[bee_rider]

I thought the analogy to linear algebra added very little. It seems more they’ve just littered words about vectors around the word average. They just want the word average.

I think there might be some interesting analogies to vectors out there, so it annoys me that they’ve basically made a head-fake toward them and then just used the word average.

I think you are going in a better direction. I’d call a person’s opinions a point in a many-dimensional space, a space of issues. Then, to come up with a discourse we project those opinions into a some space of ideals. I think what things like the 1D left/right spectrum and the 2D political compass miss is that there isn’t some objectively correct way of picking the unit vectors for the space you are projecting onto. Probably we’d want to do the PCA, but that’s based on the population.

I’d also place the discussion in terms of political opinions rather than some analogy to a god or some gods, since they bring in a lot of feelings.