I’m a little confused about your problem statement, indeed, most of the extreme politicians in the U.S. seem to win outright, in ranked-choice primaries, or systems with two-candidate runoffs.

In the Democratic party, which I’m more familiar with, their most extreme (this is not an endorsement or disendorsement of their policies, just to note that these politicians are the furthest left in the party) elected officials tend to win outright majorities or in reformed elections:

• Mamdani won a ranked-choice primary and then an outright majority in the general
• AOC won an outright primary in 2018 against a single candidate (no coalescing issue)
• Although Rashida Tlaib won her first successful primary in FTTP, in 2020 she won outright against a single candidate
• Ilhan Omar similarly won her first two primaries with a minority of the vote, but won her last three outright, in 2 cases against one ‘reasonable’ candidate (i.e. all other candidates got a small share of the vote)
• Bernie Sanders has a very strange electoral history due to running as an independent but usually being on the Democratic primary ticket. Nevertheless, he has pretty much always won his elections outright.

Similarly, I skimmed the Wikipedias for a few far-right politicians, whom I’m less familiar with, and they demonstrated similar trends. MTG, for example, won a contested primary with 40%, but then won a two-candidate runoff and has seen outright wins since.

It seems as though extreme politicians are genuinely popular—enough that people don’t form coalitions to oppose them in future elections, even when there’s only one other candidate on the ballot. I am not very convinced that your proposed form would work.

If you’re directly posting LLM output, please trim it down for clarity. This was too repetitive and very long.

Is indoor tanning worse than outdoor tanning? If not, I can see a ban making sense in cold countries, where people might counterfactually tan, but in countries like Australia and Brazil I can assure you this just has a displacement effect of sending people outside (even in winter).

Really excited about this—congrats to the team!

Conscription in particular seems really bad; if your country is undertaking an offensive war then it’s probably completely indefensible, and if it’s a defensive war then defending your country should be self-evidently valuable to enough people that you wouldn’t need it.

I also don’t think that even defensive wars hold killing to be morally good—otherwise you would see more situations where one side murders combatants who have been disarmed. Instead, most countries have historically imprisoned them or let them go. This seems, at least, consistent with peacetime ethics around imprisonment?

I don’t want to sound too facetious here but I genuinely believe that you can resolve this ‘paradox’ by just holding that all of these things are categorically bad and that war is not a special case.

I can’t speak to sub-Saharan Africa, but in India the government have put together a very comprehensive survey of mental wellbeing, which they ran in 2016 and are running again now. They randomly sampled households across the country, and asked people about their feelings and symptoms, which they then categorised into different mental conditions, rather than asking directly. This found results that largely concurred with previous GBD estimates for India. But I can’t say for sure whether there might be other biases, and there are almost certainly issues with the GBD’s Africa estimates due to a lack of ground truth data in many regions and methodological issues.

Here’s a paper on the kinds of surveys and interviews used to form the GBD prevalence estimates, and here’s one arguing that prevalence is sharply underestimated.

Not particularly interested right now, but maybe in the future :)

I will take a note—we are trying to do more comms in 2026 and this could be a great thing to post about. If we do, I’ll reach out :)

5% of Americans identify as being on the far left

However, I would strongly wager that the majority of this sample does not believe in the three ideological points you outlined around authoritarianism, terrorist attacks, and Stalin & Mao (I think it is also quite unlikely that the people viewing the Tik Tok in question would believe these things either). Those latter beliefs are extremely fringe.