Political ideology from the bottom up, part 1

I would like to figure out my political worldview. I feel like I have a patchwork of various ideas and opinions, but no coherent worldview. I’ll read something and be like “huh, that makes sense”, and then I’ll read something else and also be like “huh, that also makes sense”. I’m sufficiently high openness that I can integrate various different ideas (or I have just read enough of LessWrong), but it feels like I just don’t know enough and don’t have formed opinions on things.

I guess there’s an upside to this - not having an opinion about things is better than having a strong opinion without knowing about the subject. But realistically, both are different flavors of bad. You do actually want to have opinions. You need to have an idea of what things are good and what things are bad. That way, you can: a) predict the future a little bit better, and b) steer your society towards a better future.

Policy and ideology

Ideologies are high-level (low-resolution) descriptions of your policies. When someone says that they are authoritarian right, I translate that into: “ok, this person would like to ban abortions and build walls around the country” (same for other quadrants). These are specific policies that they would like to implement, and when you look at all of it together, they roughly belong to a quadrant on the political compass.

What happens if your policy opinions are all over the place? I sometimes joke that I am a radical centrist: various radical political opinions on all parts of the political compass, which averages to the center. This is, of course, different than a “regular” centrist, someone who doesn’t have particularly strong opinions one way or the other, and still ends up, on average, at the same place on the compass.

I think that this joke will turn out to be quite true as I inspect and form my political views. I was once asked, quite bluntly, what I was politically. How do I lean, left or right, authoritarian or libertarian? I didn’t know how to answer. There are so many individual questions that I have half-baked opinions on (meaning: I am not sure how much to trust my own opinion; it’s more like a feeling than an opinion) that I find it extremely difficult to call myself one thing over the other. As soon as I call myself “left-wing” I can think of several right-wing stances that I would endorse, and that goes the other way around.

The following series of posts is an inquiry into values, and specifically, policies. To an extent, I don’t need to know what ideology I belong to, I need to know what’s the best policy for a specific question. Then, the ideology question answers itself.

Philosophy and ideology

But it is pretty obvious that different people have different ideas on what “good” looks like, socially and politically. They think differently when asked “imagine an ideal society” - they see different economic systems, different aesthetics, different things that a society does.

To answer a policy question, maybe you don’t yet have a political ideology, but you must have some sort of vision of what good is, and for that you need some sort of philosophy, or aesthetics, or vision.

Here are some bits of the aesthetic-political vision that I have for humanity, and which will ultimately guide me in answering policy questions:

Philosophically, I would call myself a transhumanist. I do have sympathy for some of the concerns of my diametrical opponents - anarcho-primitivists - but even taking these concerns into account, I still side with transhumanism on many questions.

Methodology

I will write a series of posts which will essentially just ask popular policy questions, with the intent of arriving at a specific policy that I endorse. Popular, because there’s a million possible policy questions, and I don’t expect to be able to answer every single one of them.

I believe it is important to write down my thought process because I want people to be able to look up how I arrived at a political stance and then give me info that I didn’t have when I was forming the opinion. I want to hear opposing arguments!

Essentially, what I am doing is just answering the political compass test in a long-winded way.

There, they explicitly say the following:

Please note that this isn’t a survey, and these aren’t questions. They’re propositions.

Propositions are a very different proposition!

To question the logic of individual ones that irritate you is to miss the point.

Some propositions are extreme, and some are moderate.

That’s how we can show you whether you lean towards extremism or moderation on the Compass.

Your responses should not be overthought. Some of them are intentionally vague.

Their purpose is to trigger reactions in the mind, measuring feelings and prejudices rather than detailed opinions on policy.

All of them are necessarily biased, but we have a careful balance of biases!

This is something that most of our critics simply don’t understand.

Well, I want to do the exact opposite. I want detailed opinions on policy, and I don’t want feelings and prejudices. Their premise is that it’s worth measuring one’s political ideology even in the absence of specific knowledge (=detailed opinion on policy). I reject that premise, at least for my own purpose. Ideology is a description of policy, and if you have no policy to begin with, you can end up anywhere on the compass and it won’t matter much. I don’t particularly care about measuring vibes.