Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Show some decency, in reply to bob daktari,
and possibly its never been easier to find parties polices – generally hidden somewhere on the parties website
Yes, that's what I meant. I don't even listen to announcements, any more than I wait for people to tell me the meaning of random words, rather than looking them up in a dictionary when I want to know them. As far as I'm concerned, if it's not in their policy that I can find online, then it's not in their policy at all. If they can't get it together to put it down in written form and then publish it in the cheapest way ever invented, then they haven't even put in the bare minimum due diligence that I'd consider necessary to call something an actual policy.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Alfie,
Give me controlled, intelligent debate any time.
Let them eat Internet.
-
Thanks for the extended stuff, Russell. I did like Miller's point about the policy being actually quite well covered this time. It's a feeling I've had too, that I've never had so much information about the actual policy of major parties before. It's meant I find leader's debates and announcements entirely uninteresting and can't actually be bothered to watch them.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I don't mean to say that the Political Compass is useless. It's better to use a 50 year old idea than a 225 year old one. But we could use even more modern ones, since the software is there to do it.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Steve Barnes,
If I even mention a pie graph online I might be failed out of a statistics major on basic principles.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Well presented as a single number for each candidate you’re comparing with, sorted in order, it’s not that cumbersome. It depends how much analysis you really want to do. It’s not outrageous to aggregate the answers to related questions, I just think that there could easily be more than 2 aggregates (which is what the political compass does). If you want a multidimensional view then a pairs plot with each of the aggregates against the others could be made.
One of those plots would look just like the political compass, but you could easily plot religion answers against social progressivism, or stance on women’s rights against stance on the rich/poor divide. Or all of the aggregates against them. Or even all of the questions against all of the other questions (but you’re talking about thousands of graphs there). I think you’d learn a hell of a lot more about your position relative to the candidates. Your choice of the most important plot would say a lot about your views to yourself (since that is the point of this – it’s a self-analysis tool).
As a corollary of this, is it not apparent that the choice of axes made by the designers of the political compass says a lot about them? It’s not anywhere near as impartial as it might seem. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that the NZ projection has all of the points close to a diagonal line? In other words, the two dimensions are strongly correlated. If that is really so, then they’re actually quite a poor choice of dimensions, showing very little, since the candidates form a left to right line anyway.
ETA: Further to that point, choosing those two aggregates means that the designers can really only ask questions that actually relate to those two dimensions. Your stance on alien abductions doesn't separate you, so they don't ask. But actually, I want to know if the candidates believe in that kind of thing. Because that makes them people I want to avoid.
Basically, if you're going to go multidimensional, I see no reason not to do it properly. The questionnaire could ask any questions whatsoever, then.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Steve Barnes,
unless, that is, you wanted to use time as the fourth dimension
and
plot all the current election and polling data onto the surface of a four-dimensional hypercube
I'm not suggesting anything so exotic. That one would need to is argument enough not to do it that way.
I'm talking about making a one-dimensional plot using all the data. You sit on the left edge, and any characters of interest to you are plotted along a line in order (and proportionally) to how far away from you they are. The Euclidean distance is a good start on how to quantify that.
It might also be of interest to know the strongest contributing dimensions of the distance, so that you can grasp why their views are so far from yours. You might plot right on top of someone on the Political Compass, and yet find your distance from them is quite great, because you have profound disagreement with them in other directions.
For instance, my distance from Winston Peters is not really a function of the two dimensions we see there. He's miles away from me in some racist homophobic dimension you can't see there. Similarly Peter Dunne is a long way from me on account of his main contribution to politics, drug policy, on which I despise his stance, even though his position is quite moderate on the plotted dimensions. And Colin Craig might look close to National on that graph, but if you emphasized aspects of his religiousity and belief in science, I think the gap would be a lot bigger.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Rich Lock,
I've probably said this more than often enough, but take care about reading a lot into an infographic like that. It's 2 dimensional. Which is better in some ways than 1 dimensional, but it's a whole lot less than the actual dimensions of our political opinions. Are those two axes really important to you? Of course it's a big leap away from boring old left-right, but once you admit of a duality of dimensions, there's no real reason to stop at any particular number (other than that we struggle to draw or visualize it). Every question you could ask could form a dimension. And just as you can't really judge how close stars are to each other by their apparent clustering to the naked eye, so you shouldn't judge how close you are to a political party by how close they look on a flat projection. They aggregate a whole lot of questions into one dimension, and they just don't ask about a whole lot of things that could be important to you. Viewed with different axes the graph could be radically different.
It would be interesting, since they collect the data, for them to report not just the two aggregated dimensions relative to you, but also the magnitude of your distance in all the dimensions (a single number) to the main parties. Then your proximity can go back to one dimensional, but you don't get stuck with being pigeonholed next to people you disagree with just because someone else chose the projection axes. Whoever is closest to you is closest in a sense that captures as much information as they collected. Of course they could always collect more.
It's still an interesting tool. Just saying don't read too much into it.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to oga,
Is it just me
It's definitely not just you. Fair enough, I didn't really define the terms Left and Right, but I don't really want to either. Just wanted to say that the problem for National supporters who might actually be disgusted by the recent revelations is that there's just nothing on their right to move to. They're stuck with Peters and Dunne toward the center, or maybe the Maori Party. Dunne is somewhat tainted and Peters is highly socially conservative (and Craig even more so), which means right wing liberals have got nowhere to go. They have to suck it up, or they could refuse to vote. If they choose the second option, that's not a win for the right. At least with a viable ACT party that isn't crooked or stocked with social conservatives they had somewhere to go that would certainly ally with National, whilst giving them their protest signal.
This was always the trouble with National swallowing up the Right as a plan. It looks great if you think FPP. But that's not our system and it's strategically weak in any game of center control to find yourself not straddling the center. Which is how they ended up with quite a thin majority after only one term, despite the huge popularity of Key, and a nation weary of 9 years of Labour. It's bizarre that the party with MMPs biggest ever proportional tallies has found itself with such a weak hold on power. Basically, they still just don't get MMP. Winston Peters has been Kingmaker in this country for nearly 20 years because they could not grasp that their endless desire to push through right wing economic reform has placed him right on that sweet spot.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Michael Meyers,
Although it got me thinking: it feels like there just aren’t enough credible centre-right parties around.
I think the problem is more that there aren't any credible far right parties. So National is actually stuck there, and it's not to their advantage. It's hard to even claim to be center right when there is only one crooked wingnut to the right of you, and between you and the center left are 3 other parties.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 232 233 234 235 236 … 1066 Older→ First