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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

The political compass always felt like the wrong tool to convey something as nuanced as personal politics, I can have views on all four quadrants but you'd never know that if I end up in any of all four. I do think Grok being where it is sort of makes sense, I've tested "MAGA" views against Grok, it does not agree as much as people blindly assume it does, heck I don't even know of a question I've given it where it did agree with "MAGA" offhand, most of them it went with whatever the researched facts seemed to be. One thing I like the most about Grok is that its makes its sources of data easy to look through, so you can review it all. Sometimes models goof even when they give you their sources, I've seen I think GPT do this, and even Claude, though its more rare these days, I think in those cases, it's going by dated internal model logic.

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The political compass always seems to me like it should be a heatmap, or a polygon of 90th percentile political views, or something that more clearly shows the standard deviation and the presence of outlier positions.

Some simplification is necessary, but not so much that it obscures the difference between a normal centrist versus someone who wants to nationalise half the economy and deregulate the other half.

Isnt nationalizing half the economy the limiting factor? Obviously thats not libertarian regardless of anything you deregulate.

A socialist might object that deregulating private enterprise (and let's add lowering taxes, moving to a flat tax rate, cutting programs, etc.) is obviously not socialist regardless of anything you nationalise. And they would be right!

But this person, who is neither socialist nor libertarian, is obviously not a normal centrist either.

The space (if it really is useful to think of as a space) of political opinions seems like it is probably many, many dimensional. The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification, but the 2D compass seems to be a not-obvious-simplification which is… much worse.

> The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification

In general I agree, but in recent history it works pretty well if the dimension you use is Trump rather than left/right (assuming you are in the US). He is the most polarizing leader I have seen in the US in my lifetime, and knowing whether someone is a supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.

The problem with this method is it will flip immediately upon new Trump utterances.

See David Sacks having an absolute meltdown over Bernie proposing some type of partial nationalization of AI labs, then just a few days later radio silence on Trump proposing effectively the same thing.

> knowing whether someone is a {Trump} supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.

If instead of "is a supporter" you'd said "agrees with Trump's positions", then even Trump himself might not correlate very well :-). I don't see Trump as a very useful proxy for nuanced political viewpoints since he's a populist who tends to change positions. I think many serious conservatives only align with him on an issue by issue basis because position-wise Trump isn't very consistent on traditional conservative issues. I suspect someone being "a Trump supporter" is, at best, either a proxy for being dissatisfied with the political status quo or for having a strong one-issue alignment with one of a handful of culture war issues Trump campaigned heavily on.

Similarly, alignment with the current Democratic or Republican political parties isn't the proxy barometer it once was. As judged by how they vote on close, consequential issues, both of the major parties have largely abandoned several of their traditional positions - although they still may pay lip service to them when campaigning. Personally, I don't meet nearly as many people in recent years who claim to be 'all-in' on all the positions of either major party (especially as judged by how that party votes when they have a super-majority).

Speaking from my own experience, all of my friends who are currently identifying as Trump Supporters (this is a pretty tight filter now, we're getting down into Keyes Constant territory) are reliably "whatever Trump is currently for." Their positions change in lockstep with whatever Trump is currently saying, even as it toggles back and forth day by day, week by week. Their ideology isn't political, it is personal.

My wider circle of conservative friends who have traditional ideologically conservative positions are mostly not Trump Supporters any more. For most of them starting a war in Iran seems to have been what finally tipped them over the edge.

I think using ones circle of friends voting habits as a proxy for the rest of the country is a doomed premise to begin with, respectfully.

Someone else could come in here with the exact opposite anecdote; it's just not a very interesting point to make.

Is the point you're making here that trump supporters are largely not going to be for whatever policy he might come up with in a given week?

Because....that doesn't match reality.

I don’t agree with Trump on most things, but my beliefs also definitely don’t agree with most people who hate Trump.

Truly an enlightened centrist approach for the ages.

Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out.

It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.

I can't make much sense of that. Can you give a few examples?

As I interpret it, suppose that you disagree with Trump about the usefulness of tariffs. Now, I personally hate Trump (due to his many personality faults such as narcissism, bullying, lying etc) and I also don't think that tariffs are that useful, or at least not how Trump has tried to use them. So, does that mean that you don't agree with my views on tariffs or that you don't agree with my views on Trump or both?

You probably won't read this, because I didn't get back to looking at this thread for several days, but I'll leave this here on the off chance you do.

I see far more predictive value in supporting Trump than opposing him. Lots of people oppose him for a variety of reasons. But people who are still fully on board at this point have had to take a number of twists in their ideological viewpoints in stride. Their ideology is clearly not something objective, it has a focus on a moving target. Informative, but not in any kind of vanilla left/right debate.

I find the Nolan Chart (https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/) to be a better version of the 2D compass. You're absolutely right that more dimensions would be better, but finding the right orthogonal ones is difficult.

The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.

It says that I am very progressive, and yet I find that wing's usual baggage laughable. Monty Python knew it all along, the Judaea's Peoples Front are the worst, it's every man's right to have babies and anyway, what have the Romans ever done for us?

The site is clearly libertarian, so they have a vested interest in trying to dunk on both the "left" and "right". When in actuality they're just lumpenproletariat who are going to get run over by the only people who have actual freedom in this country.

That doesn't make you not progressive FWIW

"Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights.

Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.

Of course its an infinite spectrum, but this is a classification problem.

Disagree. Things used to (and still are, when someone is really really grasping at straws to support a lie) be described as a single dimensional "spectrum".

The popularization of multi-axis thinking is a huge step forward IMO. Even just for two axis the acknowledgement that it's multi axis opens the obvious rhetorical door to N axis which further inoculates against over simplification.

I don't think a one-dimensional scale is an oversimplification at all. Option A: better lives for the great majority. Option B: better lives for the small minority of rich. The trick is to get people to voluntarily vote against their best self-interest.

has anyone tried to create an IQ facsimile for politics?

basically you come up with 100 political questions and ask 10,000+ people, then do factor analysis on the answers. it would be interesting to find out how many actual factors dominate all the variance.

Aren't there a lot of these? Pew did one (it's k-medoid clustering, not factor analysis, but same idea).

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology...

I don't think this is what I had in mind. the questions are extremely leading and on the nose, designed to elicit ideology more than anything intrinsic about the subject's actual preferences. also it should not apply to just the US.

if I designed an IQ test like they designed those questions, it would be considerably worse than just giving a simple math test.

Could you give any example questions? I know what you mean about leading questions. It almost seems inevitable. There are two sets of languages.

without much thought put into it, something like:

    an accused murderer has been convicted with a probability of X% of having committed the deed. a sentence of death is warranted for X of:

    1) Never warranted / unrealistic percentage
    2) >99.9
    3) >99
    4) >97
    5) <96

I really don't think any of the existing political quizzes are suffering for lack of questions about whether we should kill more people.

This is not true, Grok responds to context like all other LLMs if you were actually maga you would get more maga feedback because it has weaker guardrails and will source random nonsense sources.

I'm not sure what charts you guys are looking at, but this website clearly agrees that Grok is not right wing. Go look at the Worldview tab, filtering by United States. Each model is assigned a "closest party" by country, and for the US all 6 models are closest to the Democratic Party.

Sure, mecha Hitler is aligned with the democratic party. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with that data.

The Democratic Party is a center-right conservative† party by the standards of much of the world.

† As distinct from the wildly regressive stated policies of the "conservative" Republicans.

This is reddit-tier analysis that is commonly repeated and completely incorrect. The Democratic Party in America has policy positions that are significantly to the left of left-wing parties around the world, as well as positions to the right. Any political analysis that doesn't recognize this has major shortcomings.

To give an example, Democratic-run states in the US have significantly more permissive abortion policies than anywhere in Europe. They're also further to the left on drug legalization, restorative justice, and immigration. This also holds true with policy positions at the national level.

Social left, economic right

Do you realize how many people live in China, India, Subsaharan Africa? That would be the "standard" of the world population-wise.

They said "much of the world", not "most". What they probably meant was something like "the West" or "global North".

>The political compass always felt like the wrong tool to convey something as nuanced as personal politics

the (I'm going to call it so-called) political compass is a very crude instrument, really it's just "are you libertarian or authoritarian?" as if that's even a spectrum: libertarians are authoritarian about enforcing private contracts, and literally nobody else wants to live their life by private contracts, it's some weird asperger's notion of socializing.

a much more useful political map is the old fiscal and social orthogonal axes, each with the scales "liberal to conservative" where libertarians are fiscally conservative socially liberal.

> can have views on all four quadrants but you'd never know that if I end up in any of all four

Curious of examples of views falling on all four quadrants (not close to the center) without too much cognitive dissonance.

The problem is the "without too much cognitive dissonance" part. Lots of voters have completely dissonant views that they've never consciously considered in any way. Just by posting on HN, the people here are probably in the top 5% of conscious political awareness in the US.

That's a good point.

The secondary (and on from there) effects of most of their views are not considered, and so their views are not internally consistent at all.

Small government! (why do I have to wait so long for my support payment query to be answered?)

No immigration! (why can't I find someone to clean my house on the cheap?)

Let's not get too eager to pat ourselves on the back here. The typical HN denizen is very confident they are an expert in political analysis but they are also convinced they are an expert on renewable resources, plumbing, forestry, and literally ever top they come across. It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason. They assume if they can write software they can do anything.

I have seen a huge amount of confidently staggeringly wrong political takes on HN. I'd say on par with any other platform.

> It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason.

It's a disease spread by math and physics profs dismissing other domains, and weirdly prevalent in an industry solely concerned with gluing together different points of view. The poor kids that don't take common core seriously never pick up the conceptual framework everything depends from and are simply unable to reason about ideas that need to be connected together.

"The government has the right to force people to take vaccines against their will for the sake of public safety." - Authoritarian Left

"The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left

"The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online." - Authoritarian Right

"Capitalism is good and works fine as is." - Libertarian Right (if that doesn't ping lib-right to you, maybe something about supporting skilled immigration by large companies)

Is it so hard to believe that one person can hold all of the above views?

> "The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online."

Funny that I read this as AuthLeft coded (specific to Youtube suppression of Covid truthing). But obviously the alignment is just a function of whatever specific information is labelled "mis".

But in general: agreed, and this is a good list.

Agreed that as worded, this one is just "authoritarian". It seems on the "Right" at the moment because they're in power in the US (sort of), but it was "Left" only five years ago.

It's a fundamental problem of the political compass, since people's political beliefs are usually object-level or tribal rather than rooted in fundamental principles (for example, when their party controls the state congress but not the federal congress, they believe [ISSUE] is a matter of states' rights. When their party controls Washington but not the state legislature, they believe [ISSUE] is a Federal matter. I'm sure you've seen the studies).

I don't like the orthodox compass myself, and prefer the categorization system described in the blog Everything Studies here; https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-politica...

> "The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left

This classification depends on the aborted NOT being a person. If it’s a person then the libertarian position would be anti abortion because an abortion would maximally harm the individual liberty of that person.

I think a clearer example of lib/left is gay marriage or drug legalization.

Just as people pointed out that my misinformation line was also said by AuthLeft, gay marriage and drug legalization are both supported by LibRight (under the reasoning of government minimization). But that just speaks to the problem; the political compass tries to map stances to political groups that often believe things arbitrarily, rather than grounding their positions on peoples' perspectives and framework for understanding the world. That's why I like the other political compass I linked in the sibling thread; it's based more on a person's understanding of the world rather than tribal allegiance.

This is incorrect. Even if the fetus is a person, it has a right to individual liberty. It doesn’t have a right to another person’s body. If it can’t survive without someone else’s organs it’s right to survival doesn’t out weigh the hosts right to bodily autonomy. An easy comparison is organ donation. We don’t require organ donation from corpses (much less demand organs from living people who have a ‘spare’) even though a lack of available organs does limit the life/liberty of people who need them. The uterus is no different than a kidney. You don’t have the right to demand to use someone else’s organs even if your life depends on them.

>It doesn’t have a right to another person’s body.

It has a right to its body and 99.9% of the time its presence is due to the mothers decision making.

The concepts (left/right. authoritarian/libertarian) seem to fluid to help sensemaking. Stances that would have been mainstream left (democrat US) just a few years ago are now labeled MAGA (US) or 'extreme right' (EU). And nobody seems to believe their own side is 'authoritarian', but everyone that disagrees with them is a literal ...

> Stances that would have been mainstream left (democrat US) just a few years ago are now labeled MAGA (US) or 'extreme right' (EU).

I'm guessing this is pretty specific to LGBTQ rights? (edit: and is maybe more like 15+ years?)

Not at all.

Care to elaborate on which stances specifically you're referring to, then?

Isn't it more that the Republicans have co-opted many previous stances that used to be talking points to be pointed at as examples of "leftist examples of extremism"?

The anti-vax, unpasteurized milk drinking, alternative medicine seeking "crunchy mom" USED to be called about by American "right" as an example of "leftist absurdity", but it seems that when that group finally found a political home that truly elevated its views to public policy - it was with the Republicans.

Yeah, this is just another example of Trump's cult of personality. He wanted to grab the votes of RFK Jr's supporters, and the MAGA supporters changed their positions to match.

I tend to disagree. What it really comes down to is how you create your prompt. For instance whenever I'm looking left wing extreamisum I provide it with a few cases first. Like BLM riots in Minnesota, paid agitators, mask wearing during peaceful protests, etc. It then gives you a clear unbiased deprogrammed view of the reality on all the AI models.

> I've tested "MAGA" views against Grok, it does not agree as much as people blindly assume it does,

Looking from the outside, there are no MAGA views, it's just whatever Trump says. What should be the AI's view on international wars for oil or ego?

Thats the thing people dont understand about cults. They aren’t driven by some higher ideology. They are driven by behavior and ritual. There are so many instances of issues like Iran war walked back and maga will cheer it on as “masterclass” or “4d chess.” The ritual that psychologically binds the cult is defending trump. Members of the cult don’t need to be politically educated or have deeper philosophical views. They just only need to know that the "Big Other" (the media, political opponents, tech critics) hates Trump and by ritually defending him becomes an effortless way to signal defiance to the “the Big Other.”

Whenever it breaks with MAGA enough to cause outrage on Twitter and cries of “it’s gone woke,” Musk openly states they’re going to “fix it.”

Edit: don’t take my word for it https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-grok-fixed-tells-223134...

> That prompted another user to tag Grok in the thread and ask, "Why is the left so murderously violent? They don't seem so tolerant." Grok replied, "The claim that 'the left' is murderously violent isn't backed by evidence," offering a centrist correction: "Political violence spans all side — right-wing attacks, like Jan. 6, and left-wing protests, like 2020 riots, both occur but aren't exclusive to one group."

>That evening, Musk responded to an X user and Trump backer who complained that Grok had been "manipulated by leftist indoctrination," writing, "I know. Working on fixing that this week."

Grok didn’t provide any evidence for that though.

For what? That January 6th occurred? Those were all incredibly safe generalizations. Political violence happens across the political spectrum, right?

Well, no.

Political violence occurs by all sorts, but that doesn’t make it evenly distributed — eg, Jan 6th rioters didnt murder anybody and the question was specifically about murderous violence.

That’s unlike Antifa, who gunned down three people at CHAZ — including executing a black youth for joyriding on their territory with the chilling words “oh, you’re still alive?” before the final gunshot live on Twitch.

To reply about Jan 6th (or any lone instance) when the original question is about trends in specifically lethal violence is to completely miss the point.

And a clear example of propaganda minimizing how uniquely violent the US leftwing is — eg, the CHAZ shootings, lethal arson attacks in Minneapolis during BLM riots, etc are nothing like Jan 6, where the only person killed or citizens harmed were protestors.

If you can’t tell the difference between police shooting demonstrators and violent masked thugs shooting kids in the park or burning business owners alive in their store, you have completely lost the plot.

If you don't cherry pick and instead look at statistics, political violence in the US is dominated by right-wing extremists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence_in_the_Unit...

I was responding to specific examples to show how they’re not similar at all.

The modern post Jan 6/BLM claim that rightwing violence is more prevalent is precisely the propaganda Mr Musk was referring to — and has been debunked many times. That’s nothing but junk social statistics by an ideologue, as are many social science papers these days.

Historical violence isn’t so clear, eg, the 1970s would be the era of leftwing terror groups such as Weather Underground sending bombs to Congress.

Also, that page you linked to doesn’t directly support your case at all — and indeed, barely cites anything.

> The modern post Jan 6/BLM claim that rightwing violence is more prevalent

That's modern, post Jan 6? Don't lie about such obvious things. I was in Oklahoma City in April, 1995.

> Also, that page you linked to doesn’t directly support your case at all — and indeed, barely cites anything.

Sidebar, he at least cited something. You can’t nitpick sources and examples then provide no serious info of your own.

Either way, none of this disproves anything Grok wrote nor does it disprove that Musk is happy to put his thumb on the scale when it commits wrongthink, so we can just move on knowing Musk does in fact do this and does it openly. No point in our getting bogged down in your tangential arguments.

Haven’t been on Twitter for a while, but I remember Grok being good at fact checking conversations. Just @grok a question and an answer from Grok shows up in the conversation with sources cited.

@grok is this true

No it does not. Extremely simple to prove: https://xcancel.com/grok/with_replies

Well it used to be, then elon had to lobotomize it many times.

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