There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan)

In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” ^{It was a result of a movement at the University of Michigan, where Converse taught, to do large-scale data analyses of the ideology of the American public — or, perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof.}

It’s common to think about political ideology as something that can be measured along a single left-right axis, with each…