One may be tempted to brush aside any positive correlation between conservatism and health and happiness as a side-effect of some strong positive correlation between conservatism and income/wealth (“well, no wonder conservatives are happier and healthier and start more families: they just have more money!”).
Except… there is no such strong correlation. Today, in countries like the US and Spain, income [“has for all practical purposes zero discernible effect” in voting attitudes](https://www.cspicenter.com/p/the-national-populist-illusion-why-culture-not-economics-drives-american-politics), or the effect [is very weak](https://qoto.org/@tripu/106788318030499881).
So there has to be something else going on.
WDYT?
⑤ Mutual understanding:
> _“We tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. […] One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a ‘typical liberal’ would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a ‘typical conservative’ would respond. […] The results were clear and consistent. **Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions**, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. **Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as ‘very liberal’**.”_
④ #Tolerance:
> _“**Liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa** across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically.”_
— https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal
Sources here, with lots of interesting surveys and charts: https://noahcarl.medium.com/who-doesnt-want-to-hear-the-other-side-s-view-9a7cdf3ad702
③ #Happiness (and mental health again):
> _“**Political conservatives are happier than liberals**. We proposed that this happiness gap is accounted for by specific attitude and personality differences associated with positive adjustment and mental health. […] In four studies, […] differences accounted for the happiness gap. These patterns are consistent with the positive adjustment explanation.”_
— https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009265661100170X
Possible flaw: “conservatives, who are described as fearful, defensive, and low in self-esteem, will rationalize away social inequalities in order to justify the status quo (system justification)” (same source).
② Mental #health:
> _“**White (and especially ‘very’) liberals are far more likely than all other ideological-racial subgroups to report being diagnosed with a mental health condition**.”_
— https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1248823825317363714
Possible flaw: [“it's possible that the disparities in self-reported diagnosis are simply or partly a function of white liberals being more likely to seek mental health evaluations”](https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1248826478432858112).
① #Marriage and family life:
> _“**Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be happily married**, simply because they're more likely to be married in the first place. […] Ideology predicts marital status among Americans about as well as income or education.”_
— https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-than-money-the-liberal-conservative-divide-in-marriage/
Possible flaw: I suspect age correlates with both probability of being married and with probability of leaning right, so when you look at who's married _today_, some of those (happily) married who declare to be conservatives would have been singles who identified as liberals two or three decades earlier. In other words: perhaps it's not that being a liberal makes you less likely to marry, but that being married and having children moves you closer to conservatism!
Recently I have stumbled upon several studies that seem to suggest that (at least in the US) #conservatives are happier and healthier than #liberals, that they are more tolerant of different points of view, and that they understand the ideas of their adversaries better than they are understood.
👇 Putting it all here, plus some comments where I think results may be biased or distorted.
Michel de #Montaigne on #rationality (#Essays):
> _“Since it has pleased God to endue us with some capacity of #reason, to the end we may not, like brutes, be servilely subject and enslaved to the laws common to both, but that we should by judgment and a voluntary liberty apply ourselves to them, we ought, indeed, something to yield to the simple authority of nature, but not suffer ourselves to be tyrannically hurried away and transported by her; reason alone should have the conduct of our inclinations. I, for my part, have a strange disgust for those propensions that are started in us without the mediation and direction of the judgment.”_
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3600/pg3600-images.html#link2HCH0065
I see people nowadays buying ~€1,000 #smartphones, and replacing them every year or two — especially techies and teenagers.
Hear me out: I bought my current smartphone… four years and five months ago. I paid exactly €144,74 for it. It was (and still is) free and unlocked. It is still in good working condition (although getting a bit too slow now).
I am a professional technologist.
_What the hell do you need a $1K cell phone every couple of years for?_
tripu
boosted
Southern view of Jupiter taken by the Juno spacecraft as it departed from Perijove 48. The camera, which is already well beyond it's expected lifetime, experienced some sort of temperature anomaly which resulted in most of the images not having been taken on PJ48. Hopefully the camera engineers find a solution before the closer Io passes!
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
#Jupiter #Perijove48 #NASAJuno #Juno #JunoCam #Space #Science
> _“Truly, mainstream #media is the great Mugger of Reality. Even when its individual stories are rock solid, it promotes a deeply false Big Picture of the world. And unless you have the intellectual steel to_ constantly _remind yourself, ‘This is a horribly misleading perspective,’ consuming media tends to make you believe this deeply false Big Picture.”_
— [Bryan Caplan](https://betonit.substack.com/p/mainstream-media-is-worse-than-silence)
If you are an #English speaker but not a #Spanish speaker, do me a favour:
Imagine that the word you use in your native language for hair that is yellow-ish and for people with that type of hair (“blonde”) were, by sheer chance, identical to the word that the inhabitants of Otherland use to refer, approvingly, to people who like to sodomise babies.
Now, when you are using your language in public settings (on the street, on the internet) with fellow countrypeople , there are often Otherlanders nearby, overhearing what you say or reading your content.
Imagine that many Otherlanders openly expressed shock and disdain every time you used the word “blonde” to refer to someone who happens to have yellow-ish hair. That Otherlanders looked at you as if you were an insensitive monster. That they sometimes even scolded you for using that word _in your own language_.
Wouldn't you be annoyed every time that happened? Wouldn't you feel the urge to say “you don't know my language, educate yourself!”
Let me introduce you to [the Spanish word “negro”](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/negro#Noun_8), which happens to exists also [in English as a loanword which gained different connotations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/negro#Etymology).
> _“We are so conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unawares.”_
tripu
boosted
🇳🇱
@tripu This misses a very important point... While almost all land suitable for crops is also suitable for animals the reverse isnt true. In fact it is quite often the case animals are raised on land explicitly not suitable for crops. I dont know the exact breakdown, and that would be important to evaluate this fairly. But I know from my interaction with farmers that a great many of them raise their livestock on mountainous land not suited for crops and use fertile farmland mostly for crops.. Even when the land is flat and not mountainous it is often unsuitable for crops due to the makeup of the soil (too rocky, no good drainage, etc)
3️⃣ Number of animals affected:
You could reduce quite a lot your carbon footprint by replacing all your beef and lamb with chicken and fish (big mammals emit far more CO₂ per kg of protein than poultry and fish). The problem is, then [you would be indirectly responsible for many, many more individual animals raised in industrial farms and killed in slaughterhouses](http://hannahritchie.com/meat-environment-welfare-tradeoff/).
2️⃣ Carbon emissions:
Think you can stick to your steaks and omelettes and at the same time manage to significantly reduce your carbon footprint by “eating locally”? Actually, [transport accounts for a very small fraction of carbon released in food production](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local) (be it plant- or animal-based).
Also,
> _“most food internationally comes by ship. And, actually shipping is very carbon efficient. You're going to emit 10 to 20 times less CO₂ than trucks per kilometre and 50 times less than flying. Most of your soy or your avocados are nearly always coming by ship and shipping actually has a very, very small carbon footprint.”_
— [Hannah Ritchie](https://www.econtalk.org/hannah-ritchie-on-eating-local/#audio-highlights)
1️⃣ Land usage:
[Crops for human consumption make up only 23% of all agricultural land worldwide, and yet they provide 83% of all calories](http://hannahritchie.com/convergence-nutrition-sustainability/).
Plant-based calories (and proteins) are much more efficient and require way less land and water than meat and dairy.
I became a #vegetarian (aspiring #vegan) almost exclusively to contribute to reduce animal #suffering.
With time, I realised that the _other_ reasons to avoid animal-based foods are surprisingly strong, too.
🧵
