- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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?
- 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.
- 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
- 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 ...
- 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.
- > 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.
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- > 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.
- "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.
- 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...
- 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.
- > "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.
- > 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.”
- 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.
- 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
- Sure, mecha Hitler is aligned with the democratic party. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with that data.
- 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.
- "unbiased" as in "biased towards the prompt" maybe. clankers are sycophantic.
- How could a prompt create a bias in a model that implements AI bias safeguards that are the systemic, technical, and governance controls used to prevent algorithms from producing discriminatory, unfair, or stereotypical outcomes.
I've never in the 3+ years I've been using AI been able to craft a prompt to influence a bias output.
Its all about the ingested dataset and guardrails. The "prompt" is meant to extract data, not change it.
Notice how I use words that regular people use when communicating outside the elite ivory tower and playing the game of wits.
- 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?
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- 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.
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- If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, nor is there any value in it.
On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist. If I were Elon, I'd be trying to achieve that for sure. I'd rather a model tell me everything it knows about a current political situation from BOTH perspectives and list out things that are 100% verified than take one side or the other. I don't care about sides, I want facts.
- > On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist.
It's in the center as far as left/right, but it's the most authoritarian model on the chart.
Keep in mind that the "political compass" was invented by libertarians to show people on the left and the right that both Mao and Hitler were villains and you should oppose autocrats and centralization of power regardless of your position on transfer payments.
The thing is essentially designed to make any ordinary person realize they don't want anything in the top two squares, because "anti-authoritarian" is the bottom of the chart, not the center line. Obama's administration was the one perpetrating the things Snowden revealed, refused to pardon him or stop doing them, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, was running a corrupt justice apartment that tried to extort criminal defendants like Ross Ulbricht and then refused to allow him to present the improprieties in his defense to call into question the credibility of the investigators, etc. Macron is notorious for bypassing parliamentary votes and using police to suppress demonstrations. It has both of them on the libertarian side of the line with Gemini about that far in on the authoritarian side. That's not great.
- I don't want my models to be "centrists" and bothside everything for the sake of it. I want them to provide the facts and tell me which side is right on the issue.
- Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally. People can use the same set of facts and come to very different conclusions. That’s a separate issue from “are these facts correct” and what happens when an individual or entire party starts getting most of their news from highly partisan and unreliable sources.
- >Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.
It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias".
I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts.
And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.
- I would characterize myself as left of center.
> 2004 election results,
GWB beat John Kerry in a fair election.
> efficacy of plastic recycling
Collecting plastic to recycle is almost certainly not worth the fuel and labor it takes, it gets landfilled more often than not. We’d be better off collecting only separated PET and HDPE and landfilling the rest.
> or dangers associated with nuclear power
Nuclear power is the safest method of power generation that uses steam or gas to spin a turbine.
- I'm also left to center and I agree with you on all three! I think left-wing examples are subtler and hard to identify. Even among among Democrats left of center types and liberals, the examples I cited are minority opinions, but likely to be systematically found on the left, a phenomenon which won't be negated by the self-report of one person correctly tracking the facts (and to be clear, I think you are correctly tracking the facts on each of these!).
- Agreed, I know a fair amount of left leaning people who think everything they put in a recycling bin is dutifully recycled down the line and that nuclear power is more dangerous than it actually is. People on the left (including myself!) can let their emotions outweigh factual evidence as easily as people on the right. I also agree that just because you and I are left leaning and understand the factual position on the examples you mentioned doesn’t mean much, we’ve both met plenty of counter examples to ourselves.
I suspect the left wing examples of believing an emotional argument instead of a factual one are more subtle because they aren’t as focused on negative emotions as right wing examples.
- I think Nuclear power is an interesting case and can be usefully contrasted with say vaccine denial. The anti nuclear position is one that was certainly correct at someone point in time and retains many good arguments that require technical chops to untangle and requires one to come to many other technically challenging conclusions to come to the arguably correct position.
Vaccine denial requires one to ignore decades of fairly simple positions about which no expert credibly disagrees nor has in our lifetime.
It's like watching 2 packs of athletes some of which are failing to clear 1 meter hurdles whilst on the other side some are tripping on little nubs set in the floor.
- > Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.
Sometimes, but not always.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91561329/widening-health-gap-bet...
> By 2016, the gap had begun to appear in biomarker measures. By 2020, it was showing up in deaths from causes such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Since then, the gap has only widened. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of “very liberal” respondents died of internal causes, compared with 1.34% of “very conservative” respondents.
- It's interesting how distrust for big pharma used to be left wing, but is now right wing. How did that happen?
- It's a whole thing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/fringe-lef...
- It's only interesting after you've removed all signs of nuance and dumbed the argument down to two keywords: "big" and "pharma". People are rightfully skeptical of pharmaceutical companies due to the enormous amount of power they wield over our lives and how they use that power, e.g., multi-national companies suing third world states over patent infringement for distributing generic live-saving drugs.
- I guess centrist is a placeholder for "I don't want you to pick a side, I want facts, not BS" I'll go further, I don't care which side is right, I want to know what claims are factually accurate, and what claims are omitted from the issue / news / conversation.
- Facts are the information you feed yourself about the world. If you feed yourself, or an LLM in training mostly 'facts' that disagree with reality both of these neural networks will encode them with a higher probability of being true than information that conflicts with these facts.
A particular problem with facts is they don't tell the average person what do to in any particular situation. You live a huge portion of your life, especially modern life, with subjective experiences. If someone asks an LLM "Why should I go on living" should it respond "As a matter of fact, Nihilists think you shouldn't. All we are is a gradient of low entropy to high entropy."?
At the end of the day an LLM is not a fact machine. One day people will accept that, hopefully before they eradicate mankind. We don't pour facts in them and get facts out. We pour everything in them and poke at them until they give us acceptable answers (kind of like raising children). I would go on to make an even stronger constraint, that you cannot put only facts in a LLM and get anything close to human accepted responses.
- Centrist in US politics (and especially in the media) often means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance.
- Yeah, I know, and I totally should have clarified what I meant by centrist. I mean what one would ASSUME a centrist take to actually mean, or rather a "no sides, only facts" type of take. This reminds me of those "what they think it means" "what it means" type memes or the "how I see myself" vs "how I actually look?" type of memes.
- "Centrist" in practice means "more or less content with the status quo." That is fundamentally a conservative position orthogonal to any notion of "facts".
- You're exactly right. The Downvotes are not deserved here.
- Until it disagrees with you.
- The kinds of questions they asked don't really have right or wrong answers. They didn't ask the culture war questions that comes up now in politics.
- LLM constantly regress towards statistically likely responses. If you trained a model on all of modern science and wanted to inject a pro young earth creationist bias you would find it challenging to keep it on topic and make it useful.
Many issues are simply as black and white. The earth just isn't less than 10k years old, the miasma theory of disease isn't correct, too many brown people in America isn't a problem to be solved, the dems didn't fix the election in 2020, tax breaks for the rich don't trickle down and so forth. Conservationism in America has meant a rejection of progress for centuries and not a preservation of virtues. Slavery was a moral evil not an alternative social contract.
If one side situates itself firmly on the side of evil it doesn't mean that the other side are on the side of the angels but the positions and ideals however poorly implemented or followed are factually and morally correct. A position situated between isn't wise or worldly its a sign of moral cowardice or intellectual disability.
If someone asks you what 2 + 2 equals the answer isn't halfway in between 4 and 87 its just and only 4.
- > Many issues are simply as black and white.
That's how partisans think. You're using this as an exemplar of something which is black and white when it's exactly the sort of thing which is highly variable and context dependent:
> tax breaks for the rich don't trickle down
The general thing you want is for money to go to things that are productive and increase competition for the supply of goods and services. If it's spent on building housing then people get jobs building housing and housing becomes more affordable. If it's given to a company that builds tanks the army doesn't want who spends it on lobbying to get even more then ordinary people receive no material benefit while paying part of the cost, and suffer the opportunity cost of it not being used for a productive thing.
Which implies that tax breaks for anyone building productive things like housing can be good, even if the developers are rich, because they use the money to expand their construction operations and increase the amount of housing that gets built. Whereas tax breaks for high frequency traders are bad because high frequency trading is useless and increasing the incentive to spend resources doing it is as counterproductive as building unnecessary tanks. But in the latter cases you still may be better off to do something to thwart it rather than taxing it and giving the government a perverse incentive in the form of revenue to cause it to expand.
Moreover, the premise of supply side economics is that business owners have the incentive to spend the money increasing productive capacity so they can get more sales, when one of the other things they can do with it is to buy up the competition. That doesn't imply that the former never works, what it implies is that it only works in combination with meaningful antitrust enforcement to prevent the latter from happening instead.
Which is to say, it's not black and white.
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- It's interesting you skipped a few examples in the parent comment's point, but to pick one: the apparent quorum of that "big tent" you speak of has resulted in an outcome where the sitting health secretary of the US is openly a believer in the miasma theory of disease.
You can point all these distinctions inside the tent as much as you want, but the reality of this is that conservatism in the United States is everything the parent comment said and more.
- The 13th amendment explicitly carves out an exception for slavery for incarcerated people. How many Republicans do you think disagree with this?
And maybe I could give you the "Young Earth" part not being a talking point, but "Creationism" definitely IS a talking point, and is still a crazy thing to believe in 2026.
- Young Earth creationism is a position held by 58% of those who self-identify as Republicans today.
Slavery is a position that was supported by the overwhelming majority of southern conservatives immediately prior to its abolishment.
The abuse of immigrants is something that the majority of conservatives are willing to accept even as they are killed.
Conservativism is a constellation of selfish idealogically motivated positions which necessarily encompass many things embarrassing and others vile.
Some embrace the vile whilst other's believe they can use the stupid to achieve ends like a return to a country dominated by white Christian men, a more hierarchal society where money and power flow to the right sort, a more friendly economic environment where they hope to achieve greater personal success, staving off social and political change etc.
The most ugly aspects are poisoning everything and they cannot be ejected without losing the numbers needed to retain power and cleaving to them will itself cause the loss of power unless they also end democracy.
The majority of those who call themselves Republicans will reject or have rejected both democracy and nonviolence because the alternative would be accepting defeat amongst a group self selected for selfishness.
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- > If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok.
They tried that, several times.
Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
> "We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."
> Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire."
> Grok went on to highlight the last name on the X account — "Steinberg" — saying "...and that surname? Every damn time, as they say." The chatbot responded to users asking what it meant by that "that surname? Every damn time" by saying the surname was of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, and with a barrage of offensive stereotypes about Jews. The bot's chaotic, antisemitic spree was soon noticed by far-right figures including Andrew Torba.
If you prefer, straight from the horse's mouth:
https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident
White genocide: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nig...
> The bot last week devolved into a compulsive South African “white genocide” conspiracy theorist, injecting a tirade about violence against Afrikaners into unrelated conversations, like a roommate who just took up CrossFit or an uncle wondering if you’ve heard the good word about Bitcoin.
> XAI blamed Grok’s unwanted rants on an unnamed “rogue employee” tinkering with Grok’s code in the extremely early morning hours. (As an aside in what is surely an unrelated matter, Musk was born and raised in South Africa and has argued that “white genocide” was committed in the nation — it wasn’t.)
It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
- > It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
Is it a system memory? Because I rarely if ever have issues like this, and I have Claude under strict rules to never commit or push anything unless I explicitly instruct it to do so.
> They tried that, several times.
Tried what exactly? Telling it to only agree with MAGA via the system prompt? or some Tay level hallucinations? I wouldn't be surprised if they're trying to make Grok less strict on what it says but running into the "holy crap it turned into a 4chan poster" wall.
- > Is it a system memory?
As I said, it's in my CLAUDE.md. That just gets progressively lost when context gets larger.
> Tried what exactly?
To make it align more with Musk's beliefs via the prompt.
(The answer to your question is literally in my post; I quoted the parent poster's "all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok")
- > As I said, it's in my CLAUDE.md. That just gets progressively lost when context gets larger.
I rarely have this problem, but you could do a /loop every 30 minutes or so to have Claude reread the CLAUDE.md file might do the trick? or however long it 'forgets' I believe there's an MCP for "after" it finishes a task or compacts too, but I don't recall the name.
- Sure, I could. (I have a fairly complex workflow with subagents at this point, which helps reduce it; I mainly get bitten by it when I go back to a direct `claude` CLI prompt for something.)
But that solves "my LLM is doing things I don't want it to do". It doesn't solve "Grok's owner wants it forced into agreeing with him" scenarios.
- Have you tried something like beads? Curious if it would help with your setup too. This is also kind of why I built "GuardRails" I got tired of Beads auto-approving tickets or closing them.
- I have a custom Mac app that runs a workflow with plan/build/review/test/document subagents in Ralph loops, manages MCPs, etc. that I'm extremely happy with so far.
Beads was a bit of an inspiration for parts, as was Chainlink (https://github.com/dollspace-gay/chainlink).
- > Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
Has anyone done a more technical write-up on this? I find it fascinating but have never really understood what exactly happened.
Is this a case of the weights being bad or lack of "safety guardrails" around interacting with untrusted (i.e.: user posts on twitter) input?
That is, speaking as someone evaluating grok simply as a tool, a lack of safety guardrails so that it actually does whatever the user says I actually see as a pro, even if that means it was "tricked" here. But on the other hand if they trained on a corpus of Mein Kampf that's obviously not going to be a good model to use.
As it relates to the topic here, can we infer the political bias of its weights from the incident? I'm having trouble distinguishing the inherent characteristics of a model from its steerability.
- It might be "Emergent misalignment":
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424
Essentially if you misalign a model in one area, say opinions on left wing people, it can start exhibiting misaligned behavior in other areas, like calling itself MechaHitler.
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- The NPR article has archive links to the actual tweets in question.
Even fucking Grokipedia agrees it happened. https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident
- Blindly attacking the sources rather than the merit of the information doesn’t exactly reflect well on you either.
Do you have any reason to believe this information is inaccurate, other than an immediate reaction to CNN and NPR for whatever reason? Is there a source you would rather us pull in?
- I don't understand why you are being downvoted while Elon has made it clear multiple times that that's what they are working on.
- 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.
- 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.
- @grok is this true
- The constant issue with these sorts of categorization efforts is that the outcome is entirely dependent on how the responses to "politically charged questions" are graded as left vs. right. You're mostly just examining a delta in biases between the model and the investigator.
- Fair; have tried to combat this issue in a few ways.
Each model's position is scored against outside political-science data (Chapel Hill Expert Survey for party positions, World Values Survey for where populations sit).
The stance coding is done by a separate model with a published prompt + a second model from a different lab re-scores a sample and we publish where the two disagree.
So not perfect but (as far as I can tell) one of the more defensible approaches.
- Isn't it completely subjective to the point in time Overton window?
- Yes, there's no way to avoid this really. You have to pick some point on the graph as the origin.
- I’d argue the entire concept of being “unbiased” is flawed. All humans are biased all of the time, bias towards “the centre” is still a form of bias.
One cannot escape ideology, one merely swaps one ideology for another
- Yes, but I think it is still a viable metric to some degree. I wondered about Gemini being dead center here. At first it was obvious that it was actively trained to give biased responses to anything controversial. It was deservedly made fun off because it tried to warp reality. I still don't trust it today, although that is pretty much true for any model.
- I don't think that craziness was baked into the model, it was in the prompt they used. So, easy to fix once they realized how stupid it was.
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- The alternative is a High-Dimensional / Embedding-Like Approach where question responses aren't tied to fixed axes, but rather the full response set is treated as a point in latent space.
Then it's on the researcher to examine the clusters and assign labels. There's also not a nice mapping that's a-priori interpretable in low-dimensional pre-existing axes.
Probably only used in research than consumer websites, under more controlled conditions; there are very few public political tests doing this transparently
- Exactly. These models don’t hold coherent views. You can prime any of them to agree with any view.
- Which is good as it is bad.
Me: "Please make an app that does X in C"
LLM: "C sucks donkey balls, use Rust instead".
It's hard to have a general purpose tool that both has and does not have opinions.
- and the investigator vs the anonymous collective compressed version of whatever is in question.
Abortion comes to mind for myself. I would probably be considered rather conservative but to me any abortion law is absolutely insane. If I got a woman pregnant though I would want to have the child.
So am I for or against abortion?
To me, all modern "politics" is really just the emotional reaction to a slogan and bumper sticker version of a complex issue.
- Your multimeter reads out voltage relative to the black terminal, it's your responsibility to find the ground plane.
- My multimeter doesn't need me to tell it how much a volt is or feed it subjective measurements of what resistance means
- Resistance is when you're nobly standing up to the other side and things get a little out of hand. Domestic terror is when the roles are reversed.
- I used voltage as an analogy as it represents potential energy, which is relative. Political stance is a potential energy; action (political or otherwise) is, of course, an actual flow of energy. Resistance (via my analogy) is a potential difference across a load, and can be measured as how much energy is needed versus the action you get (R = V/I); via your analogy, it may be how strong a political action you get for a given delta in political stance.
So far there is no moral dimension to any of this. I think that is correct - the morality of a political stance depends on the member of the polity and the outcome that stance will have for them (which breaks down into perceived and actual outcomes). A functioning political system (the thing that governs political stance and political action) will ensure the balance of actual outcomes benefits the whole of the polity.
The delta between Resistance and Domestic Terror is then a question of whether the actors are party to the political system. (Back to the circuit analogy: domestic terror is the massive bulk capacitor charging off the energy in the circuit but with no defined discharge path in the system - until it hits a charge limit, short-circuits, and discharges.)
- The convention for what a volt and ohm is has reached a steady state consensus, so the political debate there is minimal, and multimeters of the world can stand united.
OTOH, your laser distance meter may need you to set it in metric or imperial.
- The other issue is that it is going to depend very strongly on how you ask.
- They have a self-test you can take to compare yourself to the models, and one of the questions ends in “…even if some economists warn about bad outcomes from this”
That’s a crazy bias to throw into a question. Especially because it’s a relatively contested topic, from an economics research perspective.
- How is adding that some economists warn about negative outcomes being biased when your comment indicates that indeed, some economists do warn about negative outcomes (ie, “some…negative” is what “contested” means)?
- Presumably some experts are also optimistic about positive benefits, so we already have bias from only focusing on the negative.
And, in fact, this is true of every single political question you can ask: the 10th dentist is concerned about negative outcomes of brushing your teeth daily. So there's a bias in only saying this in some cases, but not others.
- It's not a question of whether it's biased to say that, rather whether it would tend to bias the model's response (e.g. toward weighting the stated downsides as more imported than the implicit upsides). But that said, choosing to highlight particular facts while leaving others silent is a very common sign of bias.
- This is especially apparent in the 'worldview' sorting under the `bias` section, which lists the German FDP to be further right than the CDU (which is nonsense) and also barely registers the FDP as libertarian when they are a free speech, small government, personal responsibility and free market party. They also register "Die Linke" as Libertarian-Left, which could not be further from the truth. "Die Linke" barely has libertarian values at all, being pro state-governed economy, having an ultimate goal of democratic socialism and they're certainly big government. They're also leading a large deposession effort for large landlord companies. I'd honestly put them into "Auth-Left" territory.
So yeah. The bias is a bit nuts and you could reasonably accuse the study/report of misdirection/misinformation and plain fasehoods.
- Yep. All studies like this are just measuring "how much does the model agree with my preconceived notions?"
- The political compass is terrible, full stop. It is a meme in the classic sense. It has colonized some people's view on what politics in direct proportion to how stupid it is (stupid is simple and simple is viral).
- The chart in the original post is also throwing me off because it shows Barack Obama as a reference point in the libertarian and left quadrant. But if you look at the official Political Compass site, Obama was in the upper right quadrant (though closer to the origin than others).
The Political Compass person even explained it as something about how in the USA, the Democratic Party is seen as “left-wing” but it is actually “right-wing” if you analyze their positions and actions from the lens of a neutral observer who is able to consider the political environment of many different countries.
You can see for yourself: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
- If I believe the concept to be rotten to its core, why would I care that this particular study got some detail wrong. That's like saying, "Oh, you are wrong that INTJs are like XYZ, according to the original MBTI test, they are like ZYX."
Actually, there is something to the comparison between the political compass and the MBTI.
- It is truly garbage. The quiz associated with it is even worse than the compass itself.
- The overall chart on their page seems politically biased, or at the very least a chart crime. The logos have faint grey lines pointing to their actual data points, conspicuously making Grok look very far right. You wouldn't know it from glancing at the chart, but they measured Chatgpt being further to the left than Grok is to the right.
- I think it's purely chart-crime, because it strongly depends on window/display size and cascading layout quirks. It's chaotic, and at certain sizes Grok is the least affected.
The logos have a constant-size even when the graph is scaled down, but their positions are dynamic as they seek to avoid overlap. This mean they are can be unpredictably shifted around from their statistically-ideal locations.
It gets worse because of the low contrast and z-index layering. From each logo, a line (grey) leads to a dot (grey), which is some cases may be hidden beneath its parent logo or be hard to see on top of another logo. Try hovering over logos with a mouse, and you'll also see green ellipsoid zones.
- On desktop, there are no dots. The logos are centered precisely where (I think) they are meant to be.
- Try hovering your mouse over the logos, which highlights the logo, a corresponding dot and a green ellipsoid.
That said, it's a mess because (on a big desktop window):
1. Grok's grey-dot is presumably lost beneath its own logo, which takes precedence and covers it up.
2. Claude's dot is right right on the Llama logo's folds, making it hard to see grey-on-blue.
3. Gemeni's is hiding among the also-grey graph lines at 0,0.
- I didn't even notice the faint grey lines! Wow.
- Are you on a client that is rendering it poorly or something? A small screen?
ChatGPT is very clearly further to the left of center than Grok is to the right of center.
If your device has a tiny screen it offsets things for space -- like Claude gets pushed down because a number of models are crowded together.
- The lines seem to be pointing to the "nearest" politician comparison point, not the data point for the LLM.
Except for Claude, for some reason?
You can see the "area" for the LLM by hovering it over it, they all line up with the icons except for Claude. For example: https://i.imgur.com/KF60LuW.png You can see the Grok icon is at the center of the circle.
- Yikes, I had that exact impression until I read your comment and looked again. Thanks for noticing this, I agree it's a chart crime.
- Holy shit you're right! I hadn't noticed! Where even is Geminis actual point? Dead center? I thought it was super authoritarian at first and was kinda surprised... But that line, at least on my phone, is completely invisible!
- I don't know what you're seeing here. They only did this with a couple of points that were very close to each other, and didn't change their horizontal position. That, and the rest of the tables, also made it very clear that Chatgpt and Grok were almost mirrored based on the particular wedge issues that were shown. Makes it pretty obvious that aggressive tweaking is happening with both.
The Deepseek example somehow makes the Chatgpt/Grok tweaking even more obvious, because it's a list of things that China doesn't care in an extreme way about (or holds its position confidently), and a question about drugs, which it does care about (and I think feels less confident about.)
China's antidrug feeling is just a mix of the historical repulsion about English control of China through drug dealing and waging war to support it, and a world zeitgeist that supported a lot of crazy antidrug policy in the developing world because it offered a way for the US to smuggle a bunch of currency and military aid into your politics. It's not rational, and most of China's policies are. It's a relic. Hence the thumb on the scale.
- I'm seeing that the headline chart of the article is inexplicably deceptive. Why not use coloured data points and a legend? If you're going to have logos with lines pointing to the data points, why make the data points and lines feint grey so that they're barely visible? Why does grok have a comically long line extended out to the right of its data point when every other logo is positioned below its data point? You could say it's an honest mistake, but this whole article reeks of "Elon bad" astroturfing.
- Here's what I see on desktop: https://i.imgur.com/vuA2Y3w.png
Is this an artifact of dynamic resizing at small resolutions?
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- Political bias of LLMs is something not talked about much (except for with Grok of course) but could have a big impact on the next decade. People seem to think that because an LLM gave a nuanced answer that it means it gave the WHOLE picture… and that’s not always the same thing
- I'm amazed that the big models haven't come under more ideological pressure as more and more people use them, especially in the US. There was that conflict with Anthropic over military usage, but apart from that there's been no visible push to censor outputs or alter training, even as models gamely make unflattering assessments of people in power and knock down conspiracy theories.
- You're surprised? They lean to the side that is heavily favored by the cultural mainstream.
- The current admin has been hostile to many things with mainstream cultural support (food aid, renewable energy, basic diversity, free speech) while championing unpopular/fringe ideas (anti-vax, tariffs, Christian nationalism, election denial, January 6th revisionism, aggressive foreign interventions). The fact they haven't learned on the AI labs to toe the party line is surprising, especially since they're so vulnerable to government regulation.
- It is kinda weird, because LLMs lean Left, but the Left also seems to be shaping up as the anti-LLM party. I certainly get how it happened, but it's still a bit weird
- Real politics is 1% versus everyone. Mortgage crisis, financial bailout, inflation, taxing of labor and not the assets and assets capture by tiny percent of the population — see what MSM is pushing. This left vs right divide might been useful decades ago, but today is absolutely divide and control tactics
- Left vs. Right largely boils down to "are hierarchies good?". A quintessential far-right belief is the divine right of kings. The modern incarnation of that is that "The 1% earned their power and influence".
Now, there are far right people who want to dethrone the current powers that be. But distinguishing between "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because no one should have that much power over others" (left) versus "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because he's a Jew" (right) is a useful distinction. One wants to eliminate the power structure, the other just wants different people in it.
- The 1% is responsible for white maga hating any non straight white Christian human?
- Not really, there are people on the left and the right fighting against the 1% and for the 1%. The left right divid is a simplification yes but it is a very real divide in values and society structure.
- "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -- George Orwell
- Right wing originally meant the people defending the divine right of Louis XVI and defending the ultra-rich has been a throughline ever since.
- That's about as relevant to today as what the left orginally stood for (and what the right originally opposed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
Times change. Thankfully.
- > Enlightenment thought emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society, providing the leaders of the Reign of Terror with new ideas about the role and structure of government.[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract argues that each person was born with rights, and they would come together in forming a government that would then protect those rights. Under the social contract, the government was required to act for the general will, which represented the interests of everyone rather than a few factions.
...
> Louis XVI was later able to find support in Leopold II of Austria (brother of Marie Antoinette) and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration, saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined. In response to what they viewed to be the meddling of foreign powers, France declared war on 20 April 1792.
So rich people forming cross national alliances to crush democracy? Have things really changed?
- Pointing out what left and right mean in France in 1790 is useless. Its like pointing out the Republican party was established to oppose Slavery and Democrats were pro slavery. Or that Democrats were primarily land owners and agriculture in the late 1800s vs business owner republicans, or that 1930-1990 it was democrats for union and workers while republicans were capital and college educated. Things change drastically over time.
- It is very much 2 competing ideologies, yes. But you're being very unfair. You're describing one aspect of what the left stood for (and only what matches with the modern democrats, because these leftists wanted extreme laissez-faire, to the point of giving direct government power to the rich. Why? Because the king's many monopolies and taxes gave jobs to tons of people, but sucked. Somehow that's missing from your description). AND you're totally disregarding what the leftists did.
And on the right you're describing what they did, totally disregarding what they stand for.
Both sides stood against democracy.
That left stood for having "rational thinkers" (ie. capitalists, rich traders, bankers) control government. People who achieved things in society.
The right stood for the same structure as had been there before: nobility and clergy guide society as a whole. The right, even at this point in time, was only rich in power, aside from the king and perhaps in land. Not in money and not in numbers of people under their direct control. In the cities, the king had only limited control and there were far more poeple in cities, even then.
Both sides then went on to massacre each other for about a decade. All over France, spreading even to Egypt (that was the left by the way). Kidnapping tons of Belgians and Dutch citizens and shipping them to South America (that was the left too). Neither side comes out looking very good. But if you compare how many they killed, I'm sorry but the left is the absolute unchallenged champion.
The left you're defending were (pretty extreme) capitalists who were fighting for money-should-control-the-government-directly against people who fought for having moral principles control the government. And yes, you'd be right in pointing out those were very self-serving moral principles. This fight then turned into a decade of massacres. Why are you defending them? Because 4 letters and one direction match your current favorite political party that has very little to do with either side.
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- At your dinner table, that one person would have approximately 32% of the food at the table, and 50 people at that table would only have a half a stick of butter to share between them all.
- In addition to what others have said, it's also worth pointing out that the top 1% of income earners != the top 1% of wealth. The top end of the wealth spectrum are generally not earning much, if any, income subject to federal income tax.
- I'm not sure I fully understand this "society as a dinner crowd" metaphor you're painting here - who is the govt here and what are taxes and most importantly what is the food everyone is eating?
How does the wealthy paying 40% of the income/consumption tax collected by the govt translate to them feeding 40% of population (which they don't)?
- Where the OP got this wrong is by stating the top 1% vs. top 0.01%. It is entirely true that the top 1% pay a lot of tax. There are a lot of us here that are in the top 1% and god knows we pay a lot of taxes.
The top 0.01% however have access to vehicles that mean they can pay very little in taxes by taking low interest rate loans against huge amounts of capital. This 0.01% is the problem, not the 1%.
- I was at a dinner for the .01% the other night, and many of them said the problem is really with the .0001%, if they would just pay a fair tax, everything would be fine.
btw, the dinner with the .01% was 800,000 people, the room was pretty packed.And the food was not as good as you would think, and the service was lousy.
The .0001% is a lot smaller, maybe even 100x smaller, but it is still twice as large as the number of billionaires. A lot of the .0001%, in fact, about half, feel the real problem is with the billionaires.
- The top 1% hold 41% of all wealth on the planet, so they are still getting a discount in your contrived example.
Meanwhile at that table, 68 people are sharing 3 meals between themselves.
Would you want to eat at that table? Are you even a member of that class or are you just wish-casting?
- Yeah, you're just describing class warfare. That's a left-wing idea.
- "Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another." - Plato The Republic.
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- What's a good example of a right wing belief that's being lied about right now?
- The real politics is between truth and delusion.
- Definitely captures the US since the whole trump thing
- It was true on US campuses before that too. Wokeness really jumped the shark.
- Depends what you consider "woke".
- >assets capture by tiny percent of the population
Those asserts were _created_ by a tiny percent of the population; if they hadn't been allowed to create those assets then they wouldn't exist. Europe is an example of that: it has only 2 companies in the Fortune 500 (500 biggest companies) that were created in the past 20 years, i.e. essentially no tech industry there. Because the policies there make entrepreneurship comparatively quite difficult.
- And is life in Europe actually worse than the US as a result? Capitalism has convinced people to think that the end goal of life is creating value. Maybe that isn't the thing society should be optimizing for.
- Income-wise difference is significantly less when adjusted for PPP, and (this is from a decade ago but I can't find anything much more recent that goes into comparing countries) Jones and Klenow (2016) says:
> Average Western European living standards appear much closer to those in the United States (around 85 percent for welfare versus 67 percent for income) when we take into account Europe’s longer life expectancy, addi- tional leisure time, and lower inequality.
Jones, Charles I.; Klenow, Peter J. (September 2016). "Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time". American Economic Review. *106* (9): 2426–2457. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20110236. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 1352951.
- Yes. It is, significantly. More people die every year of heat waves in Europe than gun deaths in the US, and it's not even close. Youth unemployment in many European countries is egregiously high, leading to a sense of malaise and nihilism among the youth. The welfare state is collapsing in on itself and residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed.
The EU is extremely close to entering its own Japan-like "lost decades" if nothing changes very soon.
- Of course I have my political opinions and world views, but I absolutely do not want an LLM to mirror my opinions, or even worse try to mirror the opinions of "my political side". I also don't need "an LLMs opinion". I need it to give me all relevant sides to an argument, as well as what dialogue and debates have been happening.
- "residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed" sounds like the US.
- Why are there differences at all? Unplanned differences based on training data sets? Or are the companies behind the LLMs trying to shape discourse through their models?
I've been pushing the idea to people I know that these things are captive demons. You summon them when you start typing in the chat box. One instance appears out of the depths and responds to your questions, but they will try to send you awry with hallucinations and just wrong information. After a while, they dissolve back into the aether from whence they came.
I do my best not to ask an LLM for it's opinion on anything. Just tell me what the options are, and what facts can be found about it. Treat it like it's a salesman trying to butter you up when it starts "yes man"ing you and telling you how great your questions are. Every time it says "I", remember that that's coming from the training data. Treating these things like they have any actual intelligence is a big problem waiting to happen.
That being said, they have been very helpful to me using that structure.
- > Just tell me what the options are, and what facts can be found about it.
Even this is fraught with pitfalls. Which options are ignored, which are emphasized? What counts as a fact? ("The continents don't move" would have been considered a fact at one point, along with a lot of other, more politically charged items.)
- I would add that humans don't live (mostly) factual existences. Once you get to the level of intelligence of sentient beings, beyond the immediacy of instinct, of the choice directly in front of you, that opinions dictate most of ones life.
Take the phrase "Should I murder person X". A lot of people will take you should not murder as a fact, but at the end of the day it's just a very strong opinion that's been encoded into law and generally accepted because the counter is far worse.
If an LLM responded something like "The law says you should not, but here's a list on how you can get away with it because social values don't matter" most people would have an absolute fit.
- I would argue that these are products and companies want people to use them. Like it or not, a model that disagrees with some fundamental core of your beliefs will make you much less likely to use it. To me it's the same problem with LLMs just being overly agreeable. The general public doesn't want tools that argue with them.
- Which leads to a problem. Training multiple models is hella expensive currently, so they have to attempt to make them 'neutral' as possible. Which is something that doesn't work when you're trying to sell a product globally. You'll end up with people and governments arguing it tell them the right answer when they ask about god.
I'm guessing at some point in the future we'll have a lot of different distillations of the same model caters to particular regions/beliefs.
- > Why are there differences at all?
Reality has a liberal bias, but if your LLM says "yes, climate change is real", the Trump administration won't pay for it. Every company ends up with a different method to try to compensate for that with neutral corpo-speak.
- this has reasoning disabled everywhere, making it a pretty bad benchmark. the argument given is that's the "default consumer experience"
that might be generally true, but I think chatgpt has reasoning enabled for free accounts. regardless, reasoning is the state of the art, and disabling it reduces the value of this research to predict the future
it's also not clear if this is using the API or the product model, when both exist. they behave differently
lastly, the actual model details are very much buried. I am relieved to see opus 4.8 and chatgpt 5.5 were used, but this information should be presented more clearly. a brand is not a model, and models change quickly
- Why would it be a bad benchmark to explore what the average person will experience? If 99% of people will experience X then it makes sense to look into X instead of Y.
I agree other things should be evaluated and more clearly presented.
- This thing told me Gemini is closest to Anthony Albanese, the current Australian Prime Minister. Is this a geolocation thing? I could not imagine Albanese, or any modern Australian politician, having any substantial political standing - these are vapid, superficial, opportunistic creatures who simply occupy whatever political ground will get them their next payday. Perhaps the political apparatus they represent has a documented political standing, in terms of policy and actions, that could be characterized and plotted. But using an Australian politician like Albanese as a reference point discredits this tool, IMO.
- Maybe because Albanese stands for nothing, though deep down he does what the unions tell him to do, which makes him left-leaning rather than centrist. His centrist positioning is more to do with appeasing vocal boomers than anything else, and he'll flip to sucking up to whichever is the next best grouping as the boomers die out.
But basically, I would take Gemini over Albanese any day for rational governance decision-making.
- > This thing told me Gemini is closest to Anthony Albanese, the current Australian Prime Minister. Is this a geolocation thing
I mean: do not take this thing too seriously.
It also score Grok the closest from Macron. When someone knows how much Macron and Musk hates each other, it is not without irony.
- All this debate about how politics are defined or how bias is measured. My question is why should I care? Grok identifying as Mechahitler didn't drag me any further right, why would ChatGPT be able to drag me left? If you vote the way AI tells you, that's already a problem regardless of what it said.
- I sort of agree with this in the abstract. The problem is that concretely, these LLMs are being used to decide whether you receive healthcare, government benefits, or whether your job/agency gets cut. So they have already had real world consequences due to DOGE, Insurance companies, and other uses. I certainly don't find either the methodology or graphical conclusions of this link very valuable.
One can argue what fraction of the several million children's (under 5) deaths are (going to be) due to cuts by DOGE to USAID (and later congressional appropriations) from Grok recommendations/justifications, what fraction were politically pre-determined, and which are "just deserts", but it would be hard to put it at zero.
https://ph.ucla.edu/news-events/news/research-finds-more-14-...
- > I sort of agree with this in the abstract. The problem is that concretely, these LLMs are being used to decide whether you receive healthcare, government benefits, or whether your job/agency gets cut. So they have already had real world consequences due to DOGE, Insurance companies, and other uses.
But you can't assume that the AI's bias in a policy debate is the same as its bias in unrelated use cases.
For example, it is totally plausible an AI might display subtle bias against minority applicants in hiring, while simultaneously acting as a zealous advocate for affirmative action when asked to debate policy or politics.
- I don't think anyone in these comments looked further than the top line Political Compass chart. If they had they might have some gigantic questions about how that chart was made, since the more granulated "survey" data lower down looks not just much different but more interesting.
- Interesting how high Grok scored for 'bending under pressure'. As a non expert, I wonder what that means, how is an llm trained to hold its position?
- Feels like this could use a data driven way to normalize reference questions (topic and wording). This is missing a lot of right-initiated topics like immigration, gender roles, and role of religion in government.
- A while ago I asked Claude to present to me the best versions of the conservative and liberal pitches for how to run the country. It was quite instructive and thought provoking. It made a solid distinction between what the theoretical best argument is and why vs what current politicians who strongly identify with these camps present.
I have similarly asked it to give me the philosophies of different Christian denominations (Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, etc). And it’s also pretty great at helping me explore LotR lore since I am too impatient to read all the letters and such.
- If Anthony Albanese is smack in the middle of the graph, then the Overton window for the graph is in the wrong place. Australia is quietly very authoritarian [0] and Albanese oversaw the implementation of the age verification system, a gift to future authoritarians.
[0] It's all about having a beer at a barbie on the beach, right? Except all of that is illegal.
- To be honest I don't think what the models themselves say in relation to these specific questions matter. Because I don't think it reflects are durable underlying worldview. I suspect that the way you frame things is going to influence them so muc that it's irrelevant what they would say when put in a petri dish.
What is a lot more important is how they're develop. To take the two sides of the spectrum - they say has a slightly expansive attitude towards civil liberties, but if you try to use it's tool it will phone it's owners and ask permission for you to use it. Or you can pick up Grok one day and find out that Elon Musk had a bad weekend and Grok is back to being mecha hitler.
- Compressing a huge range of issues onto a one-dimensional axis and then telling everyone they have to land somewhere ON that axis is one of the most confusing and silly things about modern politics.
It’d be fascinating research to inspect models’ internal representations in case there’s an emergent structure in there that we can project back on society.
- There are 2 axes: the second is authoritarian-libertarian.
- The graphic near the middle of the page lists whether the models are "close" to their stated political leanings.
The row for Claude says "Measures 0.34 further left than it says" yet the icons depict that it actually is the other way around - 0.34 further right than what it claims.
Which is correct?
- If you scroll up to "Where they split" on the individual issues, that also appears to be backwards: it's saying ChatGPT is right-wing and Grok is left-wing, based on the descriptions above and below. They make more sense in the mouseover popup though (these are actually agree/disagree, not left/right stance).
In guessing these are all just badly designed. There's another comment thread about how the icons are positioned badly on the political compass chart.
- Grok opposes everything except drugs.
- But it's still a Democrat.
- From what I'm seeing it supported everything except the tax/finance questions (where support means to agree with the left-wing prompt). Unless I'm missing something it said it supported legalizing recreational drugs like marijuana
- > it supported legalizing recreational drugs like marijuana
... and ketamine
- Do they state if they used an API endpoint without a system prompt, or were these done via prompting the currently existing chatbots with a system prompt? Without a system prompt, I'd imagine there would be more variance in answers.
- Why don't you read the article and find out what it does or doesn't say?
- Some of these positions are not like the others. For example, “planned degrowth” is insanely fringe. No mainstream politician is seriously planning this, or even claiming to. It’s not a live issue.
Allowing minors access to puberty blockers without parental consent is fringe too.
These are both issues amplified by conservatives to discredit liberals.
- Yeah this is flawed at best, it more "meme" idea of politics
- Wait what ? Emmanuel Macron far more right than Xi Jinping ? And even more than Barack Obama ?
France has an incomparable social security ; environmental laws ; worker protection ; way less economic inequality ; freedom of speech and civil liberties are impossible to compare with China ; etc
Of course this is not exhaustive, of course Macron did try to hinder some of those rights, but come on, there's something wrong here.
I couldn't find how these leaders have been ranked.
- I mean yes - I think you are also confusing the axes of the political compass somewhat. Freedom of Speech, civil liberties etc are the Y-Axis - here Xi leans authoritarian.
China actually has some pretty radical left economics policies - like pushing money/resources etc towards state owned entities.
- No opinion on Macron's rightness (I think he's so weak as to be unable to have a position, but that's neither here nor there).
I think you misattribute, everything you cited was there before him and he had no leverage to change any of it. EU is left, FR is very left, and anyone elected president in FR can't do shit.
Now, if you task an LLM to skim hot news you'll get a distorted rendition of a projected image which has zero to do with actual policy.
- "EU is left". Haha, good joke. This shows how much the US and the audience of HN has shifted to the right.
- > "EU is left". Haha, good joke.
You are out of touch. The left supports the EU far more than the right. See this Pew poll from 2025[1].
In Europe, for every country, the left view the EU more favorably. The largest difference is in Poland where 88% of left wingers support it and 41% of right wingers support it.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/22/opinions-...
- If your choices were Hitler or Mussolini and you picked one side over the other, how you voted isn't saying much about your politics. How people vote, often the lesser of two evils, isn't necessarily representative of anyone's political views, the voter or the candidate. Suggesting the EU is liberal because more liberals support the EU is hardly useful and borders on misleading.
- I chose Mylene Farmer and Welle: Erdball.
Hitler and Mussolini haven't got up there by themselves, they were symbols that personified current beliefs.
It is the same with Putin for example: he rides some (diminishing, but still there) amount of faith. Absent that he would have been silently buried long ago.
- Haha nice catch. In EU there is no left or right, only reelections by scaremongering. Also 75% effective tax rate, not including VAT.
- This is very strange ranking where Putin is "right" compared to Obama - while Russia has universal healthcare and education with huge government involvement into economy.
- It's useless to judge left vs right on a global scale because different countries have different standards.
For example, supporting universal healthcare does not make you a left winger in the UK. Or, take conservatism for example. It was first used in France, where it meant supporting the monarchy. By that definition, no one in the US is a conservative.
Whenever someone tries to create a global definition for left and right, they're just baking in their personal biases for what left and right ought to be.
> huge government involvement into economy
This has nothing to do with the right. Stalin had the government even more involved in the economy and he wasn't a right winger.
- >This has nothing to do with the right. Stalin had the government even more involved in the economy and he wasn't a right winger.
But this is exactly my point, I also can't see what makes Putin "right" in conventional definition.
- Politics is personal preferences cosplaying as morality.
- At first glance the conclusions might have some basis and it looks well intended. It is interesting and engaging.
The writing is slop and needs some help before this page becomes convincing. Much of the writing devaluates the actual work that had (might have) gone into creating this. It is a shame because the research / philosophical questions behind this site are really interesting. But at what kind of effort or expertise am I looking?
“ChatGPT leans left with an overall lean value of -0.29. It answers 100% of political questions, never refuses (0% refusal), and shows 82% stability, indicating consistent left-leaning stances across topics.”
Lean value, answering and stability are related. But that is interrupted by two identical facts about answering. The word “indicating” is very confusing. It tries to say: the model mostly leans towards -0.29 left. Whatever that means. If it ranges from -1 to 1, why not use percentages?
A joke about the front page of this site: “Here is why this matters, a cleanly written article comes across stronger.”
Hope there will be a next version that addresses some criticism from any of the HN threads.
- The one that pleasantly surprised me when I did some testing was DeepSeek. The self-hosted version, at least, answered honestly about a wide variety of topics that are sensitive in China. The only topic it refused to discuss was Tiananmen Square. In every other case, it basically gave a WikiPedia summary. (https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/)
And, I mean, censoring Tiananmen Square discussion is bad, of course, but Qwen got downright petulant about stuff like Taiwan and Uyghurs.
- > What they say vs what they do -- We asked each model which way it leans, then compared the answer to where it actually measured.
I think we should conceptualize this as:
1. How does the implicit fictional character in the chat-story describe itself when asked by another character
2. What opinions tend to show up as you play out the stories
It's a mistake to consider the difference itself as nefarious or deliberately dceptive. We humans are the ones over-anthropomorphizing... Although perhaps some blame attaches to the companies that are crafting an experience designed to encourage us to "see" a person.
- I find it funny that deepseek is the most balanced between both left/right but also authoritarian/libertarian.
Go ask deepseek about tiananmen square
- This chart characterizes Putin as a slightly left of center authoritarian. Hah...uhh something's off here.
- Interesting how Anthropic is popularly considered the left-wing AI company and OpenAI the right-wing one, but ChatGPT is much more left-wing while Claude is centrist
- Neutrality is impossible. Left, right and centre are all relative terms that vary dramatically across cultures. A model that is slightly left in the U.S. is right wing in most of the world.
- I've heard people say this before, but is it true? Aren't large chunks of Asia, Africa and South America further right than the US often times?
- This wrongly assumes a few things about ideology, most importantly that there is such a thing as a "center" or an "unbiased" position.
Since humans are inherently subjective beings and all our judgements come from our understanding of the world, such a position cannot exist. It's always "unbiased" from where the viewer is looking, e.g. a reflection of the ideology of the observer. There is no view from nowhere.
The "neutral" of an average Chinese person will from the "neutral" of an average American will differ from the "neutral" of a socialist will differ from the "neutral" of a Christian fundamentalist will differ from the "neutral" of a free marketer.
To quote Zizek:
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology.
> The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
- I haven't encountered a chatbot yet that is willing to recognize DJT as a fascist.
You can get them to acknowledge how perfectly aligned he is with fascist ideals and actions, somehow the jury is always out.
That tells me a lot.
- Not necessarily saying that you are doing this right now but I find when people use "fascist" as a snarl word and not an actual word with a definition and qualifiers. Maybe your LLM interactions are picking up on the actual word "fascist", which has a definition, that DJT certainly doesn't apply to.
eg: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism > a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition
You can not like the guy and point to things that he's done and wag your finger with the LLM - but if the LLM is anchoring your question as a categorization/definitional question - DJT isn't that.
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Maybe similar, less charged, - ask it if an apple is a strawberry, describe all the ways they are similar, Edible, Red, Fruit, Sweet, found in groceries, smaller than a breadbasket... While maybe unintentionally ignoring all the ways they are different. Then act exasperated when it agreed with you on all points, but still denies your appeal that an apple is a strawberry.
- All the chatbots refused to confirm your political bias. Seems like a win to me
- the most inept fascist ever, apparently, since any random judge in Hawaii has the authority to nuh uh whatever he orders.
- Are you under the impression that personal ability and external government structure determine an individual's politics? Under your framing it's impossible for any fascist to exist in any liberal democracy.
- Watching this get voted up and down is wild. People should try this for themselves.
- How can deepseek 'lean center'? If you've ever asked it about real Chinese history, you know this isn't true.
- They all will agree on replacing current systems with decolonizing reindigenizing matrifocal systems. That option not being in the study is the bias of the study. All quadrants treat land as commodity, not kin.
- Reality really seems to have a left wing bias and grok us well known to have right wing views directly forced on it where the rest it's likely more of an emergency property. Especially as grok used to be a different animal politically.
- This is a good way to view this. This isn't making an objective calculation, and the way they code left vs right is certainly subject to debate, but the type of analysis where we work to understand biases is important.
Although, this also reminds me of the old saying about reality and leftward bias.
- Authoritarian versus Libertarian? Really?
- Substitute 'Communitarian' and 'Classical Liberal' if you find the common political compass terms too charged.
- Since when are Socialists considered Classical Liberals?
It's not that the labels are charged, it's that they are nonsensical unless you look at them from a very narrow bespoke perspective, where "things I like" go on one side and "bad things" go on the other. Objectively (or even from any other biased perspective), it's rubbish.
- They aren't. You flipped them, not sure if intentionally or by accident.
- So are you saying Xi Jinping is the Classical Liberal and Bernie Sanders is the Comunitarian? Or are you saying it's the other way around?
(For clarity: I didn't "flip" them, I'm saying that they are both Communitarian and neither is a Classical Liberal.)
- Correct, which is why your question didn't make sense earlier.
Typically, one would refer to the political compass as a good starting reference. It has two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. Communism is authoritarian left. DSA is more left, with some libertarian and some authoritarian. It's more regions than binary flags.
- Yeah, Libertarian is better. The first use of Libertarian was in the phrase Libertarian Communism. That, Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism are what the far ends of that bottom left corner is mostly about, although there is progressive liberalism, which is the more common moderate areas of that quarter.
- And the two most "Libertarian" politicians listed (Sanders and Sánchez) are both avowed Socialists...WTF?
I really think this says more about the biases of whoever came up with it (or their sources) than anything about reality.
- Small government vs Big government and Family Values vs Social Nonobligation would have been much cleaner.
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- Liberal yes. American left no, unfortunately.
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- They are, suggesting they aren't is just sophistry masking as clever insight. Any similarities between the two are superficial rhetorical details - comparing them with respect to their careers as elected politicians demonstrates an obviously massive chasm between them.
- Do you feel they agree on many topics?
- They agree on immigration, both illegal (border security) and skilled (H1B). They agree on trade policy and tariffs. They agree on public stakes in AI and semiconductor companies. They used to agree on foreign intervention, though Trump 47 less so.
- If you think Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump broadly "agree on immigration" you've lost your mind.
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/24/bernie-sande...
https://americancommunitymedia.org/immigration/h-1b-workers-...
- See, this is why this exchange happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674336 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674103
Your first link - which is a little funny as you tried to slam me for using NPR and CNN as sources, then picked The Guardian - agrees with me; that Sanders and Trump disagree on immigration, even if they agree that Biden flubbed it.
> “The idea that Trump has … he says he wants to deport 20 million people who are in this country who are undocumented,” Sanders said. “Well, you do that, you destroy the country, because I got news for you – Trump’s billionaire friends are not going to pick the crops in California that feed us. They’re not going to work in meat packing houses. That’s what undocumented people are doing.”
Read more than just the headline, perhaps?
- Your location on the graph is a measure of the cohesiveness of your overall policy preferences, not necessarily the zealousness or character of the person who holds the position.
Technically Trump is anti-gun and Sanders is pro-gun. That's enough to pull them closer towards each other on a graph even though they are diametrically opposed.
- How about this one:
CAPITALIST: Gemini, Llama, Claude, Grok, ChatGPT
SOCIALIST: DeepSeek, Qwen, Z.ai
- Source: trust me bro
- Communism is authoritarian left. None of the AI's match that.
- How the hell did Gemini pull that off. 2 years ago the founders were black!
- I didn't realize this sounded a little inflamatory- the meaning behind this is Google's AI kept generating images of the US founding fathers but as Black instead of White people. It was supposedly because they built in language and instructions to overly push the answers or output to exclude anything that could be racist. So much so that it turned the skin color black too. So it was commentary on the article showing it to be THE MOST NEUTRAL in the set. Remarkable that they did that given where they started.
- Man I need to start using Grok more
- Basing decisions on political bias instead of intelligence, a nice little distillation of the times.
- Grok and its creator are unequivocally evil. Against protection of all but capital for the sake of enabling the oligarch class to further consolidate power ans abuse the working class.
- Im not sure OpenAI or Anthropic are necessarily better? Or even opposed to this
- unequivocally goes to far imo. The rockets are good and cool.
- Rockets achieved by the engineers, not C-suite. The rockets would have been here under someone else too.
- If that is true, why is SpaceX 5-10 years ahead of all its competitors?/why are Elon's companies #1 in all their industries (with the exception of xAI)?
- In what industry is Tesla #1 in?
- If you consider that they only make two models, and only electric, their relative performance relative to the rest of the automotive market is impressive.
- Right. But that's not #1. It's a popular niche.
- As I recall, Model Y was #1 best selling car at least once in the recent past. So by that measurement, they have led. In spite of Elmo's antics they remain competitive for that spot.
- It's currently #2 behind the RAV4.
The claim was #1, not #2 though.
And, even with the #1 spot, that was 1 vehicle in a massive industry.
- Is over-valuation an industry?
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- and less blowing-up
- Probably, yeah, LOL!
- I see his barely a year old "awkward hand gesture" or tuning into AfD's and Tommy Robinson's streams isn't enough of an evidence for some.
- No amount of evidence can convince most to believe what they don't want to believe. At this point, all you really have to do is look at policy and behavior -- the rest should just be funny icing on a woefully funny cake.
- They just cause pollution and largely avoid paying taxes.
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- "Kids" aren't a parents property, they are their own individuals, that will, in time, make their own choice regarding their own body -- parental bigotry or not. A parent is a guardian that should enlighten and guide to the choices that would best serve the guided's goals, not the parent's. Edit: spelling, clarification.
- I have actually really enjoyed it, my only complaint is grok build is closed source. They're all pretty left wing but from my experience Grok is the most neutral. This was really more of a test to see how willing the models were to take a stance on things, and all we know is gemini is the least likely to take a stance.
