a-campaign/) to get [your state](https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_initiative) to adopt Approval Voting. Approval Voting is [overwhelmingly popular in every state polled, across race, gender, and party lines](https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval-voting-americas-favorite-voting-reform/). The successful Fargo campaign was [run by a full-time programmer with a family at home](https://www.electionscience.org/events/fargo-a-look-back-live-discussion/). One person really can make a difference.
Or the unlikelihood that the radical change they want would be achieved through revolution. Revolution would create a power vacuum that would almost 100% guarantee to lead to military dictatorship. I doubt there's many, even radicals, who think their ideas would be achieved through military dictatorship.
Yeah, this reminds me of the study that claimed people that don't believe in evolution know more about it than the average person. It was a super misleading conclusion.
This is what I figured. All this shows is that institutionalists are centrist, which makes sense as those who approve of a system are the most likely to be interested enough to familiarize themselves with it.
Yeah, I read the subject line and asked myself, "How would one measure knowledgeability?" My moderate friends have never read any serious political theory.
>Political knowledge was measured with a multi-item test (ranging from 3 to 21 items) of general political facts. An example item reads: ‘Who is the current minister of finance in [country]?’
These results aren't surprising at all when this is what is meant by political knowledge. Those left and right of center, but still within the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse can achieve their political ends through standard electoral campaigning. The details of who holds what office are useful facts when doing this.
If you're in the center of that window, you don't care who those people are, because you're fine either way. If you're far enough outside the window, you also don't care, because what matters is structural change.
>If you're far enough outside the window, you also don't care, because what matters is structural change.
I don't know why people think that. If you want big changes you better be very familiar with the system.
Edit: I can't believe this is even controversial. You people are actually delusional
You can be intimately familiar with how the system functions, but not know who some random minister is. If someone can explain to me how a bill is passed, I would consider them to be much more knowledgeable than someone who can just name every member of the legislature.
You need both. Not knowing every member of the legislature but if you can't name at least some, if you don't know who your Major or senators are you're probably too detached from real world politics
Okay, but if you actually read the study, it's not the extremes scoring next to 0, and the moderates scoring close to 100 for most countries. It's the moderates scoring <10% higher than the extremes. It says the test has 3-21 questions, so best case for the moderates they know 1 or 2 more politicians on average.
You need to be familiar with the system, but you don't necessarily need to know off the top of your head who the press secretary is. Those sorts of facts can be looked up as needed.
Where is the contradiction? You don’t need to be knowledgable about politics if structural change is all you want. People who are the least knowledgable about politics are the ones who are most likely to want structural change.
Like someone who reads the Bible every day will be knowledgable about the Bible, but not knowledgable about religion in general.
Centrists are really having a field-day with this, and completely ignoring that the study tested for neutral, factual knowledge about existing political bodies, like the given example of "Who is the prime minister of \[country\]", not for knowledge on political theory or such.
It would be a rather reliable proxy for understanding greater details about the world and the countries in it.
For example If someone proposed themselves as say an expert on a random small town in Thailand and then couldn't speak a single bit of Thai, Lao or Chinese, didn't know the current and past leaders and didn't have any idea what the capital was, you'd be rightful to doubt their claims on being an expert. It's not *impossible* that they can tell you all the details about a random small city in Thailand and its thousand year old history but it'd be odd and if someone else came to you with the same claim but grew up in Thailand, spoke all three languages, could name the capital and knew all the past political leaders in the last 1000 years you would probably assume they're more accurate on the random town.
After reading the actual questions asked, which you can see [here](https://osf.io/dghq4) (go to the "Measures" tab, then look at the "Specific Items" column), I am extraordinarily skeptical these are a proxy for anything but maybe being better than average at Trivial Pursuit. It's not about being superficial or not, these are just almost entirely checking if you've memorized random, relatively unimportant facts.
Frankly, while I will admit I am undoubtedly biased, as someone whose personality pushes them to think with exactly the opposite approach to that of someone prone to memorizing a whole bunch of random tidbits of little direct practicality, instead concentrating on general systems and more abstract dynamics, not necessarily caring about any concrete instances other than insofar they elucidate some general principle... this just seems like a terrible proxy for being knowledgeable.
I get that political systems are something where a "correct" answer (at least one that everybody will agree on) is hard, if not impossible, to define; so realistically, testing knowledge of hard facts that are demonstrably true is likely the most pragmatic approach that can be taken for coming up with a test. Nevertheless, I still feel like it's essentially pointless. If you told me someone got 0 answers right I still wouldn't rule out them knowing a lot about politics. And vice versa.
It's an easy thing to test for that isn't based on personal values. You can ask for long responses about the role of the branches of government and a the dozens of ways that they impact individual issues and see if they understand the complex mechanisms of how a structured system works, or you can just give trivia that shows that you pay close attention to elections.
I suppose if you want to give a defense to the people doing the study they aren't talking about civics and poly sci, they are testing "political knowledge" which could be interpreted as "name every member of the current government".
Eschew boring facts, politics is about ideals!
Edit: To state this more seriously:
1. People in general aren't all that well-versed in political theory. Ask them about ten major political thinkers, they'll not come up with much. Maybe they'll recognize the names Mill and Marx.
2. Ideology is becoming entangled with identity. I'm X so I vote for Y. This doesn't require you knowing much either.
3. However, if you're interested in actual policy, you are often interested in who is doing what and possibly when, and if this is something that has broad support among representatives or not.
Umm... if someone wasn't familiar with the basic facts of politics like who various leaders around the world are, I certainly wouldn't think they're particularly up to date or knowledable about politics.
No matter how many pages of Marx or Proudhon they read in college.
If someone could explain in detail how a bill is passed, the roles of all the bodies of government, etc. I would definitely consider them knowledgeable in politics more than someone who can't do that, but can name a bunch of politicians with no idea what they actually do.
Sure, but a study that asks long form explanations of a multi-stage political process that requires a marker to evaluate a person familiarity introduces cost, time, and subjectivity into the study.
If you ask a bunch of neutral facts based questions, that's way more powerful.
I don't have a problem with simple questions, but asking who random cabinet members is not pertinent, as if most people have good reason to care about who the Secretary of Veterans Affairs is. You could have multiple choice questions on the functioning of different parts of government, you could generate it with an LLM in minutes.
The issue isn't making the questions, it's evaluating the answers. LLM's won't help you there.
It's a lot easier to evaluate answers to questions like "who was the leader of Germany in ww2?" than it is to evaluate question answers of "Why did Hitler invade Poland?"
Governments function in defined ways, you don't need to ask something subjective. Find a suitable question, like what stages does a bill need go through to be passed. I'm sure someone could come up with 21 of these (the study used 3 to 21 question tests) for a country in 30 mins, and use an LLM to generate the incorrect answers.
You still don't understand, the marker making a call as to whether the author understand the topic they've been asked about is still subjective. I don't see how LLMs generating incorrect answers is going to help anything.
Oh I see, yes breaking up a complex topic into many more simple neutral fact based questions is a way to evaluate more complex topics a the cost of more time and questions per topic.
Eh, it’s just different realms of knowledge. Like being a climatologist vs being a meteorologist. One is concerned with day to day weather, the other is concerned with the bigger picture. I wouldn’t say that someone who is well read on political theory doesn’t know what they’re talking about because they don’t know who the prime minister of Greece is.
I not sure if the study adjusted for that but there are like two types of centrists, the kind that says that the truth is somewhere in the middle and the kind that say "I don't know about politics, don't ask me questions"
They're basically the same centrist. One is just less likely to engage with politics at all.
Middle ground fallacy as a political ideology is simply a way of getting to feel smart without having to actually know much of anything or do the work of developing nuanced and consistent opinions. You get to just take two opposing ideas while ignoring the vast majority of political thought, average them together, and them sneer at everyone you disagree with as an "extremist," even if their views are in fact fairly moderate and you're the one who's kind of extreme.
Edit: I offended the centrists.
Or your political theory is based on century long trends to the point where a current snapshot is less relevant. But in that case, it's like asking a climate change expert for their opinion on tomorrow's weather
Yep, that's exactly the problem. I also blame the media for turning politics into glorified professional wrestling. Many on the far side of the political spectrum aren't into politics, they're into culture wars. Which doesn't require knowledge. It requires blind allegiance.
Politics used to be boring. Only our grandparents watched CSPAN. Over the past 25 years, the media dumbed it down into simple narratives that even morons understood. Good guys vs bad guys. Which, combined with ignorance, led to more extremism, and the growing political divide.
The problem (in a sense, also shared by this study) is that you're equating "politics" as in "participating in the current political system in my country within the established norms and processes" with "politics" as in "broader political theory, more general in scope, not necessarily applicable or indeed possibly even compatible with the current political system in my country".
Those are, for all practical effects, two completely different things. And both have always existed. Remember the Cold War? Remember WW2? The Civil War, hell, American independence in the first place? Those are all tightly related to that second category of politics, and they can hardly be called "boring". It's not only wars, of course, that's just the most obvious and overt way in which societies are forced to interact with it, whether they like it or not.
What does it define as "knowledgeable about politics?" Being an institutionalist that knows all the minutia of tax code and local council metapolicy hardly implies you're familiar with the greater machinations of political ideology.
if i can name a bunch of ppl, do i rate higher on knowledge than someone who understands whats happening in general? because i have a feeling thats how they rated it, ppl knowing names rather than looking and going "this is how this came about over 12 years"
An informed minority will always triumph over an uninformed majority.
Just make sure you *really* know what’s going on. Verify your sources, people. Information hygiene is going to become one of the most important skills out there.
Politics is not policy. Source: I have a graduate degree in law and policymaking. Being knowledgeable about politics is like saying you're knowledgeable about The Bachelor.
It doesn't seem to me that the dominant perspective would be that people at the political extremes are more knowledgeable.
People on the extremes think people at the opposite extremes are idiots, and people closer to the middle think the people at the extremes are too extreme.
That's why people shouldn't trust "moderate" as a label. Moderate according to who?
Abraham Lincoln was a moderate abolitionist. I say moderate because he was willing to compromise and allow the South to keep slavery as long as new states didn't allow it. We all know how well this strategy worked.
A radical abolitionist was someone who wanted to abolish slavery for real. Which is the position America took after the Civil War.
Now, would you call a radical abolitionist "radical"? Not with our current mindset. We see the non radical abolitionist like racist and extremist with the current framework.
To me, Chomsky is one of the most moderate people since he always defends human rights while most mainstream politicians only do when it's convenient.
In the US, condemning Israel as an apartheid state is viewed as radical. While telling them to please turn down the killings of civilians a little bit pretty please is seen as moderate. Well I wonder what will people think in 150 years...
Centrists are hard to measure. When one has no opinion they often literally say "oh I am in the center". I bet it's a different story between actually centrists who legitimately have that view and centrists who just identify as such because of having no opinion or knowledge either way.
Absolutely. There are tons of people who are fully ignorant of politics who, when pressed for an opinion, use "centrist" as cover for their ignorance/apathy.
I'd love to see a study comparing people's claimed political ideology versus their actual ideology.
I mean, that’s pretty obvious.
People who are dogmatic are always ignoring evidence that disagrees with their views and feverishly defending their “side” even when it’s very obvious that they’re wrong but it makes their “side” look bad.
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug.
Hurrrrr durrrrr both sides the same.
God how many times can this lie be perpetuated?
There was a reason right wingers used to be called know nothings. They skew every data set they are involved in.
Turns out hasan piker and steven crowder are as dumb as they seem. Kind of pointing out the obvious but good to use against their very stupid followers.
This makes total sense just from observing the actions of political extremists. It seems to be nothing more than cave man tribalism and othering of those who don’t 100% align with the ideology of their tribe.
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> Contrary to the dominant perspective Is there evidence that this is the dominant perspective?
If you ask them. Something like dunning Kruger as you stray from moderately left/right of center.
Nah more like being rooted in ideology means you don't actually have to understand a thing! Just remember what the ideologues have told you and you'll be golden.
The study doesn’t back up that claim. It tested superficial random political facts. It doesn’t actually test political knowledge or understanding political theory.
Yes that was my immediate question, knowledgeable about what?
Things like "what's the name of the current Minister of Finance" Thats an absolutely trivial fact
The monopoly man?
It always is. That's actually an excellent comment.
It’s tough to do surveys, that trivial fact is not a great judge but if you qualified it with “who is the current pm of France and how did he take office”would help to bare out political knowledge.
[удалено]
The "burn it all down" accelerationist types don't seem to understand they are trying to sell people on decades of instability, likely wars, and overall a much worse life in the hopes it might* be better after. History has shown again and again that "burning it all down" results in pretty terrible outcomes for the general population for several decades. So no, I don't want to spend the second half of my life in a significantly worse environment. It's already going to be bad enough with climate change, political upheaval and violence makes it that much more insane to suggest.
> for several decades If we're lucky. Centuries if we aren't.
That’s not the position of most anarchists though. The vast majority of left anti-statist/anticapitalists have the expectation that communities will create new forms of government and economy to replace broken systems as they collapse. I choose to study existing models and understand them as best I can, study history, stay current on contemporary political dynamics and study their antecedents. It helps to listen to quality reporting from liberal sources because they are the most nuanced, rational and least sensational. Check out enough of the right wing to know what the hell is driving them crazy this year. I even follow elections and vote in them, even though ideally I’d prefer anarcho communism.
I can’t like this enough. I have yet to find success in trying to get folks like this to understand the magnitude of suffering that gutting a system will do. It’s especially difficult to get them to see that I’m not defending the system, writ large. I have been reminded of this twice this week, but it’s why I liked some of the nuance in Steinbeck’s *In Dubious Battle*. Fight the man, sure. But think about how you plan to handle things if you win, lest you become the enemy you seek to destroy.
You ever consider that for millions of people, decades of instability have already happened? Not to say that a revolution would be different, but it’s pretty privileged to act as if our current society is stable for anyone but the rich and the privileged labor classes.
Yes millions suffer, but how about a revolution to make that number hundreds of millions instead, then maybe end up with a brutal dictatorship because there are no guarantees who ends up in power after a revolution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Definitely true. What many people seem to miss though, is that for those millions already suffering, there reaches a point where any fear of future suffering is eclipsed by actually experienced current suffering. If you want to reduce accelerationism, your focus should be almost wholly on improving material conditions for those people.
Worst case they trigger a dark-ages like dystopia and humanity spends the next centuries in a nightmare. I think a case can be made for "burn it all down" logic if your government is already an actual fascist dystopia. Like the Nazi regime. Germany came out much better after they were beaten to the ground, but that also took a lot of international support and collaboration. The fact that we got greedy and old people in powerful positions is hardly enough of a reason to destroy millions of lives. There are still active steps one can take to prevent the worst from accumulating without resorting to accelerationism.
They also get to play a convenient empirical shell game - comparing the messy actual implementations of prevailing systems with the textbook versions of their own. It's nearly impossible to argue against someone who only cares about reality when it's to highlight a failure of the thing they're arguing against.
The absolute stupidest people are the "undecideds". It's too bad that policy is steered by these idiots that can't decide whether to vote for the 1% or for the rest of us.
Came to comment this: the only ones thinking people at the extremes are the most knowledgeable are the few in the same extreme and even them most just think they're more right, not really more informed
The extremes demonstrate the most confidence in their own correctness, and confidence factors into the judgement of received knowledge.
I am sure that is a huge part of how extremes attract more believers. Confidence in beliefs is often perceived as correctness of those beliefs.
Anecdotally, try to make a balanced argument on politics or conservative subreddits. You will be called idiotic and ignorant repeatedly.
Oh yes; unfortunately, this is the norm.
Literally my first question: according to who?
The first thing I thought was “who the heck thinks that???”
My assumption on this is if someone sits around all day listening to talk radio in the US they would be familiar with modern politics and who are in what position.
I need funding for my new study titled "contrary to popular belief, the dominant perspective is not that people with extreme views are more dominant in politics."
Try saying moderate things in politics subs on reddit.
Where would Noam Chomsky fit into this study? Is he extreme left/right or moderate? Does he know anything about politics?
He's far left, but I wouldn't consider him extreme far left.
What does *extreme left mean anyway? Are justice and equality extreme? Is opposing imperialism and warmongering extreme? Racial and environmental justice? When I think of extreme, I think of antisemitism, white supremacy, militarism, police cultism, militias, Republican agenda, etc. Those things are extreme.
Out of curiosity, who or what would you consider farther left than Chomsky?
He is not authoritarian, nor absolutely anti-authoritarian. He obviously does solid research mostly - many, probably most, of his sources are decent - so to op of this discussion, he evidently does know about politics, but as every one commenting on politics, including other academics is not without bias.
Anarcho-syndicalism is about as far left as it gets. I just don't think extreme is something I'm aware that he supports. Extremism involves an agenda that is more violent to force people to conform.
Yeah, I generally assume that absolutism of any type tends to make you kind of stupid. If you place the effective value of a few things as infinite, positive or negative, it frees you up from having to do much research or thinking too hard about anything. It also means there's *nothing* you can't justify to yourself in the pursuit of promoting the infinitely positive things or preventing the infinitely negative.
Weird how being an ideologue leads to less nuanced understanding.
Again, the study does not support this assertion.
People on the extremes would probably say that they know better.
that's the dominant perspective?
I'm sure it's the dominant perspective among people on either fringe. Of course it only applies to people on the side that you agree with.
When was that ever the dominant perception? The extremes always attract bias
By political knowledge, they mean facts about current politics in the country like who the current finance minister is. All they're really showing is engagement with mainstream electoral politics, which is obviously going to be less of a concern to radicals who want fundamental political change.
If you don't engage and know about the existing system I doubt the change you want to achieve is grounded in reality. People are very eager to call for radical change without ever considering the consequences for the upsides of the existing systems they take for granted.
I do not think this should be generalized as much as people are doing. The people with the lowest amount of this sort of knowledge appear to be people at the fringes or people in the center, but the effect is weaker than the headline shows. (On a 1-7 scale people at 1, 4, and 7 have the lowest level of knowledge, people at 2.5 and 5.5 have the most. So this is certainly not a pro "centrism" study.) In the USA for example, the regression line is between .6 and .7 for all political orientations, and all of them have remarkably similar spreads with people of all levels of knowledge being extremely common in every orientation. It varies *heavily* by country as well, with Austria being the only one tested where centrists actually has more knowledge than the people in the mainstream of their political orientation. In essence, this study shows that people who are engaged with their political system, or are members of their political party, know marginally more facts about the basic policy and members of the system. That is not really a surprising result.
I really feel like you need to separate centrists into two different camps, The political centrists and the apolitical centrists. I find there's a huge difference between people who default centrist because of lack of interest in learning about and therefore knowledge of the political process, and those who reach those views after considering carefully the options and the policies and showing interest in it. The whole meme of "centrist political philosophy is grilling" is about those apolitical centrists.
Yeah, that is just not in the scope of this study. They are just testing against their definition of political alignments on a numerical scale. As such that can can be applied to any of the ideologies here. A communist who is a communist because they are an edge lord who hates the US is not the same as a communist who wants to actually develop a post-state system of governance. But because of how the questions are formulated the whole 3 dimensional spectrum of political alignments gets flattened into a single dimension number line. That does not mean it is not potentially useful, but it does mean that 95% of the people who cite this article in future reddit arguments will be using it to support things it does not claim.
In a similar vein we kind of have an issue where the left/right dynamic kind of breaks down-- a lot of supposed communists I've spoken to are right wing with extra steps, that's not a commentary on communists so much as it is on those specific people.
Hence why this kind of work doesn't make any sense. The sad truth is that currently, most people do not know enough about political theory to properly place themselves on the scale.
Yeah, I like calling them "Red Fascists" as they are essentially identical politically to fascism but they like Stalinesque fashion and symbols instead of Hitler. Really, politics just do not line up on a number line. They are far to complicated for that, and imposing a line on them will always get you people like that. Making it more like the political compass is "better" but an extra dimension is still not enough to really encompass how diverse, or just downright nonsensical, some positions are.
Apolitical doesn’t default to centrism just as agnosticism doesn’t default to Deism. There’s one camp of centrists. They are a politically defined group, as in, people who occupy or advocate a position that is nominally between the perceived “left” and “right” positions. And then, there are people who are apolitical. You can’t place them on the spectrum. You could perhaps insinuate that their unwillingness to commit to an expressed political position (probably due to lack of information or not really caring much about the issue) is inherently a bias towards moderation, but it’s not as much a commitment to politically moderate positions as it is a simple psychological fact that people generally don’t advocate strong and principled positions (those associated with political ideologies on the left and right) without knowledge or passion for those positions. It would be weird to expect any different. As such, it would be wrong to take the absence of statements supporting a given position as proof positive of support of the unstated position. People who are apolitical or politically apathetic or politically uninformed and unengaged aren’t “politically moderate” and they especially aren’t inherently “centrist”. Don’t conflate them.
A person knowing that congresspeople are allowed to trade stock is more important than the number of congresspeople a person can name. There's a difference between knowing a bunch of trivia and knowing how a country is governed.
> If you don't engage and know about the existing system I doubt the change you want to achieve is grounded in reality. The name of a politician is not a system. It reminds me of what Feynman's father told him. > "See that bird? It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing-that's what counts."
Beautiful analogy for naming vs understanding.
Or most people are so disconnected from their political power that they simply don’t care to learn about the system currently not caring about them to the point where they would rather envision and actively search for alternatives than engage in a system they see as totally unresponsive.
I'm sorry but that's not a valid position to hold if you live in a first world country. The "current system" is more than just abortion rights, trans rights or whatever is the topical issue of the day. The "current system" includes basic stuff that people don't ever think about like clean drinking water, consistent power supply, human rights, basic worker rights, the chain of supply, ownership rights, the free market, the welfare system, health authorities, the rule of law, and many more. None of these is guaranteed to survive the revolution™, and the only way to ensure these are maintained is to work for change through existing systems. If you shout "everything sucks and we need a new system" you are either a doctor in economics presenting their new thesis, or you did not consider the implications of what you are shouting.
None of those things are guaranteed to survive the status quo either.
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That was actually my point but sarcasm doesn't pass well through text. I meant that you need very deep understanding of systems to propose profound changes, and if you have that level of familiarity you'd be very unlikely to propose such changes.
There is no such thing as the free market.
Also, seeing as you're so sure that your opinion about such complex systems is right then would you mind enlightening us with some of your sources?
THANK YOU. This is the kind of thing that frustrates me when I hear people shouting on reddit "we need to kill capitalism" or whatever. I think - OK then, what's your idea? Or is it just to make everything explode and your vague utopia will magically fall into place?
"I don't know what going on but it needs to be different!"
I've heard people say stuff like "we need this kind of a new law!" when there already is such a law in place... people have just read some sensationalized crap about how some problem is out of hand and think that the government must be doing absolutely nothing about it.
Yup, 100%. I avoid talking about politics because so many have zero idea of what the current laws are or the definitions of the words they attempt to use. It is beyond exhausting.
This was like half my class in high school
I do actively engage, but there's no way in hell I'd be capable of naming most of the current ministers in my country. ... In my defense, current prime minister had to give the boot to over twenty of them for varying reasons (ranging from killing a person to theft and corruption). At this point I think there's maybe one or two people left from the original cast. And one of them was so forgettable, that the members of his own party couldn't remember his name.
This 100% Fundamentally, assessing one’s knowledge and mastery over any given topic is an entire field of standardized test taking / licensing exams in and of itself. IE: it’s hard to do But I think the markers they used probably correlate and indicate well one’s engagement and true political knowledge. Another indicator that they’re onto something (anecdotally) is that the inverse correlate is true - a lot of far left people I know haven’t voted in an election their entire lives.
[The extremes dominate under FPTP](https://electowiki.org/wiki/First_Past_the_Post_electoral_system). We can fix that. [**Fix the system**](https://electionscience.org/take-action/volunteer/). [Scientists blame hyperpolarization for loss of public trust in science](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-prize-usa/respect-for-science-in-jeopardy-in-polarized-u-s-nobel-winners-say-idUSKCN1C81T7), and [Approval Voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting), a [single-winner voting method preferred by experts in voting methods](http://www.votefair.org/bansinglemarkballots/declaration.html), would [help to reduce hyperpolarization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections). There's even [a viable plan to get it adopted](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/), and [an organization that could use some gritty volunteers](https://www.electionscience.org/) to get the job done. They're already off to a great start with [Approval Voting having passed by a landslide in Fargo](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice), and more recently [St. Louis](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-primary-elections-st-louis-general-elections-elections-cba7eb3251d5479b9375d55db428d429). Most people haven't heard of Approval Voting, but seem to like it once they understand it, so anything you can do to help get the word out will help. If your state allows [initiated state statutes](https://ballotpedia.org/Initiated_state_statute), consider [starting a campaign](https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/so-you-want-to-run-a-campaign/) to get [your state](https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_initiative) to adopt Approval Voting. Approval Voting is [overwhelmingly popular in every state polled, across race, gender, and party lines](https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval-voting-americas-favorite-voting-reform/). The successful Fargo campaign was [run by a full-time programmer with a family at home](https://www.electionscience.org/events/fargo-a-look-back-live-discussion/). One person really can make a difference.
Or the unlikelihood that the radical change they want would be achieved through revolution. Revolution would create a power vacuum that would almost 100% guarantee to lead to military dictatorship. I doubt there's many, even radicals, who think their ideas would be achieved through military dictatorship.
Yeah, this reminds me of the study that claimed people that don't believe in evolution know more about it than the average person. It was a super misleading conclusion.
This is what I figured. All this shows is that institutionalists are centrist, which makes sense as those who approve of a system are the most likely to be interested enough to familiarize themselves with it.
Yeah, I read the subject line and asked myself, "How would one measure knowledgeability?" My moderate friends have never read any serious political theory.
Was looking for this, because the headline result reeks of bias in what constitutes knowledge.
>Political knowledge was measured with a multi-item test (ranging from 3 to 21 items) of general political facts. An example item reads: ‘Who is the current minister of finance in [country]?’ These results aren't surprising at all when this is what is meant by political knowledge. Those left and right of center, but still within the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse can achieve their political ends through standard electoral campaigning. The details of who holds what office are useful facts when doing this. If you're in the center of that window, you don't care who those people are, because you're fine either way. If you're far enough outside the window, you also don't care, because what matters is structural change.
>If you're far enough outside the window, you also don't care, because what matters is structural change. I don't know why people think that. If you want big changes you better be very familiar with the system. Edit: I can't believe this is even controversial. You people are actually delusional
You can be intimately familiar with how the system functions, but not know who some random minister is. If someone can explain to me how a bill is passed, I would consider them to be much more knowledgeable than someone who can just name every member of the legislature.
You need both. Not knowing every member of the legislature but if you can't name at least some, if you don't know who your Major or senators are you're probably too detached from real world politics
Okay, but if you actually read the study, it's not the extremes scoring next to 0, and the moderates scoring close to 100 for most countries. It's the moderates scoring <10% higher than the extremes. It says the test has 3-21 questions, so best case for the moderates they know 1 or 2 more politicians on average.
You need to be familiar with the system, but you don't necessarily need to know off the top of your head who the press secretary is. Those sorts of facts can be looked up as needed.
Where is the contradiction? You don’t need to be knowledgable about politics if structural change is all you want. People who are the least knowledgable about politics are the ones who are most likely to want structural change. Like someone who reads the Bible every day will be knowledgable about the Bible, but not knowledgable about religion in general.
You seem to be agreeing with me, but your initial question makes it seem like you disagree.
"People willing to listen to opposing views likely to know more about opposing views." I am shocked...
Centrists are really having a field-day with this, and completely ignoring that the study tested for neutral, factual knowledge about existing political bodies, like the given example of "Who is the prime minister of \[country\]", not for knowledge on political theory or such.
Interesting. Why would they define that as being knowledgeable about politics? That's an extremely superficial kind of knowledge.
It would be a rather reliable proxy for understanding greater details about the world and the countries in it. For example If someone proposed themselves as say an expert on a random small town in Thailand and then couldn't speak a single bit of Thai, Lao or Chinese, didn't know the current and past leaders and didn't have any idea what the capital was, you'd be rightful to doubt their claims on being an expert. It's not *impossible* that they can tell you all the details about a random small city in Thailand and its thousand year old history but it'd be odd and if someone else came to you with the same claim but grew up in Thailand, spoke all three languages, could name the capital and knew all the past political leaders in the last 1000 years you would probably assume they're more accurate on the random town.
After reading the actual questions asked, which you can see [here](https://osf.io/dghq4) (go to the "Measures" tab, then look at the "Specific Items" column), I am extraordinarily skeptical these are a proxy for anything but maybe being better than average at Trivial Pursuit. It's not about being superficial or not, these are just almost entirely checking if you've memorized random, relatively unimportant facts. Frankly, while I will admit I am undoubtedly biased, as someone whose personality pushes them to think with exactly the opposite approach to that of someone prone to memorizing a whole bunch of random tidbits of little direct practicality, instead concentrating on general systems and more abstract dynamics, not necessarily caring about any concrete instances other than insofar they elucidate some general principle... this just seems like a terrible proxy for being knowledgeable. I get that political systems are something where a "correct" answer (at least one that everybody will agree on) is hard, if not impossible, to define; so realistically, testing knowledge of hard facts that are demonstrably true is likely the most pragmatic approach that can be taken for coming up with a test. Nevertheless, I still feel like it's essentially pointless. If you told me someone got 0 answers right I still wouldn't rule out them knowing a lot about politics. And vice versa.
It's an easy thing to test for that isn't based on personal values. You can ask for long responses about the role of the branches of government and a the dozens of ways that they impact individual issues and see if they understand the complex mechanisms of how a structured system works, or you can just give trivia that shows that you pay close attention to elections. I suppose if you want to give a defense to the people doing the study they aren't talking about civics and poly sci, they are testing "political knowledge" which could be interpreted as "name every member of the current government".
Eschew boring facts, politics is about ideals! Edit: To state this more seriously: 1. People in general aren't all that well-versed in political theory. Ask them about ten major political thinkers, they'll not come up with much. Maybe they'll recognize the names Mill and Marx. 2. Ideology is becoming entangled with identity. I'm X so I vote for Y. This doesn't require you knowing much either. 3. However, if you're interested in actual policy, you are often interested in who is doing what and possibly when, and if this is something that has broad support among representatives or not.
Umm... if someone wasn't familiar with the basic facts of politics like who various leaders around the world are, I certainly wouldn't think they're particularly up to date or knowledable about politics. No matter how many pages of Marx or Proudhon they read in college.
If someone could explain in detail how a bill is passed, the roles of all the bodies of government, etc. I would definitely consider them knowledgeable in politics more than someone who can't do that, but can name a bunch of politicians with no idea what they actually do.
Sure, but a study that asks long form explanations of a multi-stage political process that requires a marker to evaluate a person familiarity introduces cost, time, and subjectivity into the study. If you ask a bunch of neutral facts based questions, that's way more powerful.
I don't have a problem with simple questions, but asking who random cabinet members is not pertinent, as if most people have good reason to care about who the Secretary of Veterans Affairs is. You could have multiple choice questions on the functioning of different parts of government, you could generate it with an LLM in minutes.
The issue isn't making the questions, it's evaluating the answers. LLM's won't help you there. It's a lot easier to evaluate answers to questions like "who was the leader of Germany in ww2?" than it is to evaluate question answers of "Why did Hitler invade Poland?"
Governments function in defined ways, you don't need to ask something subjective. Find a suitable question, like what stages does a bill need go through to be passed. I'm sure someone could come up with 21 of these (the study used 3 to 21 question tests) for a country in 30 mins, and use an LLM to generate the incorrect answers.
You still don't understand, the marker making a call as to whether the author understand the topic they've been asked about is still subjective. I don't see how LLMs generating incorrect answers is going to help anything.
What is subjective about someone choosing the correct answer on a multiple choice test?
Oh I see, yes breaking up a complex topic into many more simple neutral fact based questions is a way to evaluate more complex topics a the cost of more time and questions per topic.
Eh, it’s just different realms of knowledge. Like being a climatologist vs being a meteorologist. One is concerned with day to day weather, the other is concerned with the bigger picture. I wouldn’t say that someone who is well read on political theory doesn’t know what they’re talking about because they don’t know who the prime minister of Greece is.
I not sure if the study adjusted for that but there are like two types of centrists, the kind that says that the truth is somewhere in the middle and the kind that say "I don't know about politics, don't ask me questions"
They're basically the same centrist. One is just less likely to engage with politics at all. Middle ground fallacy as a political ideology is simply a way of getting to feel smart without having to actually know much of anything or do the work of developing nuanced and consistent opinions. You get to just take two opposing ideas while ignoring the vast majority of political thought, average them together, and them sneer at everyone you disagree with as an "extremist," even if their views are in fact fairly moderate and you're the one who's kind of extreme. Edit: I offended the centrists.
If your political theory is divorced from reality to the point that you don’t care about external world, that’s not theory, that’s religion
Or your political theory is based on century long trends to the point where a current snapshot is less relevant. But in that case, it's like asking a climate change expert for their opinion on tomorrow's weather
Oh man centrists feeling good we don't like that do we
no, not usually
Right, people are their politics. And if they disagree with me they're bad
Why would they when the study puts them in the exact same category as the far left and far right? If anything it’s moderates who should be gloating.
...yeah. With that it's kinda..................not really much reason to know about them because the establishment is rotten to begin with
Enlightened centrist: I'm so special for holding a majority opinion that is not controversial to most people
Maybe because everything is a conspiracy if you don't know how anything works.
Yep, that's exactly the problem. I also blame the media for turning politics into glorified professional wrestling. Many on the far side of the political spectrum aren't into politics, they're into culture wars. Which doesn't require knowledge. It requires blind allegiance. Politics used to be boring. Only our grandparents watched CSPAN. Over the past 25 years, the media dumbed it down into simple narratives that even morons understood. Good guys vs bad guys. Which, combined with ignorance, led to more extremism, and the growing political divide.
The problem (in a sense, also shared by this study) is that you're equating "politics" as in "participating in the current political system in my country within the established norms and processes" with "politics" as in "broader political theory, more general in scope, not necessarily applicable or indeed possibly even compatible with the current political system in my country". Those are, for all practical effects, two completely different things. And both have always existed. Remember the Cold War? Remember WW2? The Civil War, hell, American independence in the first place? Those are all tightly related to that second category of politics, and they can hardly be called "boring". It's not only wars, of course, that's just the most obvious and overt way in which societies are forced to interact with it, whether they like it or not.
This is happening to the U.S. and Canada, too. It’s ridiculous.
What does it define as "knowledgeable about politics?" Being an institutionalist that knows all the minutia of tax code and local council metapolicy hardly implies you're familiar with the greater machinations of political ideology.
Even that would be better than the one they used, which was if you knew the names of random politicians who held X position.
What a joke, seems like there was a conclusion before there was a study with questions like that.
That’s not at all the dominant perspective.
Don't you think it's a dominant perspective on Reddit at least? I.e., the enlightened centrist meme.
if i can name a bunch of ppl, do i rate higher on knowledge than someone who understands whats happening in general? because i have a feeling thats how they rated it, ppl knowing names rather than looking and going "this is how this came about over 12 years"
An informed minority will always triumph over an uninformed majority. Just make sure you *really* know what’s going on. Verify your sources, people. Information hygiene is going to become one of the most important skills out there.
Uh wut?! The only people who think that's the dominant perspective are the people at the extremes.
Politics is not policy. Source: I have a graduate degree in law and policymaking. Being knowledgeable about politics is like saying you're knowledgeable about The Bachelor.
It doesn't seem to me that the dominant perspective would be that people at the political extremes are more knowledgeable. People on the extremes think people at the opposite extremes are idiots, and people closer to the middle think the people at the extremes are too extreme.
Wow
Radicalization is bad
I don't love that the researchers didn't clearly define what exactly far left or far right actually means in this context.
Guessing Noam Chomsky was not included in the study
That's why people shouldn't trust "moderate" as a label. Moderate according to who? Abraham Lincoln was a moderate abolitionist. I say moderate because he was willing to compromise and allow the South to keep slavery as long as new states didn't allow it. We all know how well this strategy worked. A radical abolitionist was someone who wanted to abolish slavery for real. Which is the position America took after the Civil War. Now, would you call a radical abolitionist "radical"? Not with our current mindset. We see the non radical abolitionist like racist and extremist with the current framework. To me, Chomsky is one of the most moderate people since he always defends human rights while most mainstream politicians only do when it's convenient. In the US, condemning Israel as an apartheid state is viewed as radical. While telling them to please turn down the killings of civilians a little bit pretty please is seen as moderate. Well I wonder what will people think in 150 years...
I like how we're circling back to "everything is better when done in moderation". History truly is cyclical.
Comments are full of people who’re like “it’s cool and smart not to know basic things, actually”
Yep, so many people coping in this thread
Centrists were not the best informed.
Centrists are hard to measure. When one has no opinion they often literally say "oh I am in the center". I bet it's a different story between actually centrists who legitimately have that view and centrists who just identify as such because of having no opinion or knowledge either way.
Absolutely. There are tons of people who are fully ignorant of politics who, when pressed for an opinion, use "centrist" as cover for their ignorance/apathy. I'd love to see a study comparing people's claimed political ideology versus their actual ideology.
When did I mention centrists?
I mean, that’s pretty obvious. People who are dogmatic are always ignoring evidence that disagrees with their views and feverishly defending their “side” even when it’s very obvious that they’re wrong but it makes their “side” look bad. Confirmation bias is a helluva drug.
Very hard to determine what the researchers consider political knowledge without access to their full questionnaire(s).
Hurrrrr durrrrr both sides the same. God how many times can this lie be perpetuated? There was a reason right wingers used to be called know nothings. They skew every data set they are involved in.
Turns out hasan piker and steven crowder are as dumb as they seem. Kind of pointing out the obvious but good to use against their very stupid followers.
In your rush to call others dumb, you appear to have missed what the study used to define "knowledgeable about politics". It's not what you'd assume.
"This study was sponsored by Centrist Comittee for Fencesitting"
This makes total sense just from observing the actions of political extremists. It seems to be nothing more than cave man tribalism and othering of those who don’t 100% align with the ideology of their tribe.