There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn?t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don?t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is - well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That's half the country.
And I don?t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It's not because I?m deliberately avoiding them; I?m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn?t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn?t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I?m browsing sites like Reddit.
Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking - Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn?t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.
It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.
There were a bunch of posts saying "I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it," a bunch of others saying "my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn?t be involved in the marriage business at all", and several more saying ?why would you even ask this question, there?s no possible good argument and you?re wasting your time". About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added ?But it?s not my place to decide what is or isn?t natural, I'm still pro-gay marriage."
In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with "I know I?m going to be downvoted to hell for this?"
But I?m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year?s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn?t last. Pretty much all of those "Republicans" are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose "libertarian" as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that?s still?some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative ? and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n?-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.
I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)
IV.
One day I realized that entirely by accident I was fulfilling all the Jewish stereotypes.
I'm nerdy, over-educated, good with words, good with money, weird sense of humor, don?t get outside much, I like deli sandwiches. And I'm a psychiatrist, which is about the most stereotypically Jewish profession short of maybe stand-up comedian or rabbi.
I'm not very religious. And I don?t go to synagogue. But that's stereotypically Jewish too!
I bring this up because it would be a mistake to think "Well, a Jewish person is by definition someone who is born of a Jewish mother. Or I guess it sort of also means someone who follows the Mosaic Law and goes to synagogue. But I don?t care about Scott?s mother, and I know he doesn?t go to synagogue, so I can?t gain any useful information from knowing Scott is Jewish."
The defining factors of Judaism ? Torah-reading, synagogue-following, mother-having - are the tip of a giant iceberg. Jews sometimes identify as a "tribe", and even if you don?t attend synagogue, you're still a member of that tribe and people can still (in a statistical way) infer things about you by knowing your Jewish identity - like how likely they are to be psychiatrists.
The last section raised a question - if people rarely select their friends and associates and customers explicitly for politics, how do we end up with such intense political segregation?
Well, in the same way "going to synagogue" is merely the iceberg-tip of a Jewish tribe with many distinguishing characteristics, so "voting Republican" or "identifying as conservative" or "believing in creationism" is the iceberg-tip of a conservative tribe with many distinguishing characteristics.
A disproportionate number of my friends are Jewish, because I meet them at psychiatry conferences or something ? we self-segregate not based on explicit religion but on implicit tribal characteristics. So in the same way, political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent ? a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in - based on their implicit tribal characteristics.
The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting ?USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!?, and listening to country music.
The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to ?everything except country".
(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football ?sportsball?, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk ? but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)
I think these ?tribes? will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.
It?s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble ? which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I?m restricting myself to the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods, which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.
Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin, religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don?t know.
Some of it is certainly genetic - estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one?s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself.
(for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like "traditionalism", "authoritarianism", and "in-group favoritism" and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)
But I don?t think it?s just genetics. There?s something else going on too. The word "class" seems like the closest analogue, but only if you use it in the sophisticated Paul Fussell Guide Through the American Status System way instead of the boring "another word for how much money you make" way.
For now we can just accept them as a brute fact - as multiple coexisting societies that might as well be made of dark matter for all of the interaction they have with one another - and move on.