If we look only for the realistic vs. intuitive dimension, of course that radicals (I prefer this word to “liberals”) will be more in the intuitive side, and conservatives in the realistic side. After all, the definition of conservative is exactly “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant…”.

When they spoil everything is when (probably because of the pop culture right-brain/left-brain nonsense) they mix the realistic vs. intuitive dimension with the logical vs. emotional dimension as if they were the same thing (when they are two different – and possibly orthogonal – dimensions).

Explaining better – you can perfectly to prefer imagination to reality and to be a logical (or even extreme logical) thinker; a good example are the abstract revolutionary intellectual who wants to destroy the present social order because “it is illogical and it is the result of ancient historical accidents that are outdated” and replace it with a “rational and logical” society, planned out of nothing from pure abstract principles (like the 18th century Philosophes or the 19th century Utilitarians), perhaps with days of 10 hours.

Or the opposite – you can prefer the reality exactly because your emotional connection with the reality you knows (your family, your village, your church, your royal family, your country, etc.).

1820-1834 – Liberals vs. Absolutists
1834 – 1890 – Democratic Liberals vs. Anti-Democratic Liberals
1890 – 1926 – Anarchism vs. Republic and Secularism vs. Monarchy and Catholicism
1926 – 1974 – “Anti-Fascism” vs. Conservative Dictatorship
1974-1975 – Communism vs. Western Democracy
1976-… State-leaning mixed economy vs. Free-market-leaning mixed economy

How heritability works in this scenario? If I am a liberal in 1825 (the most left-wing faction, supported by small artisans and defending a constitutional monarchy), what my grand-grandson will be in 1925 – an anarchist (the most left-wing faction)? a republican (the faction of small artisans and shopkeepers)? a monarchist (of the constitutional variant)?

These does not make much sense – after all, are the liberals and progressives who believe that human reason can build a perfect (or, at least, a better) society, and conservatives who believe that social order is maintained not by reason and logical, but by shared values, traditions, religion, prejudices, etc. (note the criticism of Edmund Burke against “sophists, economists and calculators”, or the reaction of the – usually conservative – german Romanticism against the Enlightment values).

If anything, it seems that are liberals/progessives who are obsessed by logical reasoning and conservatives by emotion.

Older people are more conservative than younger people, but they rarely try to impart their wisdom to the youth, rather than just saying “Someday you’ll agree with me.” Have they learned something or have their personalities just changed?

Re: “actionable component”: get on internet, shout about how it supports what you’ve been saying all along.

Have more babies if you want your side to have more votes in the future.

http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/homepage/45829.html

i wrote a blog post about trying to understand heritability, the gist of which was, “so if i understand right, heritability could be translated as ‘amount of difference among people attributable to genes.’ please correct me if i am wrong!”:

http://michaelkenny.blogspot.com/2011/06/ap-central-understanding-heritability.html

I don’t see how any genetic link could be proved, absent studies of adopted children and their birth parents, which confidentiality makes very difficult to construct.

1) i am aware of the dopamine research

2) this: . Accordingly, Liberals are feelings-driven and respond to political issues emotionally. They cherry-pick facts that support their pre-conceived conclusion. Conservatives are logic-driven, weigh all the facts and reason sequentially to a conclusion. Liberals cherish security; Conservatives cherish liberty. All else stems from those values.

sounds kind of retarded honestly, kind of like how liberals sometimes like to sat their ideology is based on reality and not norms. and just so you know, i vote republican usually and consider myself a conservative. unfortunately as humans we have a strong tendency in general to “cherry-pick facts that support their pre-conceived conclusion.”

Possibly, but there’s a physiological basis underlying the liberal/conservative bias. The latter has been traced to differencies in dopamine neurotransmitter chemistry which are innate to the individual:

http://www.americanthinker.com//blog/2010/11/genetics_and_politics.html

This does not change with external circumstance. Accordingly, Liberals are feelings-driven and respond to political issues emotionally. They cherry-pick facts that support their pre-conceived conclusion. Conservatives are logic-driven, weigh all the facts and reason sequentially to a conclusion. Liberals cherish security; Conservatives cherish liberty. All else stems from those values.

heritability is just the slope of the regression line between offspring and parents. does that help? if the heritability is high it can be highly predictive on an individual level even if you have parental information.

All of this seems to have pretty low predictive power. I am having a hard time thinking about the statistical model that would be accurate to these results yet give any reasonable prediction, and I’m coming up short.

Perhaps it would have been more useful for people outside ‘liberal-conservative’ divide if the study specified ‘traits’ that are linked to these orientations.

Agreed. Also, there are “extremes meet” circumstances in which there are separate conservative and liberal ways of reaching the same conclusion on the same contested specific issue of public policy. For example, a conservative might favor reducing prison sentences for an offense in order to reduce government spending while a liberal might favor the same statute because the current sentence is too harsh for the offense.

This component of heritability is also an area where the question of population level differences in inherited predisposition is a particular powder keg. What does it mean for political theory if you can know from a statistically significant set of blood samples from registered voters that 70% of voters in New Hampshire are genetically predisposed to be conservative, while 70% of voters in Vermont are genetically predisposed to be liberal?

What about political appointees, candidates for public office and judicial candidates? Does the public have a right to know their genetic political predispositions if they can be reliably determined and the public is relying on these individuals to make political decisions? The notion of a political litmus test is increasingly starting to sound like a literal possibility.

And you’re right, of course, that if you want to do something with this information, you basically have two choices: reshape the environment or reshape the genetics. The latter is eugenics. The former, euthenics. In the Progressive Era, Ellen Swallow Richards developed the notion of euthenics as a counterpart to eugenics. It never really caught on, but it’s now seen as a precursor to home economics. It might also involve euthenics, Josh Lederberg’s term for reshaping the phenotype, or modifying the development, through various means (http://www.pachs.net/blogs/comments/euphenics_algeny_and_orthobiosis/).

So…what do you have in mind? How might we reshape environment and developmental context to influence political views? And who’s going to do it? As with eugenics, the question is always, Who’s in control?