Understanding convictions, your own included

Adding dimensions to a political description makes it both more faithful and more fragile. Here is the trade-off, stated without marketing.

We picture political disagreement as a single frontier. It looks rather like several superimposed lines, which never quite coincide.

Revising a position is not only intellectual work. It is an uncomfortable operation, whose mechanism has been documented since the 1950s.

The relation to authority is the dimension most badly summarised by everyday vocabulary. Being attached to order and distrusting power is in no way contradictory.

Sorting people into named profiles makes a result legible. It also creates an illusion: that of clear frontiers where there are only degrees.

Not voting is not a single position. It is one and the same act covering very different situations, and conflating them leads to false conclusions.

We regularly overestimate the proportion of people who share our positions. This error of estimation has concrete effects on the way we debate.

Helping someone may belong to the voluntary gesture, to mutual insurance or to imposed duty. Three logics covered by the same word, and which do not produce the same institutions.

Answering forty questions requires attention, and attention falls. Wording half the items the other way round is one of the few protections that work.

The most violent exchanges do not always set the most distant positions against each other. Often it is the reverse, and the mechanism is perfectly understandable.

Emotions are not parasites that come to disturb an otherwise clean piece of reasoning. They steer attention, and each steers it differently.

That contributions should be recognised is the object of broad agreement. What counts as a contribution, and what recognition authorises, is the object of none.

A rarity percentage impresses, but it means nothing until one has specified rare compared with what, and measured how.

A poll is a measuring instrument with a known precision and known blind spots. The problem rarely comes from the instrument, often from how it is read.

When we are wrong, circumstances explain it. When someone else is wrong, what explains it is what they are. This asymmetry has a name and direct political effects.