Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
Any reason why they wouldn't, at least up to a certain height?

The distinction between "Power" and "Benevolence" and "Openness to change" and "Tradition" should not be problematic in this regard, nor should linguistic barriers cause significant obstruction.
Disagree on both of these, but nbd. It has been my experience that people, or at least I, do not really understand the values that matter the most to me. I know the values that I am culturally conditioned to like, and what values I am inclined to like (largely for reasons of connotation and association though), but as for what values I'd die for, what values I really care about, what values animate my action... I don't really know. And I feel like I've thought more about this than the average person, although not all that much in absolute terms. Perhaps those broad terms you listed would be useful insofar as they seem to be very distinct from one another, but you have to think about the associations some people have with the word "power". Say you grew up in a very academic home, where you grew up hearing things about "speaking truth to power" and unconscious oppression and power dynamics, etc., etc., you're going to have a very different set of associations with the word power than someone in a more "all my life I had to fight" situation. Or on a smaller level, if you were bullied or a bullier as a child, how strict/authoritarian your parents were, etc. I'm just saying our associations with words make words mean, in the sense that it is significant for a study of values, different things to different people. But, yes, perhaps some moderately useful data can be culled from such a study; I'm just saying that as far as it revealing the truth of human values, what sorts of things we value, in any truly significant way... I'm extraordinarily doubtful.

The statement that the study was "empirically sound" was made relative to the standards of psychology. If the study is as reliable as anything else that gets accepted as humanitarian science, I think I am warranted in calling it that.
Agreed. It was more the statement in isolation that I was rolling my eyes to. But yes, if you make it relative to the soft sciences in general. I guess my position is just that "empirically sound" is DEFINITELY not the first thing I look for in a "theory on human values," which is why I found that statement sort of spurious. But, yes, on consideration, it's not totally valueless, which is why I just rolled my eyes at it instead of saying "WOW THAT IS SUCH USELESS BS" because it isn't useless bs, it's just sort of funny to me to apply an empirical test to something so elusive and slippy and difficult to quantify. Still worth exploring and thinking about regardless.