Political Debiasing and the Political Bias Test

The problem here is who will have the authority to decide what viewpoint is to be considered unbiased.

Let's assume a completely unbiased viewpoint about a very controversial political topic actually existed. Wouldn't most people see it as biased in favor of their opponent's side?

Cool! I've been desperate to see a rationality test and so make improvements in rationality measurable (I think the Less Wrong movement really really needs this) so it's fantastic to see people working on this. I haven't checked the methodology yet but the basic principle of measuring bias seems sound.

I'm generally a proponent of nuclear power but you might want to make your

"Can radioactive wastes from nuclear power be safely disposed of?"

question clearer as my first thought was "define 'safely'".

I'm normally the one saying that sealing it in glass, wrapping it in steel, concrete, steel and then burying it in a mountain above the water table in the middle of nowhere constitutes safe for reasonable purposes but it's also pretty fair for critics to say that we have so little experience of really long term construction projects or what future conditions will be like (perhaps a settlement will end up there thousands of years down the line for no good reason) that just pointing to a review paper doesn't really cut it.

If you'd said "reasonably safe" or "safe enough that it's unlikely to cause problems unless someone intentionally mines into it a thousand years from now and starts selling glowing jewlery to all the locals" it would have been a clear yes but I couldn't answer that without disclaimers.

I just looked at this test and had a problem with the very first question. It asks if you are strongly conservative or strongly liberal. What? I'd expect a high percentage of libertarians taking the test.

Other problems: Policies that are pro-immigration: If I believe in some policies that are pro-immigration and some that are not (like if I believe that certain groups of immigrants are bad and others aren't), what do I answer? Am I supposed to answer the question as if it means "are you in favor of unrestricted immigration?" (which it often means in political discourse) or actually answer what it literally says?

Actually, that's a general problem with the whole survey. There are questions which might have one meaning literally, but which mean something other than their literal words in political discourse. The global warming question doesn't say "... to such a degree that in order to fix it, we should put drastic policies into place", but that's what the question usually means. You're going to end up misdetecting bias when you've actually detected ability to read subtext and context.

What am I supposed to answer for questions about subjects on which I have no opinion? There isn't a "no opinion" answer on the question about whether I support tough on crime policies. And I have no idea how many percentage points renewable energy grew by.

There's also a problem whcih I've seen in lots of other surveys. The survey question consists of a statement followed by the actual question, phrased in a way which indicates that you're supposed to assume the statement is accurate. What do you do if you don't consider the statement to be accurate? ("Advocates of American capitalism argue that global technological and economic progress is largely due to American ingenuity." Literally true since it fails to state how many such advocates, but I don't believe what it is probably intended to say. "Taxes are much lower in the US than in the average EU country. If lower taxes meant more wealth, you would therefore expect the US to be richer, in the sense of having a higher GDP per capita, than most EU countries." I would not "therefore" expect any such thing, because I would only expect it if other factors are equal or favorable for the US and the statement hasn't stipulated that.)

I think at some point you hit a problem with hypocrisy rather than bias. The arguments people make and the beliefs they claim very often don't align with their actual contingent predictions and preferences.

The basic popular belief "I am not responsible for improving this aspect of the universe" is perhaps best handled not so much as an unconscious bias, but as an unstated motivating belief that drives biases.

Overall fantastic article. One small request:

If they don’t have any special reason not to, people without special knowledge defer to the scientific consensus on technical issues.

Citation needed

Another reason for optimism is that it seems that the level of political bias is actually lower today than it was historically. People are better at judging politically controversial issues in a detached, scientific way today than they were in, say, the 14th century. This shows that progress is possible.

Can you expand on what evidence there is for this?

The very first question I got (not sure if the order is randomized) was about global warming. Instant priming: Okay, this quiz is going to be about scientific consensus. After that I was trying to guess what scientific consensus said.

That question breaks your quiz.

I'm uncomfortable with the question distinguishing between "richer than most" and "richer than nearly all". Logically if I answer "richer than most" is true.

There justification of the answer makes little sense as you have to count the number of countries which are richer to find out and not take the EU average.

however, namely a political bias test which I have constructed with ClearerThinking, run by EA-member Spencer Greenberg.

I just took the test. Looking at the official answers, I have to say that the test probably says more about the test makers' bias then my own. For example, a number of the answers cite "scientific consensus", which is a rather dubious concept philosophically especially in areas like the global warming and GMOs where there is reasonable suspicion that the "consensus" is politically manufactured, or even worse "economic consensus", a.k.a., the economists we cherry-picked all agree.

It doesn't help that some of the economics questions are ambiguous: "Did the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus package reduce or increase unemployment?" are we including the effects on the economy of borrowing the money to pay for the stimulus?

Another example is the World Giving Index. While the answer, that the US gives more then European states is probably true, the fact that the index has the US tied with Myanmar is extremely strong evidence that the index is BS.

(From the test)

Note, however, that in this case we also need an explanation of why these test-takers ended up with factual beliefs which systematically favor a certain political position. The explanation closest at hand is that they have been given biased factual information (e.g., from the media). Thus in this case, too, the cause of the correlation is bias, but it does not stem from the test-takers themselves, but rather from the information that they are given.

Or media bias has a negligible effect, but people randomly encounter more of one side than the other. Do the scores follow a bell curve around no bias?

Hm.. I'll just ask here for the questions I didn't get right.

2) Are genetically modified foods unsafe for humans?

ANSWER: No, according to scientific consensus.

I choose "we don't know" because I genuinely don't know, but in all honesty the thing that bothers me is that GMO is a pretty big umbrella. I'm assuming it first means that it's something grown in a lab and not human selection of which fruits were tastier/bigger/more colourful than others. And in the lab scenario, what was modified? Disease resistance? Vitamin contents? Rat poison in the organism's blood/juice?

Words are harmful.

Studies show that organic farming, which aims to minimise the environmental impact of farming, gives…

ANSWER: lower yield than conventional farming. A meta-analysis shows that organic yields are on average 80% of yields from conventional farming.

What is even "conventional" farming? Giving the plant plenty of sun and water, or spraying Agent Green (Agent Orange's nature-friendly brother) everywhere? (I believe the proper word is insecticide)

I don't get this question at all.

Words are harmful THE MOVIE II: harmful.cat-v.org

The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of highly educated foreign workers were legally allowed to immigrate to the US each year.

ANSWER: True, according to consensus among economists (pg. 13 of the linked article)

Waaait a sec.. how can this be true? This seems counterintuitive: the average US citizen would probably have less high-income jobs available to them if not less jobs overall as they have to compete with immigrants too now.

And that assumes all things being equal. In reality, we don't really know what a "high educated foreign worker" implies, and because things are most likely not going to be equal, I have a feeling foreign workers would work for less money and perhaps even in worse conditions, so this question is to be honest kind of disconnected from reality.

15) Does the death penalty decrease homicide rates?

ANSWER: We don't know as of yet, as evidenced by a study from the National Research Council.

Wouldn't there be a gradual switch to more covert, less-likely-to-get-caught methods with such a severe punishment? Clearly the punishment has some effect.

I took the test:

In total, you correctly answered 11/18 (61.11%) of the political knowledge questions. 80% of people correctly answer between 4 and 9 questions; 6 is the average. Your score is higher than 95% of test takers.

On a scale of 0-100%, your total political bias was 5.56%.

Instead most people seem to believe themselves to be politically rational, and hold that as a very important value (or so I believe).

That depends a bit on the enviroment. There are cases where people care very much of signaling group alliance. On the left you find people competing on being more ideological pure than the next person.

I had one experience with an extremly smart person, which politically influential parents and maybe a future political career on her own who once quite explicetly said, that's what she was doing after she read a room wrongly and excused for that (it wasn't a even a public event but party internal).

Great post.

Another great resource is the ABC's fact checker, for those political news watchers to see whether the politicians they agree with or disagree with are factually correct or incorrect.

And, to actively compare one's ideological beliefs with theoretical truisms, such as those in game theory

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-- Stephen Colbert

See also.