I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

As someone with a family background of more left leaning Catholics (which I think are more common in the US northeast), it's interesting that it decided that you are conservative based on Catholicism.

Born in Pittsburgh, raised Catholic, pretty darn liberal. We had alter girls in the 90s, openly gay members who had ceremonies in the church, etc. I'm not catholic now but that was a good church in the 80s and 90s.

I would say in aggregate, both Catholics and Protestants (whichever flavor) are more likely to be liberal in the northeast / west coast and more likely to be conservative in the midwest / south. Which tells you something about the average importance of religion in 2025.

I think it's older than 2025 and definitely has a piece of it that is specific to Catholics. I tend to think of northeastern American Catholicism from the lens of immigration. The big waves of Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, etc. The immigrant identity often led to left leaning economics and the parts of Christianity which are about helping the poor get emphasized.

i.e. are you a charitable catholic or a prudish catholic.

To be fair, it actually said:

> Fiscally conservative / civil-libertarian with traditionalist social leaning

And justified it with:

> Bogleheads & MMM frugality + Catholic/First Things pieces, EFF privacy, skepticism of Big Tech censorship

First Things in its current incarnation is all about religious social conservatism. If someone is Catholic and reads First Things articles, "conservative" is a pretty safe bet.

However, I think profiling people based on what they read might be a mistake in general. I often read things I don't agree with and often seek out things I don't agree with both because I sometimes change my mind and because if I don't change my mind I want to at least know what the arguments actually are. I do wonder, though, if I tended to save such things to pocket.

I have a hypothes.is account where a decent amount of my annotations are little rage nits against the thing I'm reading. You'd be able to infer a ton of correct information from me if you pulled the annotations as well as the URLs, but the URLs alone could mislead.

I've had to remind myself of this pattern with some folks whose bookmarks I follow, because they'd saved some atrocious stuff – but knowing their social media, I know they don't actually believe the theses.

Idk how much experience you have with catholics outside of the northeast. I have a fair amount with all of the regions I mentioned (northeast, south, midwest, west coast). You cannot really find any American Catholic parish that is not dominated by at least one of Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans or Hispanics. The catholic church in the US is mostly "immigrants," that is, people whose ancestors were not in the US prior to ~1850

First things is also pretty high brow. If you’re interested in poetry, classics, etc it had a lot to offer.

I’m sure any profiler would be very confused by my reading history, but I really, really like poetry and Plato. So New Yorker, Atlantic, First Things, N+1.

Catholicism is certainly interesting! It is somewhat similar from my experience. On one hand it was fairly conservative: super against abortion, and old fashioned family values (ie moms should stay home). On the other, there was a huge focus on service and helping the poor both at home and abroad. And not missionary type stuff, just helping no strings attached. Plus a real interest in education with an open mind. So slightly more complicated than a single left/right value.

There’s a quip I heard recently that the most Protestant Christians are American Catholics.