Measurement, Epistemology, Politics
June 25, 2023
By NZB3
Here is a question I found interesting from an unknown person wanting a connection between measurement, epistemology, and political groups to be elaborated upon. This association seems to explain the different points of view that Conservatives, Libertarians, Progressives, and Woke Leftists have about reality itself. And, it maps right on to the basic textbook learning of introductory statistics!
In Janurary 2023 episode 557 of the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters put the idea played some listener correspondence that contained this idea. The hosts really didn’t know what to make of it, talked over it, passed it by. I emailed the show’s Digital Content Administrator, Pete, who was polite but unhelpful. I wanted to correspond with the unnamed man who obviously intended this idea to be taken seriously but so far am out of luck. He recited the ‘Four Levels of Measurement’ as in the diagram above in their hierarchy of precision/nature: Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, Ratio. He pointed out that these groups appeared to correspond to different political groupings and asked what others made of this. My answer is on the way.
Four Levels of Measurement
The diagram above and left might be clear enough, especially for those who remember their statistics studies. We attribute different levels of precision to a fact, or datum, based on how well we understand a thing. The most basic level is Nominal– we have identified a quality, tagged it with a name, but not quantified it. Next up the scale is Ordinal, then Interval, then Ratio.
Information in Ordinal form has natural order such as ‘more or less’ or ‘better or wose’ but not in any units we can strictly pin down. For example, when it comes to pain we use a Subjective Pain Scale generally using happy/sad/etc. faces.
Better yet in precision is Interval data because we can put an exact number value on it and rely on it by direct comparison to other numbers in the same set. We can apply transformations and conversions, arithmatic, to Interval information. We are now in the territory of the measurable. For example, temperature and speed.
Best of all so far as we know is Ratio data because we now comprehend the entire numberline of information whereas Interval information was just a subset. Now we really have the information cornered and can perform statistical analysis and exact physics calculations on facts about nature. Now things like mass, height, mean, standard deviation etc. can be figured out; Now you can send a rocket into orbit and bring it home again.
Primitives don’t have access to these levels of measurement because it is not built-in to the human animal. It is an achievement built in culture that we pass on to each other by teaching and what we have now was built up over generations. In the days of Locke and Newton our culture was still grappling for these sorts of terms and as such still relied upon artistic, poetic, language to try to express ideas about physical phenomena such as light and heat and electricity. What else could they do?
To pre-civilised folk physical phenomena are mysterious, supernatural, tribal. The distinctions on these charts are, to them, meaningless terms. The great achievements made possible are magic. The spooky thing is that minds like these are returning to the Earth, even within our own communities. We can do no better to understand them than to observe that it is because they do not have cognitive access to something as simple as this chart: The Levels of Measurement.
Return of the Primitive
Where I, and Unknown Podcast Correspondent, are going with all of this is to map these Levels of Measurment to particular political (Nominal) catagories. First, a few words on how we receive or fail to receive things like the Levels of Measurement into our intellectual tool kits. This is easily done with a quick flick through the pages of someone who wrote a book about the Anti-Industrial Revolution; Reurn of the Primitive by Ayn Rand.
Intelligence, says Rand, is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions and is an aquired skill. Identifying objects is the basis but abstracting the attributes (eg height, weight, colour,..) takes conscous effort. Quoting Maria Montessori, whose teachings have inspired many Montessori schools all over New Zealand, Rand points out that the child is aquiring a framework for content not the content itself. For example, they learn about the Levels of Measurment which leads to making ordered observations about the world around. Teachers help facilitate children to have “…an inner guide which leads them to become active and intelligent explorers instead of wandering wayfarers in an unknown land.” Montessori (1965) wrote.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? The kind of education New Zealand children should have and that, in past generations at least, did receive. No wonder many parents seek out Montessori options for their children to provide the cognitive guidence a fully actualised modern mind depends on. Have this and the world can be yours. But what about those who don’t get that? Maybe you’re born too early before Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding or, worse, too late because your school has been taken over and is now run by “teachers” who do not transmit that framework and actively pull it down?
“But the Progressive nursery school does not merely neglect the cognitive training that a child needs in his early years: it stifled his normal development. It conditions his mind to an anti-conceptual method of functioning that paralyzes his rational faculty.” – p65, Rand
“It is the educational establishment that has created this national disaster. It is philosophy that has created the educational establishment…To oppose it will require a philosophical revolution or, rather, a rebirth of philosophy.” – p93, Rand
“The primitive man reguards the world as unknowable…where does primitive man turn to guidance? To his tribe. It is membership in a collective that infuses such a person with his sole sense of identity. The tribe’s edicts thus become his unquestioned absolutes, and the tribe’s welfare becomes his fundamental value.” – Schwartz; ix, Rand
“Animals, infants and small children are exceedingly sensitive to emotional vibrations: it is their chief means of cognition.” – p60, Rand
The primitive’s “…feelings are only various shades of panic.” – p77, Rand
An anti-Enlightenment, anti-Industrial Revolution is a very real threat to the level of civilisation we have reached. The cognitive tools needed for our civilisation not to fall are still in reach but are no-longer being transmitted. Our current ‘open plan’ barnyard government schools are failing to educate. The government’s compulsory language, math, and now history lessons are dumbing down each new class and each new generation. Ref. Government English, Government History, NZB3
Degraded Cognition and Political Profiles
Now we can look directly at groups like Conservatives, Progressives, Libertarians, and the Woke Leftists and understand their positions in terms of degraded cognition. Specifically, as the man on the podcast was seeking to develop, it seems there is a pattern between political affiliation and someone’s grasp of the Levels of Measurement.
There’s a famous picture of a shattered sink (image, right) going around the internet lately that makes a metaphore for a broken mind or society too. Even as a person or a society degrade and deteriorate there are still parts that last and continue to function. When, say, the Roman Empire fell its buildings and roads and aquaducts did not simultaniously shut down; Many out-lasted the Empire. So too, like this sink that is technically functional, people have various grasps on the Levels of Measurement rather than simply all or it or none.
“What is a woman?” has become a key question in the past few months to explore where someone stands on Levels of Measurement. It’s a very concrete, basic, way of trying to have a philosopical conversation about data because the national IQ isn’t high enough to put the issue in other terms.
Conservatives are Nominal thinkers. They “just know” what a woman is. They utter statements like “it is obvious,” “it is common sense,” “I know it when I see it,” and appeal to shared sentiments which, “if you don’t know I can’t tell you!
Progressives are Ordinal thinkers. They can see the difference between sex and gender whereas Conservatives cognitively cannot and will not. As Ordinals, the Progressives view qualities as being on a spectrum. It is they who extended LGB to LGBQ to LGBQ+ to LGBTQIA+ and so on.
Libertarians (especially Anarchists, of course) think in Interval and Ratio terms. We know qualities and phenomena are measurable. We strive to discover and quantify and comprehend nature and to make a science of it and celebrate one another as this is accomplished step by step. (I have certainly noticed that mathematicians and engineeirs have a more ‘right-leaning’ view whereas those in the arts tend to go ‘left-leaning’ and eschew measured thinking.)
Woke Leftists are off the chart which is why I added a triggered meme image to the diagram above. Their cognitive guidance didn’t make it as far as even grasping the Nominal. They are stuck, like the primitive state of mankind, without cognitive tools. Instead they have emotions and live in various shades of panic. The Levels of Measurement and the terms within are “meaningless” to them; Even terms like “woman.” The achievements of those who do think in terms of Levels of Measurement are dismissed or considered magic. Will of the gods or of the tribe. A consensus decides for them if biological engineeiring is poison or a cure, a consensus decides if the planet is getting too hot and what must be done about it. Where does primitive man turn to guidance? To his tribe.
Progressives are befuddled by their incomplete training in the Levels of Measurement. A case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. As ‘mid-wits’ they end up being less able to deal with qualities of reality than both those above and below them in a Bell Curve of understanding. But they’re not as badly off as the Woke Leftists.
It may be that the Woke Leftists never made it to step 1 of understanding. The spawn of the increasingly commercialised, and government-sponsored, daycare farms they never really had a chance. It might also be that the Woke Leftist transitted through Progressivism. Might it be that the existential nausia of being arrested at the Ordinal cognitve phase drove the Progressive crazy and they abandoned it for Woke Leftism? For example, adding new letters as software patches to fix LGB never seems to end. The spectrum keeps expanding forever, the ground you try to stand on so you can think keeps shifting. Without philosophy, without a good teacher, or therapist, to help you complete your training what else can you do but recoil back into primitivism? Perhaps this is the genesis of Woke Leftism.
This is a testable idea. When you meet someone try comparing their political outlook to their comprehention of the Levels of Measurement. Are they taking mankind forward or hurling it backward to primitivism hosted by the last remains of people who were helped to think for themselves? Do they deal in ideas, principles, laws, measurements? Or, do they manipulate to get what they want? Ideas to them are counters and tokens to be moved around the board not money with value. A book is a symbol to be brandished in someone’s face not a repository of knowledge. These sorts of people tend to have come out of of government “education” enclosures where they have been penned up from an early age and they are intent in re-creating the world according to that horrible image. Home for them, hell for us!
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Image ref. modified image by NZB3, byjus.com
Image ref. Statology.org
Ref. p58, etc. Return of the Primitive, Ayn Rand. Peter Schwartz (1999)
Note: Nominal people tend to speak in terms of annecdote. Story telling. They’re the sort who would say an affect isn’t real because they have a small sample size (knew a woman who lived to a ripe old age, a sister of a work mate heard that..) saying otherwise. Interval and Ratio people don’t convince themselves and others by annecdote, they are focused on trends.
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