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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Could someone well-versed in "political sociology" provide one or two primary sources for the concept of "Overton window"? None of the links from its Wikipedia page end up in anything like a published study.

Just to be clear-- I'm talking about a paper that a) makes a hypothesis about public policy, b) presents relevant data, and c) makes a conclusion based on the results of that data.

Edit: removed redundant line

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I think you are unlikely to find what you want, because the idea of the "Overton window" is not especially controversial, in the sense that it's basically a shorthand for a number of not-especially-new-or-different concepts that have been around, and are widely understood to exist, for a while. It's not really a new concept as much as it's just shorthand for "the range of acceptable opinions that reasonable people can have" on a particular issue. In fact, you could probably find/change every instance of "Overton window" to that phrase, and not lose very much, but you'd gain a bunch of extra syllables in the process. Humans love data compression.

That makes sense for a policy wonk enumerating potential positions and situating them between two extreme poles to find an efficacious strategy, or perhaps a group looking to change opinion on a currently fringe idea. I can imagine that being a clarifying exercise.

But it's sheer confusion to use that same concept as a metric for freedom of thought. Suppose that respectable opinions on encrypting messaging apps, treating dimentia, and political correctness all shifted and narrowed in the last 10 years. So what? You must still look into the details and context of each shift to have any idea whether or not speech got stifled in the process. So I don't understand how reference to a narrowing "Overton window" (or "Overton bubble") has any explanatory power wrt freedom of thought.

I just found a reference to this concept in Churchill's The Gathering Storm (WWI->him being appointed PM), first page of chapter 11, he talked about opinions events had caused to become no longer "excluded from lawful thought", at least by several major groups of people. The events were in 1936, the book written in 1948.

That's a legit question, and I tend to get skeeved out by political pieces referencing "Overton windows", which to me reads like value-laden jargon for concepts we already have perfectly good language to describe: "orthodoxy", for instance, and "taboo".

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