Frog ready to grill now.
The political compass might be pretty arbitrary and biased but I do think it does a decent job as describing most of the political divisions that exist in society. Frankly, I don’t really know of a better model but I’m open to learning about one.
If you want more nuance, you need more dimensions to display them. The compass is basically taking two principal components of something with arbitrarily high dimensionality, in order to flatten this multidimensional conceptual ‘political ideology’ position to a plane .
The easiest way is to add planes with axes that are orthogonal to the left/right auth/anarcho axes, or alternatively you can decompose left/right and auth/anarcho into their own 2d components.
It’s not the better model; it’s the framework to build a better model. My initial ideas are using a second plane with enviro/industrial and tech/primitivist as a secondary plane. They aren’t completely orthogonal to the main axes, but should be different enough to get new decision boundaries.
Politics isn’t just high-dimensional, it’s non-Euclidean. The orthogonality of axes depends on the position in the graph. Stalinists and fascists are more alike than anarchocommunists and anarchocapitalists, despite them only differring on the auth/anarcho axis.
There’s an inherent imperialist centrist bias of a principal component analysis that measures the principal components as weighted by a specific present-day in-group. Are historical suffragettes extreme left for their anarchoterrorism or extreme right for their racial beliefs? In truth, when centrism accepts a new belief, there is a non-Euclidean wormhole that takes a centrist slice of the beliefs outside the Overton window along with those of its advocates who are otherwise okay with supporting the current system. In the 00s and 10s there was a pipeline of queer people who become conservative once their own rights became relatively secured. But this leaves historical figures in a limbo outside the centrist narrative, usually erased from the public consciousness.
Graphs like these leave those historical figures out because they look weird no matter how you do it. Is an anti-slavery terrorist far-left or centrist? Is a turbo-racist who committed terrorism to support women’s right to vote but who opposed abortion far-left or far-right? Or are they averaged out into the center, putting terrorists who disagree with everything the center stands for and centrists at the same point in the mapping?
And this is why the political compass should burn regardless of its number of dimensions. It enforces the centrist worldview of its in-group, being unable to render most political developments in human history, the forms of political change that can actually work, or the pathways by which people and societies change their minds. It gets Labor parties to endorse liberal and fascist policies because they don’t see the non-Euclidean pathway between workers that have international/migrant solidarity and workers that don’t. As a tool of analysis, it makes people make worse decisions that reinforce the liberal-conservative status quo.
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
With a large enough tangent kernel and histogram equalization, every monotonic nonlinear relationship can be projected into a series of linear decision boundaries
Okay, fair, and the space of political ideology is probably monotonic because it describes the behavior of humans that live in a universe with physics that appear to be monotonic. So I was wrong to say “regardless of the number of dimensions”. Unfortunately we are limited to a small number of dimensions in practice.
are you a Rationalist?
No idea, I just have the maths autism
fair enough, I might be getting a bit paranoid. Have a nice day!
It could be fun to feed some data on people’s values into an algorithm and see what kind of axes it comes up with, and what different clusters look like. Do they cluster by self-described ideology? Nationality? Religion? Other characteristics?
Personally I do feel a sense of political kinship with most people in the lib-left quadrant, which is why I generally like the political compass.
Abandon axis ideology, embrace k-means tsne political clustering
