re: #268 Obdicut

No, the ‘sides’ are only real in that there are two political parties, called “Republican” and “Democrat”. The ‘sides’ of left and right don’t actually exist.

That’s not a demonstration. People with no affiliation still most commonly vote for either Republican or Democrat. And the rest of the parties- I dunno what point you’re trying to make here. They exist, they’re not very important in US politics, and they’re mostly politically incoherent.

But the two parties are populated by people who hold specific values that can be expressed as dichotomies. Those dichotomies can be grouped and assigned arbitrary numeric or categorical values. That’s how you build a model of the real world functional enough to produce useful information.