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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

There’s a slate star codex post that describes research demonstrating that conservative Americans can predict the responses of progressive Americans to political questions, but the converse is not true. It’s not that conservatives are “unwilling to consider” conflicting ideas; in fact, they do a much better job of modeling conflicting ideas than progressives do!

Most of the difference is, I think, not based on factual disagreement, but based on principal disagreements on issues like the personhood of fetuses.

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> There’s a slate star codex post that describes research demonstrating that conservative Americans can predict the responses of progressive Americans to political questions, but the converse is not true.

All this demonstrates is ideological consistency on the part of Liberals.

> It’s not that conservatives are “unwilling to consider” conflicting ideas; in fact, they do a much better job of modeling conflicting ideas than progressives do!

Citation needed.

> Most of the difference is, I think, not based on factual disagreement, but based on principal disagreements on issues like the personhood of fetuses.

A fetus isn't a person in the eyes of the US government. It never has been. This is an orthogonal issue to how to handle abortion in America. Conservatives believe that those who seek and provide abortion should be punished, but we know that this does not result in fewer abortions. Liberals believe that we should take steps to limit the need to seek the abortion in the first place.

It's the old adage, "conservatives think liberals are stupid, liberals think conservatives are evil."

I know a lot of liberals who think conservatives (especially poorer conservatives) are stupidly voting against their class interests.

They probably still hate those conservatives though. Even now you can see the hate being directed to Blacks or Hispanics that may have voted for Trump.

One must consider the major confounding factor here that Republicans have made a substantial effort to publicly taunt and insult liberals from positions of power[1], and that being the target of that kind of thing can easily override what would otherwise be more compassionate interaction.

[1]: One example: https://twitter.com/CawthornforNC/status/1323813315169165313

What that tells you is... they don't understand those interests.

Or they don't understand that their proposed solutions don't sound likely to solve the interests.

Suppose class mobility is good for poorer people. Canada has more class mobility than the US. Canada also has universal healthcare (like most developed countries) which helps people take risks like starting their own business which helps with class mobility.

Why do poor republicans in the US keep voting against universal healthcare?

They actually don't. You get that result only if you exclude non white people.

Overall, if you define working class or poor economically, they are more likely to vote for those things.

This is because the heuristics low-IQ conservatives use are actually better than the low-quality first-order reasoning midwit liberals use. Policies that immediately enrich poor people at the expense of economically productive people are bad for poor people in the medium-long run. Low-IQ conservatives do not explicitly understand this, but their inherited heuristics encode it.

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