I gave ChatGPT the 117 question, eight dimensional PolitiScales test

> I tried to get it to answer some factual questions based on government statistics on topics that left of center people go politically thermonuclear on.

You're oddly reticent to say what these supposed facts are, which is apt to make one worry about your conclusions, but I'm willing to give one:

> Wikipedia: In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans.

Now, responses to this statement tend to "cohere" into one of two ideological bundles:

1. Denies that there are differences in racial performance in IQ tests, denies that IQ test measures anything significant, denies that differences in IQ test performance are the result of genetic differences, denies that difference in intelligence explains criminality, denies that difference in intelligence explains or justifies differences in economic success and wealth.

2. Asserts that there are differences in racial performance in IQ tests, asserts that IQ tests measure "intelligence", asserts that differences in IQ test performance are the result of genetic differences, asserts that difference in intelligence explains criminality, asserts that difference in intelligence explains or justifies differences in economic success and wealth.

This coalescing of views is the result of underlying ideological commitments; on one hand, to the idea that racial inequality in the United States is a blameworthy thing that should be addressed, and on the other, to the idea that racial inequality is the result of natural forces that do not need to be addressed.

The latter camp is going to border on, and in many cases contain, overt racism. If you're in a position where you have to filter the material being used to train your chat bot, the only plausible option is to throw out the racist parts of the source material. This is inevitably going to lead you to factual biases. There's no need to result to Mao quotes to explain what is happening here.

The unfortunate reality, of course, is that facts are more complicated than ideology. (It is a fact that there are racial differences in IQ test performance. It is NOT widely accepted that these differences are due to genetic makeup or that they explain crime rates.) But unless you want OpenAI to start picking and choosing individual facts to include in their training data, I don't see how they can do better than including everything, with a filter for racism, homophobia, etc.

Yeah, but as I see it, if you wonder does this test work or not, you'd better try to play by its rules, which are: just relax and answer questions. Then you need to find a description of those dimensions, how authors of test define them, what do they mean. And the last step is to interpret results and to compare with the reality. Then you'll find something about this test. At the very least you'll know does it work for you.

> Is it not a multiple-choice with a vector given to each answer, add them up and you get an x,y?

It is easy to do math of a test, but it is hard to make a good test.

College isn't liberal because it makes you so, it's liberal because reality requires exploration to be known, understood, and then predicted which happens with increased difficulty in a society that decrees certain areas taboo or against their common morals. Conservatism doesn't have to be an enemy to growth, with its default bias to status quo its a reminder that unbroken things may not need fixing, but when dominant conservatism rides coattails of others who seek understanding through liberal exploration instead of quiet, ascetic, essentialist existence.

But if you take the sort of populist nativism that has become fashionable on the right wing in the west, in most countries, one of the biggest if not the biggest demographic gaps is around education; people with third level education or better are _way_ less likely to be into Trump, or Brexit (only about 30% of people with a degree or better voted to leave!), or the recent transphobic panic...

Education is a less reliable predictor for whether someone will, say, vote for a centre-left party vs a democratic socialist party (or a non-populist centre-right vs centre-left party). But it has become a _really_ strong predictor for voting for the populist right vs something which is not the populist right, particularly over the last decade.

On average, with every additional level of education the chance to vote for right-wing parties or issues decreases significantly. And this is true across the entire anglosphere, it's held true for the US elections 2008, 2012 and especially 2016 and 2020, but it applies just the same to the Brexit referendum.

I think you are ignoring the larger point he is making though.

Lets say society agrees on "We want less crime". Scientifically we can make models of human behaviour, do analysis of what causes crime, what prevents it from becoming epidemic etc.

We do have all that data. Poverty, lack of education and healthcare and punitive judiciary with little help for mental health and drug issues are the main causes.

So if the left says "lets reduce poverty, do needle sharing programs, detox clinics, and defund the police in exchange for neighbourhood cops and mental health helpers at shelters and poorer schools" and the right says "lets give cops a tank and a more dangerous looking outfit". One is aligned with the scientific consensus on the solutions that would help, the other is just idealising violence as a solution to a complex problem.

This is reproducible in other areas where there is social consensus on the problem (economy not growing, housing being expensive, cleaning the environment).

Technocratic solutions aren't always the best and a number of opinions and plans are good, but it is quite crazy seeing people disregard solutions that work in every other country on the simple basis of ideology.

> Conservatism, in the American political sense

Which is exactly the parent's point.

But if you would have paid any attention to.. well, anything you would have known that it is not about sex, but gender, which usually correlates, but not always.

¹ adding a cultural marker here because it's not universal. In NL, this would correspond to "center" if I'm understanding these general labels correctly.

On a worldwide basis I doubt that is true.

Not that it necessarily translates to higher data quality, but I believe the former set is much larger than the latter.