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.
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.
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
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!
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.