Liberal Internet? - Page 10

On July 05 2010 19:51 kzn wrote:


Disclaimer: You're going to get about 2 paragraphs into this and think I'm a liberal just taking an opportunity to troll, but I assure you, I am not.

Short Answer: The internet artificially selects for a liberally biased population.

Long Answer:

1. We can safely assume that people who do not own computers are at the very least significantly less likely to be denizens of this hive of scum and villainy (HA HA, THE INTERNETS) than those people who do own computers.

2. Computers and the Internet are vaguely selective in that most of the reasons one would purchase one, appeal more strongly to those who are more intelligent. Video games are arguably "harder" to enjoy than, say TV is (let alone whatever it is your stereotypical rednecks are doing).

3. Thus, the Internet has already selected for a population that is skewed somewhat above the average as far as intelligence goes. Moreover, the majority of those people who are exceptions to this rule (most of the people who comment on Youtube, for instance) are likely to take the more common viewpoint among their peers, which on the internet is already being liberal.

Now, this appears to be me claiming that intelligence correlates positively with "liberal-ness" - and this is true, that is my belief, but only up to a point. To explain this, lets reverse the issue:

Liberal positions (using the modern understanding of the term) are, I think, generally characterized by a belief that the end result of conservative policies is unfair, or unjust. Marx rails against the exploitation of the proletariat, the Democrats seek openly to redistribute wealth, they seek to universalize healthcare coverage, and so forth. They are, in essence, trying to help other people.

This is, really, quite easy to support, on the face of it. Who doesn't want to help people? Who, really, is going to admit that they're perfectly happy with people dying from a curable illness because they cant afford treatment*?

I'm making an assumption here that with increasing intelligence comes increasing empathy, which is tenuous, to be sure - but certainly as intelligence increases the capacity we have for worrying about issues which are not of direct importance to our own well being increases.

Now, lets look at the result of, say, arguments against universal health care. It is an unavoidable fact that if you oppose universalized health care you must accept that some people will die when they could, perhaps, have lived with a universal system. This immediately puts conservatives in a fairly sticky position as far as arguments go. It is quite difficult to reconcile this kind of end-result with a concern for society - which is essentially what politics is, an argument over how best to serve society.

It takes a great deal of intellectual fortitude to take a long, hard, unbiased look at the arguments for both sides, and moreover it takes an intellect that has passed through the phase of believing every death is a tragedy that should be prevented at all costs. Such an intellect is, I would argue, more likely to side with conservatives than not, but that particular argument has nothing to do with answering your question. People capable of this kind of cold, logical, and prolonged thinking about very inflammatory issues are few and far between.

tl;dr: Conservatives are over-represented at the extreme ends of intelligence distributions, while Liberals are over-represented in the middle areas. The internet artificially selects a distribution that is biased away from the lower end of that distribution, thus resulting in an artificially high Liberal-to-Conservative ratio.

*Well, I am.

Having written that, I could posit another 3 possibilities for the appearance or fact of a liberal bias on the internet, but I think this one is sufficiently likely to degenerate into flames.