Comment by shw1n
16 days ago
PG has two different terms for it in his essay: unintentional moderates vs intentional moderates
https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
That's what represents the two circled areas in the graph, though I realize if people don't have that context it could be confusing
added an explanation to clear things up
fwiw, I don't think that's arrogant, I've met plenty of high schoolers that understand this concept
I didn't think that was confusing, your article pointed it out fine and clearly. However it doesn't address my point. "(Un)intentional" is solely a qualifier regarding the intentionality behind becoming a moderate, not the "moderate" part itself, which is what I'm arguing against. Independent thought doesn't necessarily lead to a moderate position. It leads to a position that almost certainly isn't perfectly aligned with a single -ism ideology. In fact, many of the individual beliefs held may well be considered the opposite, "extreme" in the sense of the Overton window (which is what "moderate" is really about).
Hmm maybe I'm misunderstanding, but each red dot represents the average of a collection of views
The idea behind PG's article (as I understand it) is that "the left" and "right" have some degree of arbitrary positions they support, so the chances of any individual independently coming up a set of positions that perfectly matches is extremely low.
But individual positions could very well be scattered across the spectrum, some very left, some very right, but together would likely average out to near the middle
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